January 17 – A Land That Remembers: Artist Talk with Alejandro Macías
Saturday, January 17, 2026 | 3 pm | 516 Arts | Free/Sliding Scale Ticketing | RSVP Required
Image credit: Alejandro Macías, Man Drowning, 2025
516 ARTS is pleased to host an artist talk with Alejandro Macías, whose multidisciplinary practice moves across painting, drawing, and video to examine questions of identity, migration, and belonging. This conversation offers an opportunity to engage more deeply with the ideas and lived experiences that shape his work on view in The Armor We Wear, and to hear directly from the artist about the processes—both material and conceptual—behind his practice.
.
Image credit: Alejandro Macías, A Land that Remembers (Jennifer S.) 2025
In this artist talk, Macías will speak about the questions guiding his work and the ways he thinks through making as a form of inquiry. He will reflect on his use of materials, the role of storytelling and research in his process, and how his work negotiates visibility and care within institutional contexts. The conversation will also touch on how art can function as a site of reflection and resistance—holding personal experience alongside collective histories.
Macías’s work is rooted in personal history along the U.S.–Mexico border, while remaining attentive to broader social and political conditions, considering how systems of power are felt in everyday life. Memory, celebration, joy and grief surface throughout his work, often carried by symbols and motifs from a Chicano visual lexicon. Moving between varied materials like acrylic, oil, graphite and found objects in any single work, Macías creates space for complexity and contradiction, inviting viewers to sit with what is unresolved.
Alejandro Macías has been an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center, The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, CALA Alliance, Phoenix, Arizona, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency in Granville, New York, among others. He was the recipient of the Lehmann Emerging Artist award, which included a two-person exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum, and has had solo shows at Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock, Texas, Presa House Gallery, San Antonio, Texas, Tucson Museum of Art, and Latch Key Gallery, New York, New York. His artwork was recently featured in the New York Times. He is currently Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Arizona School of Art in Tucson, where he lives and works.
The talk will be facilitated by 516 ARTS Curator Olivia Amaya Ortiz, who has worked closely with the artist throughout the development of the exhibition. Rather than a formal lecture, this program is structured as a dialogue, allowing space for Macías to expand on his ideas while remaining responsive to the conversation. Amaya Ortiz will guide the discussion through key themes present in the exhibition, connecting the work to larger curatorial questions around place, power, and contemporary artistic practice.
A Q&A will follow, inviting audience members into the exchange.