Raven Sanchez: Así Sea / So Be It
On view in ICA LA’s Project Room will be the first institutional exhibition by Los Angeles artist Raven Sanchez (b. 1992, Los Angeles, CA), who works across media to consider the relationship between place, memory, and community. Grounded in her own family history, she pays particular attention to the richness and specificities of L.A.’s communities of color, pointing to their reverberant cultural and sociopolitical influence.
For her presentation at ICA LA, Sanchez will debut an installation titled Así Sea / So Be It. At the project’s core is a series of over 200 wax rubbings the artist produced of her grandparents’ home in East Los Angeles. The structure’s exterior was hand-stuccoed in 1974 by Sanchez’s grandfather, who moved to the U.S. from Tijuana, Baja California, where he learned his trade. After living in the home for over 50 years, the family made the difficult decision to sell; an outcome of her grandparents’ passing and the economic impacts of a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Made in multigenerational collaboration with her mother and aunts, the rubbings document the home’s plaster exterior—fitted with ornamental wrought iron—as well as its interior details and plant matter from the surrounding garden.
While Sanchez’s work points to a human impulse to preserve, her approach embraces this impossibility, rendering visible the realities of loss while honoring the intangible feelings, experiences, and encounters that bring a house to life. As both a material record and an embodied ritual of grief and remembrance, Así Sea / So Be It reimagines archival practice as a tool for care, connection, and reclamation.
Raven Sanchez is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles exploring memory and place through painting, sculpture, and process-based works. Sanchez’s art practice focuses on domestic labor and ancestral memory as it is held in the body and in materials. Incorporating elements such as charcoal, sand, rocks, iron, plants, and dried organic matter, she uses the process of rubbing as a way to activate and deepen her examination of fragmentation, loss, abstraction, and vignettes of family. Sanchez studied Sociology and Latin American Studies at the University of San Francisco and has pursued art-making outside of institutional frameworks through artist-run and community spaces in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Sanchez currently lives and works in Los Angeles.