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November 2, 2025
By Lydia E. Ringwald
The Museum of Latin American Art celebrated the opening of the exhibit Coded Earth: Tierra Cifrada in a gala event on December 18, 2025, at the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA).
The exhibit features nine artists from Guatemala, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic, awarded by the Cisneros Foundation and MOLAA for their expression of global perspectives in Latin American and Latinx art.
Coded Earth: Tierra Cifrada was sponsored by the Cisneros Foundation, founded by visionary Ella Fontanals-Cisneros, a passionate Cuban-Venezuelan art collector dedicated to cultivating the talent and careers of Latin American women artists and advancing international recognition of Latin American art.
In MOLAA’s spacious galleries, each of the nine artists explores their unique interpretation of the shifting shapes of ever-evolving realities between our original earth environment and human habitation and development.
From Chile, Voluspa Jarpa’s Ciclorama, consisting of 12 suspended maps in a semi-circle surrounding a video projection onto an interior wall, explores the perils of development on indigenous Andean populations and the social conflicts that emerge from the interaction.
Mexico City and Santo Domingo–based artist Madeline Jimenez Santil explores migrant, transgender, queer, cyber, and Creole bodies in an installation of cardboard geometric shapes representing the puzzle of populations in transitional flux that shift in game-like art rearrangements.
Brazilian artist Alexandre Canonico, in his presentation Tombo, employs abstract lines and voids with multi-various colors to shape an art form that resides somewhere between sculpture and painting. His spontaneous Dada-inspired applications, which rely on chance to define direction and meaning, arrive at unique insights that lie beyond deliberate will and consciousness.
Marcela Armas, who studied in both Spain and Mexico, integrates technology into her statement about the environment and sustainability. Through her art, she deciphers the complexities of our evolving ecosystem by visually exploring the science of symbiosis and the often subtle poetic interchange between nature and the inhabitants it hosts.
Cinematographer Ana Naz of Brazil explores the interchange of film and life—the power of film imagery to create perspective and fuse time and space. By burying rolls of film into the earth, Naz allows the film emulsion to merge with the raw soil of reality. Flickers and fragments of the decayed film material are presented in her dramatic screen projection.
Natalia Rivera of Colombia expresses the intertwining realities of nature in new narratives, engaging a feminist, anti-colonial perspective. Her worldwide exhibit Cloud of Clouds is inspired by microbiomes from the rainy Chocó region of Colombia, accumulated in glass tubes displayed in an art installation that researches the effect of bioprecipitation and how bacteria may affect weather conditions. Rivera merges science and art to reveal insights and forge discovery.
Jeronimo Reyes-Retana, an interdisciplinary artist and community organizer from Mexico, integrates sound and video into his installations exploring the colonial voids that threaten to erase original native industries. In his installation Void in Resonance, a fishing village in the community of El Campo Pesquero de Playa Bagdad, which depends on oyster harvesting, is threatened by industries along the Mexican border that could wipe them out.
Diana De Solares of Guatemala explores ancient myths and patterns through abstractions that take various shapes and forms.
At the gala evening event, Ella Fontanals-Cisneros received the prestigious LEGADO Award for her philanthropy in the arts. California State Senator Lena Gonzalez was also honored for her achievements. Special tribute was paid to Carmen O. Perez for her dedicated support of arts and education and to laud the launch of the Carmen O. Perez Arts Fund.
The charming and poised Master of Ceremonies Giselle Fernandez of Spectrum News and Rush Hour anchor journalist presided over the gala event.
Lourdes I. Ramos, Ph.D., President and CEO of MOLAA, was honored for her leadership in building the cultural legacy of Latin culture at MOLAA—both in the present and for the future.
Thanks were also given to Gala Co-Chairs Robert Braun, M.D., Mike Deovlet, and Marianne Gastelum, along with the many generous donors who supported the museum and its important mission.
The Museum of Latin American Art invites art patrons to visit and explore the Coded Earth exhibit and to participate in art classes offered at the museum for adults and children. Check the MOLAA events schedule—dance classes are also often included in the program of events, along with the annual festival of art and dance performed on the stage of the outdoor museum amphitheater.
Please visit molaa.org for hours and information.
