About the Exhibition.

My Veins Do Not End in Me explores how we inherit pasts that don’t directly belong to us and how the memories that these pasts conjure live within families, amongst communities, and across nations. The exhibition is conceived as a family portrait that is at once intimate and worldly. Bringing together the work of Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, his father Juan, and his grandmother Maria de la Paz, the show investigates the cultural legacy of the Salvadoran Civil War, tracing the war’s impact into the present and opening the door to a little-known but vital part of Los Angeles art history rooted in the beginnings of the Central American Civil Rights movement.

Lasting from 1980 until 1992, the Salvadoran Civil War was fought between the country’s U.S.-backed, military-led government and the guerrilla forces of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN)—a coalition of revolutionary groups formed in response to a long history of socioeconomic disparity and State-sponsored human rights violations. The war is one of the most violent periods in the modern history of Central America; over 75,000 people were killed and countless more were forcibly disappeared.  As in other cases of U.S. military, economic and political involvement the war created deep and conflicted ties between the two countries. As a result of the violence, a quarter of El Salvador’s population was forced to flee—many of who arrived in the Los Angeles where they were protected by U.S. asylum laws.  Today, Los Angeles in particular remains home to one of the largest Salvadoran populations outside El Salvador, and is considered the heart of its diaspora.

The constant movement of people between Los Angeles and El Salvador, both historically and in the present day, is the living rhythm that contextualizes My Veins Do Not End In Me. Over four decades, each generation of the Aparicio family developed distinct visual practices in response to the shifting psychological, political and material circumstances of their disparate life experiences.

Juan Edgar became one of the thousands of refugees to leave El Salvador during the war after his wife, brother, and daughter were disappeared by government forces in reprisal for his activism as a student leader. His painted and sculpted works, whose subjects often emerged from this painful personal history, sought to materialize the political struggles and hopes of Salvadoran refugees in a new country.  Maria de la Paz, who remained in El Salvador, sewed dolls from used clothing that her son sent back from the States, which were then returned to L.A. and sold to family and friends as part of a booming remittance-based economy. Alongside journalists, activists, and migrants on both sides of the borders, both artists were active participants in the formative stages of a diasporic imaginary that began to grapple with the challenges of post-war reality.

Eddie Rodolfo grew up surrounded by visible and invisible evidence of the Civil War, but with no direct experience of the conflict himself. His own expressive language, which directly engages the neighborhoods he grew up in around Los Angeles, poetically describes how the inherited physical and psychic residue of war and migration directly shapes the present using materials like rubber, pine sap, and found clothing, which have symbolic and practical links to the Salvadoran diaspora. These objects—which the artist refers to as “documents” and which are imprints taken from neighborhood trees—exist somewhere between a print, map, or archive of and for a community for whom history has a long and persistent reach.

My Veins Do Not End In Me takes its name from a line in Like You a poem by the foremost Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton. It suggests a subjectivity at the intersection of multiple and contested pasts and presents; a consciousness with responsibilities to both a history and a future beyond the self. Backdropped against a global refugee crisis and the United States’ historical complicity in its creation, My Veins Do Not End In Me dwells in the emotional complications, ruptures of logic, and ideological impasses that accompany difficult— but necessary—reckonings with traumatic pasts.