Crafting on Site with Giovanni Valderas

Meet, talk, and build with Dallas artist Giovanni Valderas as he takes his landscape intervention project, Casita Triste (Sad Little Houses), to Los Angeles. Valderas will be making casitas at the Craft in America Center and then placing them throughout the city of Los Angeles to spotlight issues of gentrification, lack of affordable housing, and displacement of Latinx communities.

Visitors will have the opportunity to be observers or to participate themselves by building and placing their own casitas.

No RSVP needed. Just drop in!

Artist Bio:

Giovanni Valderas is a mixed media artist who makes three-dimensional works that address his relationship with his Guatemalan, Mexican, and American ancestry. Valderas incorporates and deconstructs elements of the traditional piñata in order to transform the piñata’s original identity as one of gratuitous celebration, into one of cultural construct. He challenges dominant power structures through what he views as the most frivolous of means: tissue paper. A native of Dallas, Giovanni Valderas Valderas graduated from the College of Visual Arts & Design at the University of North Texas with a Master of Fine Arts in Drawing & Painting.

This project is supported by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
www.culturela.org

Additional support for the Craft in America Center is provided by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.
www.lacountyarts.org