Es el viento que me manda. Bajo el cielo de acero. Soy el punto negro que anda. A las orillas de la suerte.
It’s the wind that sends me. Under the steel sky. I’m the little dot that walks. On the shores of luck.
—Lhasa de Sela
Situated in Wolfpack HQ, the ecological activism of Luchita Hurtado and the atmospheric investigations of Lee Mullican find continuation in Janeth Aparicio Vázquez: Entre Ángeles y Huertas. With Hurtado’s declaration that ‘we are earth’ and Mullican’s mapping of consciousness as perpetual flow forming critical ground, Aparicio Vázquez extends their artistic legacies to where ecology and labor converge.
With the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency moving to dismantle decades of scientific consensus to advance extractive interests, the stakes sharpen. Entre Ángeles y Huertas sketches an alternative, linking the exploitation of elements—air, soil, water, fire—to the structural exploitation of workers. Embroidered textiles register the hand as ritual, while avian forms and feathers signal the migratory currents that structure life. Across media, Aparicio Vázquez renders circulation as form, where repetition, dispersal, and labor become aesthetic operations inseparable from political contestation. Here, the smallest forms—a seed, a stitch, a mark—circulate as fragile continuities, carriers of worlds.
Aparicio Vázquez works through networks of agriculture and resistance, where cultivation and activism are entwined. She draws from her experience of participating in the reintroduction of amaranth at El Sereno Community Garden with Malaqatel Ija, Semillas Viajeras—an Indigenous-led collective founded in Rabinal, Guatemala. Once nearly extinguished by colonization and civil war, amaranth moves again through the Campesino a Campesino model of horizontal exchange, built to outlast institutions.
In conjunction with Entre Ángeles y Huertas, on October 12, 4–6PM, a workshop led by UC Irvine's Community & Environment Research Lab will address soil contamination and air quality, framing data as tool for collective-determination.
Janeth Aparicio Vázquez is a Los Angeles–based artist and MFA candidate at the University of California, Irvine. Her work has been presented at institutions such as the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, and The Situation Room, Los Angeles, among others. Aparicio Vázquez has been recognized for both her artistic practice and community leadership with honors including the Modern Maverick Artist Award from the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures, an Artist Fellowship Award from the California Arts Council, and a Civic Service Recognition from the County of Los Angeles.