This community archiving initiative responds to the need for cultural preservation, meaning making, commemoration, and social connection arising from the January 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles County, and demonstrates models of creative recovery and resilience in response to climate change. The initiative is led by LA County Library and LA County Library Foundation and will be implemented in partnership with Arts and Culture, the Altadena Library District / Altadena Library Foundation, and Los Angeles Public Library / Library Foundation of Los Angeles. It models how cultural institutions can transcend jurisdictional boundaries to center community healing and memory in response to disasters.
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
Artist Tanya Aguiñiga has been selected to be the Community Memory Lab Artist-in-Residence. During the residency, Tanya will, among other activities, develop a series of collective memory and artmaking workshops for Altadena residents and others impacted by the January 2025 fires that provide space for creative expression and storytelling and that foster healing and strengthen community bonds. Community created artworks created during workshops may be added to LA County Library’s new digital archive.
Tanya Aguiñiga was born in 1978 in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. An artist, designer, and craftsperson, Aguiñiga works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Drawing on her upbringing as a binational citizen, who daily crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego for school, Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community.
Aguiñiga began her career by creating collaborative installations with the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, an artist collective that addressed political and human rights issues at the U.S.-Mexico border. The artist co-built and for six years ran a community center in Tijuana, aimed at bringing attention through arts initiatives to injustices that the local community faced. Aguiñiga has maintained this spirit of activism and community collaboration throughout her career, going on to create many performances and installations that involve the participation of other artists, activists, and community members. In her installations, furniture, and wearable designs, Aguiñiga often works with cotton, wool, and other textiles, drawing upon Mesoamerican weaving and traditional forms. In 2016, in response to the deep polarization about the U.S.-Mexico border, Aguiñiga created AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of projects that provides a platform for binational artists. Her inaugural AMBOS project, Border Quipu, used brightly colored strands of fabric to create quipu—an Andean pre-Columbian organizational system—that recorded the daily commutes to and from the United States.
Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. She is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of crafts and traditional arts, a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures awardee, Creative Capital grant awardee, and a recipient of an Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2018); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); among others. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Annenberg Space for Photography (2019) and Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles (2018), among others. Aguiñiga lives in Los Angeles, California.