Mercedes Dorame is a visual artist who calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of visibility and ideas of cultural construction as an outcome of the need to tie one’s existence to the land. In addition to working as a visual artist, she currently is visiting faculty at California Institute of the Arts and acts as a cultural resource consultant on sites where her Tongva ancestors and items are being excavated. This work carries a heavy burden of responsibility which has fueled her artistic exploration and passion for visibility for the Tongva community. Dorame recently received a Creative Capital Award and was honored by UCLA as an outstanding alum of the last 100 years working in Equal Justice. She was also part of the Hammer Museum’s biennial Made in LA 2018. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Triton Museum, The Allen Memorial Art Museum, The de Saisset Museum, The Montblanc Foundation Collection, and The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, among others. Dorame, born in Los Angeles, has shown her work internationally including a recent augmented reality project with LACMAxSnap inc., and she is currently part of exhibitions at the Getty Center, the Autry Museum, and the Fowler Museum. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, PBS Newshour, Artforum, Hyperallergic, among others. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA.

mercedesdorame.com