In 2015, Los Angeles–based artist Guadalupe Rosales launched the Instagram account @veteranas_and_rucas as a way to share images from her personal archive of Chicana life in Southern California in the 1990s. In the decade since, the account has shared thousands of images and amassed over 273,000 followers, many of whom have submitted their own images of the community celebrated by the account. Rosales has described the project as a necessary one for combating racist stereotypes of Latinx people seen on the news and TV, and in other mass media.
At Rosales’s Instagram has grown in popularity, her art practice has continued to evolve. She has produced everything from lush photographs showing details of lowriders, hung in metal-engraved frames, to lowrider-inspired murals, to sculptures and installations that incorporate her ever-growing archive.
Her work has been included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, the 2023 Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum, and the group show “At the Edge of the Sun” at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles. In September, she will publish a memoir, titled East of the River. Ahead of her most high-profile international showing as part of the main exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, for the 2026 Venice Biennale, ARTnews spoke to Rosales about her practice and her contribution to the show.
This interview has been edited and condensed for concision and clarity.
ARTnews: How did your participation in the Biennale come about?
Guadalupe Rosales: I had a remote studio visit with the Venice Biennale team after Koyo Kouoh passed. I think I was one of the people she really wanted to visit, but she wasn’t able to do so before she passed, unfortunately. Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, one of the advisers for the Biennale, contacted me, and I met with them. Koyo obviously had the idea for the Biennale and the artists she wanted to highlight, so [my invitation] was about carrying that legacy forward and honoring the theme of the show. Everything happened in that one sitting. It didn’t feel very traditional.
If I remember correctly, Gabe described how Koyo wanted to include people who work with community, but also artists who, from what I understood, make work that touches on so many things, from joy to grief. To them, that seemed very important for the Biennale.
How do joy and the grief manifest in your work?
I’ve had a complex relationship with archives. When I first started working with archives, I was interested more in thinking about memory and our bodies, how we hold on to experiences and moments. For a long time, I was really prioritizing storytelling. There was a moment where I was thinking about how my practice could grow, and I started understanding the archive less as collection of documents and more as something that holds energy. I wanted to humanize these materials.
I’ll use my cousin Ever Sanchez’s passing as an example about how I came to my thinking around storytelling. My experience of looking at his certificate of death for the first time, more than 15 years after he passed, touched on something that brought me closer to that moment. It was almost fresh again, bringing me back to 1996. When I had that experience, I felt it was so important to talk about everything, and not just about celebration. It’s also about the pain that we experience when we lose people or when we go through certain things, because that’s the truth.
Was seeing the death certificate more than 15 years later what prompted you to start “Veteranas and Rucas”?
Over the years, a lot of people have asked me, “So, how did it start? Why did it start?” There were a lot of things, and seeing my cousin’s death certificate around 2013, about two years before “Veteranas and Rucas,” was definitely one of them. But it was also being away from LA for so long, and being in New York—I was missing home a lot. I was longing to connect with family, and also feeling this loss at the same time. All of that is what happened when I started “Veteranas and Rucas” because I decided needed to have these conversations with other people. Before I started it in January 2015, I had been talking to a few friends about what I have been noticing, which was the ways Latino communities were being portrayed on television and in the newspaper, and how the way things were being preserved wasn’t the full story.
On top of that, I also noticed another layer, which was that everything that I was reading that felt true to my experience was mostly from a male perspective. I felt that if I can relate to that, and I’m not hearing women talk about those things, then there’s something going on. I wanted to see women talk about these experiences without feeling shame. I noticed these guys talking about how fun things were back in the ’90s, how there was so much freedom, how the things that they did were more dangerous. But I remember thinking how I also experienced that, and so did other women, my sisters and my friends.
I remember thinking about the best way would be to do this, because I can’t rely on institutions. The decision to have it on Instagram was more about what’s accessible. I was thinking, let’s just use whatever we have. At that time, most people were using Instagram for more personal use. There were some pages here and there popping up that were not personal accounts. That inspired me to start something that could be more community-based, almost like a public platform. This is also the time when people were using a lot of a lot of hashtags; that’s how we were communicating, and that’s how it just went viral because people started clicking on hashtags. Using these hashtags allowed me to develop a language to talk about this time and place through these images that first started with my own photos, and then clippings from magazines that I grew up looking at and reading. At one point, I had in my bio [a prompt] to send photos.
An image from the “Veterans and Rucas” archive is projected in Rosales’s “El Rocío Sobre Las Madrugadas Sin Fin,” 2020, at Chopo University Museum, Mexico.
Courtesy the artist; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; Commonwealth and Council
“Veteranas and Rucas” initially focused on the ’90s, but at some point, you got submissions of photographs of Latinas from the ’40s and ’50s. Did you ever expect that to happen?
No, not at all. I realized that there’s so much of history that has repeated itself. That’s when I thought it would be so important to not just have this timeline focused only on the ’90s, because I wanted people to see that this is something that’s been happening for a very long time. The fashion might look different, but we were still talking about love or injustice. I wanted people to see the bigger picture. I wanted to post things that are familiar and easily recognizable, and then to introduce new things, spark new conversations because I was also interested in learning myself. I was reaching out to folks, saying, “Hey, let’s talk about this together.”
Did you ever think the project would get as big as it did?
I remember actually feeling scared waking up one day and just getting a crazy amount of notifications. The numbers were going up fast. I think that has to do with the intention [behind “Veteranas and Rucas”]. It was so honest and so real for me. I wasn’t treating it as a project, because I wanted more to have conversations with people. I didn’t know what to expect. I remember being asked to do an interview, and I was nervous because I didn’t know if I was ready to put my face out there [in association with the page]. Eventually, maybe less than a year later, I recognized that this page needed a face and a voice, and I wanted to put that out there so people could know that a real person experienced it, and this is the body that’s behind it.
How did your sculptural practice develop from “Veteranas and Rucas”?
At a certain point, I was also having exhibitions, but these exhibitions were more so just showing the archive—flyers and photos, things like that. In having those shows, I started feeling that maybe I shouldn’t handle the archive so much because I didn’t want to damage it. That got me thinking: What does it mean to have a conversation about memory without the archive? I felt like I could materialize the archive, but how do you do that? I could create an immersive space that evokes these feelings and thoughts. The “Portals” series that I’ve been making are inspired by this idea of how memory works. When you stare into these portals, it’s this infinity mirror effect. You’re staring into a void, a black hole, basically. I realized that’s something that I struggled with in terms of trying to remember little details about my past. It was more like the absence of memory. I’m always trying to think of ways to challenge the way we see the work and how we see ourselves in the space.
Installation view of “Guadalupe Rosales: Tzahualli: Mi memoria en tu reflejo,” 2025, at Palm Springs Art Museum.
Photo Lance Gerber/Courtesy the artist, Palm Springs Art Museum, Commonwealth and Council
What will you show in Venice?
I’m making a new “Portal” work for the Biennale that will be in what I consider a skeletal structure that will look like a home with a roof. It’s similar to the “Portal” I showed at Jeffrey Deitch but with a completely different design. I also had a solo exhibition at the Palm Springs Art Museum last year, and the [Biennale] team saw the images and loved them, so we’re bringing part of the exhibition to Venice. I’ll also show my photographs, close-up detail shots of lowriders—I almost see them as paintings. What’s interesting is that in the same space, I’ll have work from different times, including the archive. It’ll almost walk you through my practice.
What do you make of showing your work in Venice at the Biennale?
It’s so crazy because it’s one those things that you think about: Am I ever going to be in these spaces? Is the archive ever going to be in those spaces? And it’s happening. I want to thank Koyo for that, because I feel like if it wasn’t for her, then it could have never happened, even years from now, to be honest. The response from my community and friends has been so beautiful and supportive, because it’s also thinking about Brown bodies being there, especially Brown bodies from East LA. I feel like I’m bringing our people to this exhibition. It’s not just me. It’s surreal, to be honest.
Guadalupe Rosales, Lo-Low, 2023.
Photo Ramiro Chaves/Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council
What do you make of Instagram now?
There’s always going to be that one new person who stumbles across the page and is going to learn something. I’ve had moments where I felt like things are not the way they used to be 10 years ago. The relationship we have with social media is so different. I wouldn’t say it’s more or less interesting, it’s just different. I recently started thinking: How long can “Veteranas” exist on social media? Does it have an end? Last year, Instagram crashed and people were freaking out about losing their images. I was okay with that. It might mean that people will have a different and new relationship to whatever they share on social media. If they went back to their photo albums and took out that picture [that they shared with me], they might see it in a different lens, from a different perspective, and maybe have more appreciation. Lately, I try to tell people, we have to go back to the physical; let’s not get stuck in the digital world. I have a book [East of the River: A Memoir of Los Angeles Girlhood] coming out in September about my personal story. I feel that once the book comes out, it’s almost like this full circle, back to the physical.
What does it mean for you to show this work right now, during our current political moment?
Even though so much of the archive is so focused on women in ’90s LA, I want people to see this work and this archive more broadly. I want people to understand these stories as universal, and I think this is the invitation to do so. I’ve had a lot of moments where I felt powerless, wanting to give up on things. I was at a retreat for Black and Brown writers a few months, and we were just devastated with the world. I had this realization that we need to put our voices out there and not let the world we live in dilute or diffuse the things we want to put out. That’s something that I’ve been holding on to, even though this is a really hard moment to motivate oneself. But I feel like the work that that I do is so important, and I think we need to find that voice that tells us to keep going.
