Webinar #2 with Frida Larios. This webinar is closed. Watch recording above.
See below for resources provided by Frida.
Frida will lead us in an exploration of Indigenous people throughout the Americas, including the Maya civilization which grew over 3,500 years to be the dominant agrarian society of a tropically forested Mesoamerica. The people farmed and traded within the region and developed a complex hieroglyphic script: the only one of its kind in the pre-Columbian Americas. It enabled a Maya mythic narrative to be captured, in its art and built environment, mathematics and cosmology.
Frida Larios is from El Salvador (of Mestizo [Mixed] heritage), a small and impoverished country in Central America with deep ethnic and social identity crisis. In 2004, these overwhelming historical tensions inspired her to found a cultural movement called New Maya Language, and while creating it, to find her own indigeneity. Larios’s unique system re-codifies a small part of the Maya mythic narrative through new graphic form. Her methodology speaks with and for today’s indigenous communities by borrowing directly from the logo-graphic principles of ancestral Maya scribes. For nearly 15 years she has dialogued diverse Mesoamerican narratives around the world – for children, youth and designers, through exhibitions, workshops, installations, books, artworks, and textiles; including the commission of the Toronto 2015, Pan-American Games inaugural uniform and the Rio 2016, Olympic T-shirt line co-designs for the El Salvador olympic delegation.
Larios is Chair of Indigenous Advisory for the International Indigenous Design Network (INDIGO) at the International Council of Design (Canada) and Deakin University (Australia). She co-founded Indigenous Design Collective (Washington, D.C.), an organization that partners with the Smithsonian Latino Center for Day of the Dead celebrations in the USA. Larios is currently an Adjunct Professor in Art and Design at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C., where she lives. She holds a MA in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London.
Making visible is a free webinar program supported by the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation, based in California, along with the Opening Heart Mindfulness Community in Washington, DC. This call includes one hour of teaching led by an expert with lived experience. There will be time for mindful questions and answers and sharing, and a follow up sharing call after.
All of our learning calls will be led by the people who are living the life, and doing the work.
Resources from Frida:
https://www.carlosrosario.org/collaborative-mural-depicts-students-cultural-origins/