Event Details

New Mexico Arts and New Mexico Historic Sites are please to co-present a special public program with the 2025 New Mexico Arts Artist-in-Residence at Los Luceros Historic Site with resident Chris E. Vargas. Vargas presents research and artwork developed during his time in the residency. His creative research centers on several Los Luceros icons like Maria Chabot, Mary Cabot Wheelwright and her collaboration with two-spirit Diné weaver Hastiin Klah, whose preservation of Indigenous artworks laid the foundation for the Wheelwright Museum. Their partnership represents a compelling intersection of cultural and gendered autonomy, as well as resistance to erasure. Vargas will contextualize his artistic practice and personal relationship to these figures while examining the legacy of their work through a contemporary lens. He will also debut a new film project created during his residency. As part of Los Luceros Historic Site’s ongoing research and storytelling please bring your memories, stories, and forgotten histories about Los Luceros which will be recorded and collected onsite.

Chris E. Vargas (born 1978, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a video maker and transdisciplinary artist. He earned his MFA from the Art Practice department at Berkeley in 2011. His work uses humor and performance to explore the complex ways that queer and trans people negotiate spaces for themselves within historical and institutional memory. He is the Executive Director of MOTHA, the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, a critical and conceptual arts & hirstory institution highlighting the contributions of trans art to the cultural and political landscape. In 2016 he received a Creative Capital award in the Emerging Field category, in 2020, he was a John C. Guggenheim fellow, and he is a 2024/25 Latinx Art Fellow.