Corrido de Ruben Ortiz-Torres + 3B Collective
Rubén Ortiz-Torres and 3B Collective
Louis Carlos Bernal Gallery | Pima Community College, Tucson, Arizona
August 25 – October 10, 2025.
Reception: September 18, 5-7 PM lecture, Lecture/Panel: Thursday, September 18, 6 PM
The Louis Carlos Bernal Gallery presents an exhibition featuring Los Angeles-based artist and educator Rubén Ortiz-Torres alongside the 3B Collective, a multidisciplinary group rooted in collaboration, activism, and community engagement. Ortiz-Torres’s work investigates the aesthetics of hybridity, cross-cultural exchange, and globalization while using various media, including painting, photography, video, installation, ceramic tiles, and customized commercial objects. He is currently a professor in the MFA program at UC San Diego and a graduate of CalArts.
Together, Ortiz-Torres and 3B Collective offer a layered and visually compelling conversation about place, power, cultural inheritance, and resistance. Their practices challenge established hierarchies and invite viewers to rethink how art can function in and for the communities it reflects.
The gallery and its programs are free and open to the public. Hours: Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Friday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m., and before most evening performances in the Center for the Arts theaters. For additional details, call 520-206-6942
3B’s Highway Hypnosis at the Craft Contemporary
May 26, 2024 — September 8, 2024
3B Collective: Highway Hypnosis explores the cultural lineage of 3B Collective, a group of native (and immigrant) Angeleno multidisciplinary artists. Presented at Craft Contemporary, the exhibition delves into past and present connections within the collective’s work, such as challenging preconceived notions of craft, the commodification of cultural goods, hyper-individualism, and hidden labor. All of these while honoring indigeneity and also shedding light on migration histories. The exhibition is a testament to collective effort, revealing the masterful hidden labor of artists and artisans who contribute to each work.
3B engages in collaborative works with skilled artisans from regions integral to their familial roots, such as Oaxaca, Jalisco, El Salvador, and Baja California. This ongoing collaboration forms a contemporary manifestation of ancestral cultural networks within an urban context and sensibility in present-day America.
The exhibition features murals, assemblages, textiles, ceramics, mask installations, and other media that serve as vital expressions of a culture forced to migrate and adapt due to socio-political and financial pressures. The artworks embody a resilient cultural heritage that thrives and evolves across borders in a capitalist system that makes them unintentional collaborators in their own exploitation.
Highways & Byways | Oct 23 – Dec 11, 2021 | Residency | Inglewood, CA
With the current conversation around the environment, systemic racism, and monuments along with unseen labor, this exhibition uses massive infrastructure projects like freeways and megadevelopments as the nexus in addressing issues of erasure and equity in our communities. We look at the parallel histories of various Los Angeles communities that have become the victims of “progress” and the aesthetics that arise from colonialism, concrete, cultural iconography, and lowrider custom car culture. The connection between urban renewal and gentrification is undisputed. The works presented serve to facilitate a visual conversation between the works and the viewer with their disparate cultural iconography and representations of urban landscapes. The relationship that develops between the aesthetics that arise from urban renewal, and megadevelopments questioning both the construction of these icons, structures, and stadiums and what lies beneath them both physically and ideologically.
By Way Of | May 8 – June 12, 2021 | Best Practice, San Diego, CA
