MARIA MAEA

 We are nature but most of our species seems to have forgotten our relationship. However, in Echo Park, artist Maria Maea builds her practice around her connection to land, a kinship she embodies and uplifts in her exquisitely symbolic Future Ancestor sculptural work. We met in her slanted backyard where plants break through the concrete cracks, a black walnut tree grows, and a beautiful palm tree fans its giant leaves. Working in multimedia with natural and found materials Maria inspires transcendence through time and space, a contemporary journey through ancestral lineage and memory. Rising amongst the thriving community of brown artists in Los Angeles, she tells stories through fragments and connections that challenge our relationships to scarcity, abundance, and sustainability. A devoted teaching artist, she leads hands-on workshops and teaches weaving in a variety of educational and community spaces, including institutional places of incarceration.

Her relationship with land also examines the way it relates to social concerns over housing, water, labor, food, and conservation. Maria created two “wishing pieces” for the group exhibit Edge of the Sun at Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles in 2024 and the year prior, she showed her Lē Gata Fa’avavau (Infinity Forever) sculpture at the Hammer’s biennial Made in LA exhibition. A frequent collaborator, Maria works with many other artists in deep conversation around identity and culture and was a featured artist in the ASCO: Without Permission documentary film (2025). Weaving through our own conversation on the patio, we’re surrounded by much of her source material, her garden, and an air of incredible possibility.

Living Mural, 2022

TRINA: I enjoyed how you explained your multifaceted practice on your website.

MARIA: Thank you for saying that. I've really been thinking a lot about my writing practice and how it lends itself because I am a DIYer. I grew up here in LA, in Long Beach. In my teen years I was taking the blue line up to go to music shows, to the Smell and all these little venues and house shows, but I've been writing grants and things since way before. I am not an academic. I didn't go to school for any of it, but I've found on my Google Drive grants that were from my early twenties that were like, this is what my practice is. All things I didn't win.

TRINA: That’s okay.

MARIA: I do feel like I've gotten a lot better at refining. Okay, how do you say these abstract things a little more directly or how do you tie in all these different kinds of things you do.

TRINA: And speak to what they want. How did you know you wanted to be an artist?

MARIA: I don't know if it was any one thing. Growing up in LA, I was a part of a lot of music communities. I threw shows in Long Beach. I ran a space here in Mid City from 2012 to 2016, it was called Mata. I was a part of the sound art community here in LA and there was a lot of pop punk, folk, and rock music going on in Long Beach when I was growing up and I came across the sound art community, people who were making noise. I was like, ‘I could do that.’ I can’t play guitar. I can't really sing, but I can do that. I can just collect some instruments and make a lot of noise.

But that was an early exploration of art. I've always been in labor communities. I've always worked warehouse jobs in my late teens, early twenties, and then that all kind of transitioned into film world. Through running the space, I met a lot of young artists, production designers, and I started hitting them up, asking for work. I gained my chops there.

TRINA: How did the community at Mata inspire you?

MARIA: The community that built around Mata was very multi-generational. In running this space, more so than when I was younger, just going to shows, exploring and doing my first kind of tours around the country, around the west coast, I met a lot of multi-generational women of color who were making sound art.

Like Banetoriko is from Japan, she plays Yokai noise music, which is ghost music. She would build these instruments that were made of springs, and she would turn these springs really slowly and blow out candles over a mic. That's how I met Carmina Escobar, Micaela Tobin, and Eva Aguila, who runs Coaxial Arts Foundation. Julie Tolentino was an early mentor and friend who put me in a lot of her work and performances when we met, and that's how I met Ron Athey and Rafa [Esparza]. I've always been a part of community, and I always went to things. I always showed up in spaces, and this is something I say to students a lot, I asked people if they needed help. Be like, ‘Hey, you working on anything? You need a hand?’

Mata was on Pico and Fourth. We were up the street from Jewel’s Catch One, and we found out after we had been there for a year or two that we were right next to where Jabberjaw used to be. Jabberjaw was like a nineties artist run venue, baby Beck was over there. People came and showed us a lot of pictures from that era, which was cool about having Mata because at that point what was next door to us was an evangelical El Salvadorian church, so we were always in negotiation. We never had shows on weekends to be respectable. I am very brown still! We were being good neighbors, and it was complicated already. We knew in a sense we were bringing in college age kids who were coming from different backgrounds to the neighborhood. We were so strict for being so we're just doing whatever the fuck we want. We had no drums, no Saturdays. We didn't start shows until 11:00 PM which was hard on my work schedule.

TRINA: So, while you were exploring sound and worked in film production, it seems installation was a natural step.

MARIA: I would do performances as UNICA. I'd build these mini sets for myself that were really DIY. It'd be a phone light and a toilet paper roll, and I'd make spotlights and set up little scenes.

Performance at DIY space, 2018

Photographed Performance by Lucky Dragons (Sara Rara and Luke Fischbeck) for Phil at 100 book

TRINA: Do you feel like you were already investigating your relationship to nature through these different mediums? I think about my relationship to nature all the time. I am so drawn to that conversation in your work.

MARIA: Garden master.

TRINA: I am, and it is very much a part of who I am, but not a lot of people are always thinking about that. I feel like a lot of times we’re reawakening people to the relationship they already have with nature.

MARIA: It's inherent.

TRINA: Can you talk about your evolution of the materials you work with?

MARIA: I think we live in such a cinematic landscape. The crossover on how natural materials ended up in the work is I grew up in a space where they were always adjacent. On my mom's side we’re Samoan and my dad's side we’re Mexican and I grew up in a particular community where the whole family lived in these big houses. My mom was always the young steward of all her brothers and her mom and making sure that we always had a collective space. We made do with our environment. We always had fruiting trees, and I don't think I thought about that quite in the same way. For years. I've felt like I couldn't even keep a house plant alive, but I was working with people like Rafa, and we were doing a lot of Earthwork and with Beatrice Cortez; she’s making these spaceships out of metal, but also, to do what? To house seed.

 I appreciated all those conversations I was having. But I also like that LA is kind of this collection of the discarded. People come here with a particular dream of what this city is and there's so much detritus that comes out of this world of production. I think being an art department person, there was so much buying and then discarding. That happened on every tier of production. I'd take the food after, and I'd go and drop it off on Skid Row. This kind of access to these spaces of high / low were present in my practice of the nature of the work I did.

I worked in production, but I also worked in personal assisting. I worked in everything, wherever I could get in and fit in, I did. That showed me a lot of different layers of Los Angeles. Even with the participation with the palm. I'd been thinking about weaving while I was working with Beatriz. As the pandemic hit, she was building her inaugural sculpture for the Rockefeller Center. We were in it; it was a huge undertaking. We were doing this 10-foot Glacial Erratic, and all the news would come out, ‘Food's running out.’ We'd put back on our mask and think, ‘Whoa, fuck. What should we do? Toilet paper’s gone!’

TRINA: Toilet paper!

MARIA: Everyone lost their jobs, and everyone came home for the first time. I had been a decade in production, so I was constantly working or resting for that one moment before another gig. It felt like I was always in that cycle of my 16-hour days and looking for the next thing.

This was a big yard full of tons of weeds, completely abandoned. I'd come and sit under this tree and smoke joints, but this space was invisible to me, like so many people.

TRINA: And then something changed.

MARIA: During COVID I felt like I could see how stir crazy we all were going as we unhinged from this certain kind of time. No one knew what to do with themselves. Everyone was just pent up. I started to look to plant time. Funny enough, I had these potatoes growing, that I just threw in this leftover prop sandbox for a Lego commercial. It was just here in the backyard forever, just a dead box. I threw these potatoes in there and they were growing.

TRINA: You're like, wait a second. What are these beautiful green leaves? Because potatoes have the most beautiful leaves.

MARIA: They're vibrant. When I finally did stop working with Beatriz, the grocery stores were super impacted, the lines were out the back door. I was at Lassen’s with my brother, we both were living here at that point, and everyone was so manic in the store. You know, I read [Octavia] Butler. I was like, ‘We got to get the seeds.’ I went to the little carousel, and I just started lining my pockets. My brother was annoyed with me, ‘What are you doing?’

TRINA: ‘I'm stealing fucking seeds!’

MARIA: I was like, ‘This is important! Read a book! We’re doomed!’ I ended up here and there's a group of women and we were all in our early thirties, working professionals in different ways. Savvy Wood who runs Afro Charities, which is like the first black newspaper, I met her at Clockshop when we were working with Rafa. Ellie Lee, who is the director at GYOPO, and Joelle Mendoza who is a writer, she just graduated from IAA, and a professor. We were just all homegirls, and our check-in’s were that we finally all looked at our yard. We looked at the space that we were standing in. We gave each other a lot of little prompts and activities. We talked on the phone, checked in. This garden was a concrete slab.

TRINA: But it's clearly not.

MARIA: There's a lot of earth under there. I started picking at all the little cracks and talking to my friends on the phone. We had done a show, that group of women, and a handful more folks, at Residency Gallery in Inglewood, 2018 or 19. I curated this show around facilitators and curators and all these people who support the arts, but a lot of 'em were young women who had art practices that lived off to the side of everything else. That group was birthed out of that. We were a grandma gang, we took our grandmother's practices, and who they were. We were into the sci-fi of the fact that you're in your grandma's womb because we're all processing our relationship to motherhood during the pandemic. We're like, okay, let’s think of some grandma magic and get fucking through this.

TRINA: That's a lot of layers. Connecting with your yard, the land underneath inspired you to think more about yourself, your body, and your parents.

MARIA: The lineage is there.

TRINA: It's a natural intuitive.

MARIA: I think even pre that, I was coming of age in all these moments of being from the performance work, a lot of that just felt like a lot of trauma release. Eva and I talk a lot about [how] our participation in noise was this radical way as brown girls who grew up in a sort of, girls ‘do this’ kind of environment, conservative in certain ways. That was the moment we were shaving our heads, and we didn't give a fuck. We were who we were. We were going on tours, and we were traveling the country. We were being little freaks and sound really gave us this, ‘We're not singing this song, I'm mad at the world.’

TRINA: It’s a different noise.

MARIA: Yeah, it's frequency. It allowed us this kind of space to maybe process some of those traumas that were about violence, about the communities we were coming from, that we didn't have language for. I feel like language has developed so much in the last decade around identity and the way we stand in it and our participation in it.

TRINA: And trauma.

MARIA: And trauma.

TRINA:  And people using that word trauma like that.

MARIA: Yeah.

TRINA: No one talked like that.

MARIA: Right? No one talked like that. Not in our communities at the time.

TRINA: It’s a crazy way to really connect with somebody if you can go that deep, that fast through your work. It's intense and older people are sometimes confused by the language and intimidated.

MARIA: Because it just wasn't available. They weren't allowed to be in those kinds of discourses. I understand that my parents’ generation, the generation before them, they just didn't have any of that language.

TRINA: You're exploring in real time, as an artist does.

MARIA: In real real time.

TRINA: How did these different experiences impact the shape of your practice?

MARIA: After Mata had closed, my practice became more of a private space. In that part of my twenties, I was so out loud, I was performing a lot, but I think I also got the little jitters about performing and I stepped back.

In the making of these kinds of ephemeral objects, I worked a lot with wax, and I was thinking about a lot of this while I was also in a learning space with being in a production world and working with artists like Rafa, Taisha Pageant and Beatriz. I was becoming a good listener, curious about what made their work work and watching a lot of these people navigate these systems that were really complicated as people of color. That was interesting to me because even with my costume family, my first real production job was for SYFY for the costume department for the show called Face Off, which was a special effects makeup show. It was a Project Runway for effects makeup. We built all the costumes; we were making wing sets. We were making goblins. We were making morph suits and body suits. But those were also people of color that I was working under who were at least a generation or two older than me and learning about their navigation through these commercial industries and how they did all of this. I think I was watching people's map making, in a lot of ways, but also quietly being like, what is my map? What's my practice? I don't know yet. Again, I was navigating a lot of what that meant to have felt a little bit past this window of academia. That I didn't do.

Photographed private performance, brick squad on LA River with Rafa Esparza

TRINA: Did you want to go to school or were you like, fuck the system?

MARIA:  I never wanted to go to school, but I also had a point where I was like, fuck, I didn't go to school. I know I'm smart. I feel like I'm a hustler. What exactly do I do with all of this? And there were definitely a lot of limitations in that, the late twenties to early thirties of like how does this all land for me? How do I think of what this practice can become? And that's why actually it's really a big part of my practice now, when I situate labor and things, I like to offer work within my own practice as alternative education. Alternative to higher education even, because I am working with a lot of students that are coming out of places like Artworks LA, who college is not the route for because the infrastructure is not there.

It took me a long time to realize that that was true about why I didn't go. I was like, well, maybe I was just a quitter. But there was a lot of things where I had to really dissect, well, ‘Why were these structures not there?’ Again, my parents are supportive and amazing, but there were so many things, particularly in that early 2000’s where it was just like infrastructurally, we just didn't have it.

TRINA: There's such a wide gap and we know the reasons why.

MARIA: And we're seeing that now in how many barriers there are just to be and sustain and thrive. Los Angeles artists are such an ambitious group of people, and what I see us all do, at least I see in my generation because the language showed up, we're doing a lot of out loud processing and that's what our artist talks are about. That's what our work's about. We are in that exchange of languaging it out so that in this next generation there's a lot of agency there. ‘Oh, that's what’s going on with me.’

TRINA: Setting up the infrastructure.

MARIA: A lot of infrastructure setting up. But again, you have to acknowledge, where were my barriers really?

TRINA: You had some good models.

MARIA: I really leaned into those other forms of modeling. Labor was a core of something I understood, and I was able to do it. I was a good manager of people and projects, naturally. I was able to jump into people's work and be an asset but also be receptive and learn a lot.

I felt like that was a quiet time where I was making things and contemplating a lot. What materials do I care about? What things do I care about? The palm did come midway through that first round of COVID, 2020, and I got a surfboard. I went back to the beach. I'm a beach kid and I had a little more play. I just looked it up one day when this tree was still a baby and learned the basics of weaving. Wove my first basket out here and I was like, ‘Oh, game over. I get it.’ Yeah, I got the material.

I was still having small solo shows at places like Carlye Packer's old spot, which was Club Pro, Coaxial, and Human Resources. Sometimes those would be in between performance and installation. I was working with wax a lot and I was working with ice. There was something about the impermanence, I loved an object performing itself, existing and then not. I was in the community, so I’d make people props for their shows like at RedCat. People knew I was a costumer. A lot of the connections to brown community in that time were by going to the club. We were showing up to Mustache. I was going to Rail Up. I remember seeing Gaby Ruiz completely painted blue doing the door at Rail Up and letting me cut the line. That's how we became friends, like a high five.

TRINA: What do you think your parents wanted you to be?

MARIA: Yeah, maybe a nurse. I don't know. Now that I look at it, I feel like they probably had a sense that this is always who I'd become in some way. I think there was a lot of confusion on what the hell was happening. But there would be these amazing moments where I'm like, ‘I'm working for so-and-so doing such and such. Watch this music video I just did, watch this film’ and then it'd go back to me being broke, waiting for the next job. My car's breaking down. I felt like, again, they're immigrants who came here hoping for these certain things for their kids. I think what they have seen is the older we get, oh wow, the world just isn't the world that we got, like the version that we got, where we were able to buy a home and we were able to keep a home. I think that awareness is coming up, and we are living, in a sense, this immigrant dream we've made our way in certain ways with Los Angeles. I think it's always a challenge because they didn't have a very easy version of it either.

Both of my parents came here when they were young. I recently was writing about it for a Tautai residency I'm doing in New Zealand in November. I was like, they're this strange half generation, where they were immigrant children and they grew up somewhere between their families trying to retain what they brought with them culturally and trying to absorb as much Americana as possible to make it and fit in, but in poverty and trauma. The island diaspora, my mom's side of the family came here in the seventies, followed the canneries over, worked in Terminal Island. That was really exhausting and spiritually depleting. They were trying to figure it out from island time they sustained on the land for generations and generations, for thousands of years. These people were like, ‘Oh, you put something in the ground, you grow it, you're okay.’ And then they come here in the seventies and they're having a hard time keeping an apartment with all these kids, and they're having a hard time just doing the thing.

TRINA: Where’s the food? We can't grow it in the backyard. We have to go the store. We need money…

MARIA: …Live in an apartment, all that. They came in the seventies, between the eighties and nineties. It's a heavily incarcerated family, violence, gang activity, a lot of death. I really do believe that the nature of cultivating land is violent. We use our bodies to break the Earth, to swim in the ocean, to capture an animal. There's an exchange of violence that's necessary to participate in land. But when you're displaced and you have no connection to land, that just instantly severed, what you get is violence, turn to the self, turn to each other. That sort of thing has such intense lasting effects. The way we embody that for generations after is really interesting.

I'm watching this generation older than me, between their fifties and forties who grew up the immediate kids of the people who left the islands who were also heavily incarcerated in their youth and had a lot of other sorts of violence and things happen. There's this thing that's missing in their kind of reformatting because that generation between the forties and fifties have rehabilitated in a lot of ways. That's not what they're passing on to their kids, this kind of understanding of violence and gangs. Their kids are academics, and their kids are playing sports, and it's just a different world of the way they're participating with family structures. But this generation of my uncles who did come from the island also had a different level of embodiment. They lifted weights, they were strong, they played volleyball. They took the kids out. We were swimming.

TRINA: A very healthy physical embodiment.

MARIA: The first things I was really thinking about when I was sitting here was, we were losing a lot of people in COVID because people already had health issues. Once a person went to the hospital, that was it. Once they had a cough, we're like, ‘Oh fuck.’ It was that moment where it was like, you have to take them to the hospital? What are we doing? There was a lot of confusion. I started thinking about our relationship to food. I grew up a fast-food kid, those were prizes.

TRINA: Rewards. Growing up, we were good kids if we got In and Out.

MARIA: And that was the systems that I also feel like were framed up for our families. These kind of reward systems of bad food. My grandma grew food and when my mom retired, she started growing food. But those conversations happened when I started doing it. This kind of understanding and ‘Well, when did we lose that? When did our relationship change to food? When did we stop seeing the yard outside as something to cultivate?’

I remember being taken to San Pedro and we'd go down to White Point, which was right where the Korean Friendship Bell is and that was before they had a paved road going down. Grandma and everyone, uncles and aunts, my grandma would be pulling sea urchins right out of the water, and we'd have a bucket of rice, and we'd just sit there. It was those nostalgic memories of our participation with land, then for a long time feeling scarce. Going through my late teens and my twenties and just feeling no matter how much I put out, no matter how much I worked, no matter how much labor was in the world, I could never hold onto anything, and the basket was such a receiver.

Chalé homie (Piolín), 2025

TRINA: It is a container in so many ways.

MARIA: That also gave me the language of, when I go into classroom settings, ‘What is resource in your landscape?’ This thing that came over, like the palm tree, is invasive here.

TRINA: The palm tree is invasive here. There's a particular kind that is native.

MARIA: The Washingtonia.

TRINA: Yeah, exactly and here, the palm has a lot of symbolism.

MARIA: So much history and so iconically LA. That's my favorite thing to say whenever I talk about it. It’s iconically LA and completely invisible for its utility. But then you realize how strategic our relationship to land, our disconnection to land is. It's like we only plant male trees. When I started working with plants, I gained all this knowledge of about how intentional our separation from land is here in America, in the States. We have the capacity to have fruiting trees everywhere. We have the capacity to be in exchange with food communally, but it's purposeful. These are kind of modes and methods that allow me to say this out loud and for me to understand it because I feel like it's in working with the plants that there's something symbiotic happening, where I'm understanding things that I'm saying out loud that I don't really know if I would've.

Who am I to be communicating these things? The basket is one of our earliest human technologies, it literally put us in societies. It allowed us to become hunter gatherers. It allowed us to carry things. It allowed us to hold our water and our babies. It changed our relationship and that's global. Because people are always like, is this a Samoan practice? Is this a Mexican practice? This is my very diasporic Los Angeles practice.

TRINA: Human practice.

MARIA: It's a human practice. I think that's why people connect to it so deeply from so many cultures. I remember that one of the first shows I did that had palm in it, somebody came up to me and was like, ‘Oh, for Shabbat, we make palm roofs.’ Like, ‘Oh, for my culture, we do this.’ It's like there's something so human about this technology.

Lē Gata Fa’avavau - Installation & Detail, 2023

TRINA: What was the first show that you brought the palms into?

MARIA: It might've been Oxy Arts. There was a show that was curated around In Plain Sight, an activation that Rafa and Cassils did where they had 80 artists do skywriting over detention centers and huge points of interest. I did a sculptural piece that had my mom and my sister in it.

Pre that, a lot of our community, a lot of our friends, started these meetups at Elysian Park to talk about what was going on with ICE at that point. That was around 2017-18. I think Rafa and Lupe [Rosales] called a meeting and a lot of us came out. Different people had different strategies on how they wanted to show up. There were people who wanted to throw a party to support. Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. was painting banners to throw over the freeway. I went with a group of other women artists to visit Adelanto.

I'd met this woman, Paula Khan, who does a lot of that work, and I invited a handful of women, Carla Canseco, Carla Lopez, and Jazmin Garcia, an awesome filmmaker. I met this woman Lucero there. She was a mom of six coming from Arizona. She was Oaxaqueña. She had come here young with an American guy, and she was queer. She was like, people ask, ‘How am I queer and I have six kids?’ But she was like, ‘That's just my life.’ She was a maker. She would take headphones and strip them and make these little bracelets. She made these little shoes out of candy wrappers.

We were all doing DIY shows together. Alfonso and Rafa hosted a show called LA Fonts in Alfonso's Backyard in 2019. That was even pre palm. This was an evolution. I was already doing a lot of faces, but I had a face of my mom and my sister. It was a backyard show, and Shizu [Saldamando] had a bed sheet that you had to walk past. Everyone was sighting the yard. We were being specific to what a yard space is.

My thought was the broken pinata and it was a little ode to Felix Gonzalez Torres. I had a giant candy pile under these two faces. I was thinking a lot about Lucero, and I was thinking about the Felix Gonzalez Torres piece of the diminishing body where people can take a piece of candy. It was about him losing his lover to AIDS but again, we were all meeting up and talking a lot during that time, and we were visiting these women.

For me, it was about this relationship to these women in immigration detention. I put a piggy bank that I'd gotten from the North Gate, and a big pile of candy in the middle of a backyard and these faces of a mom and a daughter. I stood there the whole time, and I was like, actually, you could donate to this piggy bank, and we could give it to Lucero, and here's this woman's story. I called it Woman's Worth / Work.

Woman's Worth / Work, 2019

TRINA: How do you connect a mythos of time into your work?

MARIA: In that early part of the pandemic, there was an unhinging from labor time and a capitalistic time, where I'm just like nine to five gig, gig, gig, moving into a time that was paced around watching these plants grow. Everyone for the first time had stimulus benefits, had this abundance around them, and we didn't have anywhere to go so that money wasn't really going anywhere. I was paused enough to actually watch a plant grow.

I know that by 2022, the world was moving, and these questions were coming back up. I taught a weaving class on Zoom at Cal Arts through Practicum during that time. That was a fun experience for me because I was watching my nieces and nephews who were still high school aged, and my sister, who was graduating from high school going into her first year at UCLA, in this complicated situation with time. Whereas women my age, and their mid-thirties, we were so fucking relieved. Like, ‘Oh my god, a break.’

TRINA: A breather.

MARIA: But I don't think we knew what to expect. I was watching this generation younger than me, and I was feeling for them in their experience of loss of time.

TRINA: Loss of youth.

MARIA: Loss of youth. That was a real conundrum for them. My sister was valedictorian in her high school, and she was in her little robe in the living room, smiling, graduating in front of her computer. It was so fucking sad, and I watched that with my nephews and nieces too. They all graduated through the pandemic. It was strange.

In that weaving class I’d use my sister as my consultant and I'd be like, ‘So what's up with this? No screens, no sound, no world. What are people doing?’ And she'd say, ‘It's just that it's so awkward, your parents are there, and that's why kids don't want to turn on their screens or they're in a little corner in their kitchen or something.’ It's like everyone’s despondent.

This was when I was still learning how to weave, and understood the form of Practicum, the play was like, okay, we're going to be all screens on, all sound on, and we're going to really be intentional about the world building we're doing together. I would do prompts like, ‘Okay, what's the darkest part of your space? Put your camera in the darkest part.’ and we'd screenshot it. We'd make collages together from our Zoom interface. What's the most undesirable viewpoint? What's the most desirable viewpoint?     

A lot of that comes out of my performance practice, but also working with people like Taisha Paget and Julie Tolentino, who are mamas of the prompt. They're like, ‘Okay, show me you, here goes, we're going to do this performance together, but I'm not going to tell you how to dance. We're going to understand what you do under these circumstances.’

In our weaving class, we’d go and forage together and it'd be like, every 10 breaths, take a screenshot. Everyone would have their own bank of screenshots, and then we'd come back and we'd sit down. ‘Okay, we're going to take two minutes and you're going to write a story about it, about the future or about the past but this is the world it’s in.’ I think all my sculpture comes out of these ideas of play. They're very playful sculptures and they give me the space to be like, ‘It's like my nephew riding a bike, but he's a time traveler.’

But I think about people like Greg [Bojorquez] and Estevan [Oriol] and all these image makers that were creating a visual language of brownness in my youth that made it feel noble and brave and beautiful in this way. As a bussed-out kid, I wasn't in these suburban neighborhoods until I was in middle school and high school. All of a sudden, I felt like, oh shit, are we poor? Because there was this abundance of all of that that they found a way within my mom's generation to make being hood really glamorous for themselves. I think that that's why I have this very idealized version. Like the films we were watching where it was giving us this iconic brown life that was gorgeous. You're watching fucking Giggles out the window and her hair's blowing, and you're like, ‘She just came out of jail. Wow.’

All In Time, 2022

TRINA: (laughing hard) Totally.

MARIA: It’s funny.

TRINA: Yeah, that's beautiful.

MARIA: These are also relationships I was having with visiting my uncle in San Quentin. Our first trip to San Francisco was to go to San Quentin. I'm four, five years old and it's like, ‘Wow, this is right on the ocean? Uncle lives right on the beach.’ It's these complicated ways of not understanding the thing.

TRINA: When we're dealing with the natural world, we're dealing with time and there's always trauma involved. Growing up in LA in the nineties was violent for many of us, I often reflect on my survival during that time. To hear you say it was noble, I'm like, wow, because it was challenging.

MARIA: That was my adjacent kid reality take on things. It was like my noble uncle Joe Fob, who was the founder of Sons of Samoa, was in a wheelchair because he had gotten shot as a result of gang violence. He would take us to Silverado Park in Long Beach for the lunch programs, and he dealt with lots of health issues over his lifetime because of his disability. But even as a kid it seemed to me that this lifestyle is not easy. He was the guy with the giant boombox who's at the park surrounded and cared for by so many young Samoans seeking community. It's in that complexity that I didn’t realize he was disempowered. We didn't realize he was disempowered. There were so many ways in which he was beaten down by these systems and remained a pillar of true joy and leadership in his community. That’s the noble part for me.

I've taught basket weaving at Los Padrinos. What a complicated space to take natural material into. I taught it with the Boyle Heights Arts Conservatory, and it was their first time doing art paired curriculum for incarcerated youth. My class was focused on the basket and manifest destiny, 2023 or 2024. I talked to the boys about westward expansion, how the women sustained their communities, because the utility of the basket changed, right? All of a sudden, you didn't need a basket to boil water. There was a pot. The industrial revolution is happening. There's steel, there's cast iron. Things have changed. The basket is really losing its utility within communities and women in a lot of these indigenous communities, like Hopi and Navajo communities, started weaving in Victorian flowers onto the side of a basket. The commodification of a sacred object, of a utilitarian object for consumption, for participation. They sustained communities when land loss was there, when male separation was present, and to talk to these 14-year-old boys currently incarcerated about male separation was challenging.

And then I'm talking to my uncle on the phone. No longer in San Quentin, California has closed San Quentin's death row and moved men to other facilities, but I'm talking to him about time travel. I'm like, ‘You know about Los Padrinos?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I fucking broke out onto the golf course at 12 years old, I try to run the golf course. They caught me, though.’ He's telling me about which buildings are there. I'm like, ‘Yeah, that building is there’ and I'm with young Mexican boys and there was one mixed Samoan boy. This work allows for time travel. The use of plants, I think early on when these sculptures were moving into museum spaces and different things, people were really talking about this kind of idealized space of the plant and I'm like, ‘No, this is dystopia.’ This is gardening in the dystopia. This is gardening through concrete. I very much feel like these are portraits of family. I call them future ancestors.

I'm hoping that a lot of this is prototyping for civic projects. It's like I look at land artists and people who make public sculpture, and I wonder how my practice can take it that further step and be art as infrastructure. I cited Agnes Denes and Wheat Field--A Confrontation (1982). But what if we could eat that wheat field after?

Ruth Asawa would go and work with students and community and she'd make all these objects they would turn into fountains. She would take student work from elementary schools and shopkeeper's kids who worked in the shops next to this installation she's going to do, and she would build the fountain out of their objects. It's like, ‘What if we can drink from the fountain now?’ Especially because privatized water is so here. I grew up in the nineties when we were still drinking from water hoses. Now I buy a $5 water bottle if I wasn't smart enough to put water in a cup before I leave.

TRINA: It's ridiculous.

MARIA: We’re cringing at the $5 bottle. What about the person I'm walking past who's unhoused? And that's why the Deitch fountain had that juxtaposition for me.

I was thinking about water a lot. I am a community member, and when we were in the pandemic, when I was first using this yard as a studio, my friends and I had a social distance potluck where everyone brought one dish. This is right before the Black Lives Matters protests were active, because for the first time also in LA, in my awareness, when the pandemic hit, finally people saw that the homeless are here.

TRINA: Yep.

MARIA: Again, I grew up in production, so I was constantly carting that food over after shoot days to downtown LA unhoused encampments. But I feel like during COVID there was finally a spotlight on that community in a way that had people talking about what public space was, like the park. There were all these kinds of radical communities around the unhoused forming. They had a garden at Echo Park Lake. I know they had charging stations, and when it felt like the pandemic was letting up, the city fenced off the entire park.  

Even in those protests, I saw folks giving water bottles to the unhoused, which at protests prior to that, honestly, I did not see that exchange. There was an invisibility and that's again, LA's landscape sometimes. There's so much that lives invisibly.

What I was thinking about with the water fountain was a lot about access to water. Who has it? Who will have it? Oh, back to the food thing we did here. Everyone brought a dish. I bought those to-go plates, and we made about 200 plates, and we took 'em downtown. I've always been that kind of DIYer. That's always been built into my practice.

I was thinking about the fountain and drinking water access. I got lucky to be positioned right near the front door of the [Deitch] gallery and I was thinking about the pedestrian. There are these big door windows and this kind of relationship to the ask. I had a figure whose hand was out, and it had a penny drop. You could put a coin in it. Those are two different kinds of wishing spaces. In a fountain, we throw a coin in to make a wish for ourselves. When we're feeling generous, when we're feeling capable, we give a dollar to a person asking to wish for our community. We give somebody some resource to be like, ‘Ah, I believe in us. I believe I'm abundant enough to give.’ But sometimes when you're wishing in a fountain, it's like, ‘I just need something.’

Wish into Me (Taupo) Detail, 2024

Infinite Hibiscus Purifying Fountain, 2024 & Wish into Me (Taupo), 2024

TRINA: Take my penny.

MARIA: Right? Take my penny, let me find love. Let me find happiness.

TRINA: How has that fountain led you to a larger water project in Catalina? 

MARIA: I’m working on a community food forest on the museum’s fallow lot in Avalon on Catalina Island in collaboration with LAND, the Catalina Conservancy, and Catalina Museum. My project centers migration stories through food as a love letter to our motherlands. Thinking a lot about diaspora, the project will be living testament to the resilience of people and seeds to journey across land and time. Ada Wrigley’s love letter garden to her husband collected plants from around the world to plant in Catalina’s Botanical Gardens memorializing their world travels together. Our garden will bring plants and seeds from the diaspora of LA artists and Catalina’s residents, who are predominately working class of Mexican descent, to commemorate the diverse histories that have brought us and our families to Los Angeles from our lands of origin onto the indigenous lands of the Tongva people and made us a community now.

I’m excited for how this project is really considering the island's community, sustainability and creating a resource through food access, water purification sculptures and job creation for the youth on the island. This is a long-term project, and it is at its very beginning stages of permits, landscape planning and relationship building with the community there. It's the biggest work I’ve taken on as an artist and I’m open to ways it will shape my practice going forward. Lots to learn from these types of interventions in real life spaces.

TRINA: What do you do on the daily for your practice?

MARIA: I'm so used to being in my labor and right now a lot of the structuring around my practice is 10 minutes at a time. 10 minutes to paint this thing, 10 to make a mold, 10 to play guitar, 10 minutes to read from a book on the shelf. I’m breaking down my time.

A practice is built out of a lot of things and I’m teaching myself that level of flow. Plant time but also allowing the practice to not just look like an object making practice, which at first in gaining some of these successes of getting to exhibit at museums and things, it felt like maybe I was concerned about whether I had to become an object maker which is not the way my work is built. They're process-based pieces so what I'm understanding is that I can build the practice around that by being a better communicator of how that's done.

TRINA: Is there a connection to institutions and Western thinking that possibly pushed you away from a more specific practice of object making?

MARIA: I think it goes back to the ephemeral and the sound art communities and the ideas behind performance. That's why I even think there's a lot of alignment with the ethos of ASCO. I found out about them later, and I loved when we had the premiere at LALIFF because we had a nice talk after, and it was Willie, Patsy and Harry. I don't think they've all been kind of on a stage together in a long moment. Travis [Gutiérrez Senger] and I talked a lot about ASCO's capacity to make in the world and for it to be present in environment and in space. That's what I felt like I was doing even before I knew their practice. I had these spaces, but I also made things in LA. I found a picture from a decade ago too, where I had a grocery cart full of recycling that's all painted and that I left in Echo Park Lake. I was my own little exchanges with the city because I grew up here. I was a bus kid. I traversed the city. I worked on the west side a lot as a young person before I even drove. I was always an observer of this place.

TRINA: The cinematic landscape.

MARIA: That's something that deeply struck me about their practice when I did learn about them and saw their process. Here they were tagging LACMA and then in LACMA, and now LACMA is showing their film. I appreciated the way the film closed it out with it's a movement, like Dadaism. It's this movement that happened that was particularly brown, particularly LA, and it does belong to this group, but it also belongs to a spirit of LA. That's what I think the documentary did a good job of framing up and saw people through different kinds of practices, San Cha as a performer, Ruben as a true sculptor, and I'm a performer object maker using space. It was cinematic.

Sculptural piece for ASCO: Without Permission, 2025

TRINA: Who are artists that inspire you?

MARIA: There are many great women who've made many, many great things, particularly in my LA community. I really love Nao Baustamonte, I really love the play in her work. I love that she uses cinema. She makes sharp critic in her work she's also so fun and lively. I do hope for a cinematic time again in my practice, and I have really loved that she's always brought that camp and joy and has challenged people a lot. The fucking burrito piece [Indigurrito, 1992] and her stewardship in general of community, like her role at Roski. I had so many friends go through that program while she was there, while she was directing, and even now as a professor, she shows up to everything. She's actively a part of everything, but also, I see all the practices that she's touched.

Big picture, I love Ruth Asawa. I love the way she has done her work. It was hyper personal, and yet it had this monumental energy to it. Her family, her kids, her life was the core of her work, and it could be held up in this kind of grand way, but it was so deeply personal. I love that aspect of her work and that so much of her work was community built. She worked with her family, she worked with kids in her neighborhood, she taught. Humble queen, humble queen, I love that about her.

Then Noah Purifoy, the grandness of his works and the directness - this is what this means, even in the abstraction. That takes a bold person and those are the lines I really want to straddle because I do want to be, especially in these times, I do feel like we need to say the thing. But it's also a complicated line of, okay, how do you let the work also speak, and how do you let the actions behind the work speak? How do you create a megaphone through the work? At the end of the day when I'm long gone, I want for people who participated in these works, students and communities, to feel collective ownership and to feel that what we did together served the places they existed in, ‘I made this. Look at this thing I made.’ I want that sort of activation within the work. I want the community to turn around and say, ‘Look at what I made. Look at what we made.’