Mercedes Dorame

About

Mercedes Dorame, born in Los Angeles, California, received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA. She calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of (in)visibility and ideas of cultural construction.

Dorame’s work is in 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. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from: Creative Capital, the Montblanc Art Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Loop Artist Residency, the James Phelan Award for California born visual artists, En Foco’s New Works Photography Fellowship Awards program, Galería de la Raza, for her solo exhibition there, the Harpo Foundation for a residency at the Vermont Studio Center and from the Photography Department at the San Francisco Art Institute for her MFA Studies. 

She is currently visiting faculty at CalArts, and was recently honored by UCLA as part of the centennial initiative “UCLA: Our Stories Our Impact”, and was part of the Hammer Museum’s 2018 Made in LA exhibition. She has shown her work internationally.  Her writing has been featured in News From Native California and 580 Split and her artwork has been highlighted by PBS Newshour, Artforum, KCET Artbound, the New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, KQED, Artsy, ARTnews, the Los Angeles Times, the SF Chronicle, among others.

Artist Statement

I am a visual artist based in my ancestral homelands of Tovaangar, which is more commonly known as Los Angeles. I grew up playing on hillsides of southern California, getting to know the deer trails and the smell of the grasses in the summertime, learning when the water flows through the creeks and when to look out for rattlesnakes. I call on these learned and ancestral connections to the land to explore the problematics of visibility and cultural construction and connection to place. 

I create installations to remember and re-imagine the land and sky as Indigenous. I ask that we remember the ground we walk on, and who the original caretakers are, and I also remind us to look up. 

I create a permanent record of Indigenous presence in a city that sought to erase us. I create body relationships with the cosmos, using markers in the night sky as navigational tools.  Each project I work on is an outpouring of intense focus and connection, pulling from ancestral ties and research and moving it all into the realm of the future. 

My work is an expression of all of these overlays of experience, of moving through the land and sky as an Indigenous person, being called a trespasser on my homelands, and reconciling how to work through these experiences in an empowered way. 

I collaborate with the land and cosmos to empower the expansion of perception, experience, and imagination and insist on removing Native people from the past tense and re-imagining our decolonized sovereign future.

mercedesdorame@gmail.com | +1.415.952.7697