About this Event
Please join us for an artist lecture and conversation with on Wednesday, January 28, 2026 from 6:30-8:00pm at the historic Beaux Arts Flagg Building!
Bella Varela uses video, photography, found objects, and textiles to create installations that layer personal experiences with American history and popular culture. Navigating the fine line between playful and critical, her work explores the intersections of immigration, family, gender identity, and sexuality. Within her work, she dissects iconic materials and archives to critique mainstream anti-immigration rhetoric and subverts the appropriation of Latinx culture. She rearranges personal and found video footage, TikTok songs, thrifted souvenirs, and San Marcos-inspired blankets to create physical gaps where new meanings can be interpreted and carve out spaces where hybrid identities can exist and thrive. Using rasquache sensibilities, she distorts ideas of patriotism and nationalism, revealing the hollow promises that lie beneath them. Through her multimedia practice she has developed her own hybrid language to visualize her family's migration from Guatemala.
Her video and photography work combines analog photography with green screens, 360 cameras, and drones to create non-linear narratives that reference viral political and pop-culture moments and critiques the way online audiences consistently create, consume, and virtue signal during times of crisis.
This talk is a part of the Studio Arts and Design Research + Practice lecture and conversation series, occurring on Wednesdays. Dates for the Research + Practice series are listed below.
*This event takes place in the hemicycle.*
*All events will be Wednesday nights, 6:30pm-8:00pm.*
1/21/2026: Mary Calvert
1/28/2026: Bella Varela
2/11/2026: Margaret Boozer
2/18/2026: Kiel Mutschelknaus
3/25/2026: Artur Galocha
We look forward to seeing you soon!
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Flagg Building, Corcoran School for the Arts and Design, George Washington University, Please use New York Avenue Door, 500 17th Street Northwest, Washington, United States
USD 0.00
