UO Libraries Tiny Galleries Exhibitions

Liesl Cohn

Migrant Memories of Guatemalan Maya Living in Oregon 

Guatemalan Social Anthropologist with more than a decade of experience working for Guatemalan academia, non-profits, the government, and different research projects.  Her research interests include digital ethnography, transitional justice, intercultural health practices, and Guatemalan migration to the US. During her master’s thesis in Applied Anthropology as a Fulbright-Laspau scholar, she worked with Maya migrant women about how they experience pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum in Oregon from a structural competency approach. Currently, she is doing her doctoral research in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oregon about how Guatemalan Maya migrants in diaspora build their intersectional identities and reconstruct community in Oregon as an ongoing process of construction of collective memory.  

Lola Tagwerker 

Eyes on Ireland

Eyes on Ireland is a photography collection from my time studying cinema abroad in Dublin, Ireland. I was drawn to capture moments when the lush Irish landscape echoed the beauty of my home state, Oregon. This collection was exhibited at the 2025 Undergraduate Research Symposium. 

Lola Tagwerker is a senior at the University of Oregon, studying Public Relations and Creative Writing. She is a writer, published poet, and the founder of Lyonheart Relations, a boutique public relations and marketing firm based in Eugene, Oregon. 

Mariana Rivera 

The Pleasure of Doing Too Much: Black and Latina Femmes Embody Excess

In this art installation, I draw from Jillian Hernandez’s Nicole Fleetwood’s theorizations of Black and Latina women’s aesthetics of excess. I particularly draw from their respective books, Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. Aesthetics of excess refer to the ways Black and Latina women craft their bodies as a way of flaunting their hyper-visibility, their sexuality, and their pleasure. Often described as “too much”, Black and Latina women’s corporeality is racialized and gendered as what Nicole Fleetwood calls “excess flesh”. That is, Black and Latina women’s corporeality is framed by the simultaneous discipling of their bodies and the ways that they use their corporeality to enact the gaze, not necessarily in an attempt to be legible to a white supremacist gaze, or to heal the exploited racialized body, but as a display of “[understanding] the function of this figuration in dominant visual culture” (Fleetwood 111). Likewise, Hernandez argues that Black and Latinx populations’ presentation of excess is done to make oneself hypervisible, “but not necessarily in an effort to gain legibility or legitimacy” (Hernandez 11). She further argues, “Embodying such styles often stem from one’s racial, ethnic, and gendered culture, and the desire to use the body creatively, admire one’s self-image, and potentially attract the gaze of others” (11). By centering what excess can mean to those performing it, I move away from excess as solely focusing on the discipling of Black and Latina women’s bodies to celebrating their corporeal self-indulging. I frame excess as abundance and center Black and Latina women’s pleasure in my work. Thus, this art installation is a celebration of Black and Latina femme’s aesthetics of excess. My re-invention of the Virgen de Guadalupe through aesthetics of excess bridges Mexican folklore, decolonial praxis, and Latina women’s excess. The Virgen de Guadalupe as a cultural figure of motherhood, purity, and sainthood is often imagined in contrast to Latina women who display excess as cultural figures of mundanity, hyper-sexuality, and ratchetness. I intervene in this virgen-puta dichotomy that is used to discipline Latina women’s bodies by re-framing the Virgen de Guadalupe through aesthetics of excess. Often denied the ability to be soft, whimsical, and connected to the natural world, Black and Latina femmes are often reduced instead to racist stereotypes of aggressiveness and the urban landscape. Thus, my series on Rococo-era scenes of leisure centers Black and Latina femmes’ excess as soft, whimsical, and indulgent.  

Mariana Rivera (they/he) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies doctoral program at the University of Oregon. Their research interests include Black and Latina women’s aesthetics of excess, the performative labor of Black and Latina women on reality TV, and the online lives of women of color. Their research interests partially stem from growing up in Matamoros, Tamps., MX along the U.S.-Mexico border. There, they grew up having satellite access to several U.S.-based TV channels where reality TV shows such as The Maury Show, The Jerry Springer Show, Divorce Court, and Couples Court depicted Black Americans along reductive stereotypes. Living in a mostly homogenously non-Black Mexican and non-Black Mexican-American area, these shows became their first entry point to learning about blackness. Thus, their curiosity for studying Black women and queer people of color in media and popular culture as linchpins for the racial politics of the cultural moment in which they emerge has carried them through their graduate career. 

Rachael Lee 

this prism of my own making 

Rachael Sol Lee works with textile, object-making, and performance to facilitate moments of sensory connection to ancestral memory. Her practice engages themes of loneliness, exile, disappointment, and desire through a lens of cosmic innocence. Lee is a member of Q[Ch]Asm, an arts and research collective committed to the study of queer Asian American diasporic kinship. Currently, she is studying place-based understandings of time, space, and color.