Lorena Molina
Instagram: beingmoli
Website: https://www.lorenamolina.com
Bio: "Lorena Molina is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist, educator and curator. She is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art Practice at San Francisco State University. She’s also the founder and the director of Third Space Gallery, a community space and gallery that supports and highlights BIPOC artists. She received an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a BFA from California State University, Fullerton. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Diversity of Views Fellowship, the Christopher Cardozo Fellowship, two Truth and Reconciliation grants from ArtsWave, The Idea Fund, the ARTPACE International Residency, SF Camerawork Forecast 2025, and the Kala Art Institute Fellowship.Her work has been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at venues such as the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, The Kemper Museum, the Southeast Museum of Photography, The Carnegie (Covington, KY), Vox Populi, Assembly Projects, Art League Houston, The Moody Center, the FSU Museum of Fine Arts, EXPO Chicago, The Armory Show, the Berkeley Art Center, SFAC Galleries, The Rubin Center, the Beijing Film Academy, and throughout the piazzas of Florence, Italy. "
Statement: "Through photography, video, fermentation, ecologies, sound, textiles, and ancestral rituals, I build environments that invite difficult conversations, collective imagining, and radical belonging. My practice interrogates who gets to belong, who is erased, and what it means to return when return isn’t impossible. I see the margins not as spaces of lack, but as fertile ground for dreaming, healing, and survival. At the core of my work is an exploration of spatial inequalities and the challenges that oppressed groups face in constructing place and establishing a sense of belonging.. My work is driven by a deep sense of displacement experienced after a 12 year old civil war forced my family and I to immigrate to the United States. Most of my work stems from a need to find and build community in a way that it’s both tender, accountable, challenging through difficult conversations that makes everybody involved actively question their position and privileges in society. In my practice, I create installations, performances, and participatory spaces that confront the afterlives of colonialism and migration, not from a distance, but through the intimacy of the body, our homes, and the land. My work embraces the entanglement of grief and joy, resistance and care, memory and future, because I believe they often coexist. The materials I use: corn, beans, coffee, carry deep political, historical, and cultural significance across Latin America. Coffee, in particular, reveals how agriculture has been tied to labor exploitation and land dispossession, and how these violences remain entangled with U.S. imperialism and forced migration. "
