This 2025 Sor Juana Festival event is free, but online registration is required. As part of the current exhibition Into the Hourglass: Paño Arte from the Rudy Padilla Collection, the NMMA cordially invites you to an informative and thought-provoking event that will explore the intersection of art and incarceration: Filmmaker Evangeline E. Griego will answer questions after screening her 30-minute documentary film, “Paño Arte: Images from Inside” (1996). Chicana Professor Karen Mary Davalos, PhD, will examine how paño art is a pillar of Chicano art as it builds community and belonging. Local artist Maria Gaspar will present her latest work based on Cook County Jail. There will be a musical segment with Thaddeus Tukes as part of her presentation.

Evangeline “Vangie” Griego is an award-winning director and producer known for Sir! No Sir!, Chevolution, and God Willing. Her work has aired on PBS, Netflix, BBC, and Sundance Channel, earning recognition from the Independent Spirit Awards and major film festivals. A Sundance alum, she has produced for MGM, Disney, and Morgan Creek, including Pocahontas and N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton music videos. Griego has served on the boards of NALIP, Outfest, and VIVA! A 12th-generation New Mexican, she holds three B.A. degrees from USC and splits her time between Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Madrid.

Karen Mary Davalos, Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, has published widely on Chicana/o/x art, spirituality, and museums. She has published four books: Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora (2001); The Mexican Museum of San Francisco Papers, 1971-2006 (2010), the Silver Medal winner of the International Latino Book Award for Best Reference Book in English;Yolanda M. López (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), the recipient of two awards; and Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties (NYU Press 2017). With Tatiana Reinoza, she co-edited Self Help Graphics at Fifty (UC Press 2023). With Constance Cortez (UTRGV), she launched a post-custodial, aggregating web portal, Mexican American Art since 1848, that compiles relevant collections from libraries, archives, and museum throughout the nation.

Maria Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s body of work addresses issues of spatial justice to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Gaspar has received the Guggenheim Award for Creative Arts, the Latinx Artist Fellowship, the United States Artists Fellowship, the Frieze Impact Prize, the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. The Art for Justice Fund has supported Gaspar’s projects, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Gaspar has lectured and exhibited extensively at venues including MoMA PS1 and El Museo Del Barrio in New York, NY; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA; the African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.