December 13 – Exhibition Tour with Olivia Amaya Ortiz
Saturday, December 13, 2025 | 2 pm | 516 Arts | Free/Sliding Scale Ticketing | RSVP Required
Experience The Armor We Wear through the eyes of curator, Olivia Amaya Ortiz, who will share curatorial insights and stories behind the works. Explore the artists’ perspectives on how clothing and adornment become acts of defiance, pride, and self-determination. Ortiz will discuss how the featured artists transform materials into a visual language of resistance, identity, divergent narratives, and cultural memory.
Olivia is a curator, a museum and arts professional, and a writer. She seeks to reconcile essentialist narratives of identity by advancing relationships to land, decolonial pedagogy, collaborative programming, cultural revitalization, and to the poetics of representation. Currently the Curator at 516 ARTS, Albuquerque, NM, Olivia has also worked to facilitate museum education, community outreach initiatives, artist programs, and public art projects for organizations such as New Mexico Arts, Santa Fe, NM; the Indian Arts Research Center (IARC) at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe; the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson. She is a contributing writer to the art publication Southwest Contemporary. Olivia holds an MA in Art Education from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and a dual-major BFA from the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Image credit: Vicente Telles, Hijo del Provencia, 2022.