Exhibition Overview
A Historic Venue.
An Unforgettable Evening.
In April 2009, Omar Holguin, Director of La Mancha Gallery, joined independent organizer Stephen Gates in presenting Art at the Braley — a three-day group exhibition held within one of Pasadena's most storied architectural landmarks. The Braley Building at 35 South Raymond Avenue, constructed in 1906 for civic leader Edgar R. Braley, is a work of Chicago-style commercial architecture designed by C.W. Buchanan — individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places and long considered one of the anchoring structures of Old Pasadena's historic district.
Among its preserved interior features are original tin-formed ceilings, Craftsman millwork, square columns, and a four-story atrium — a setting that lent Art at the Braley a rare architectural gravitas seldom afforded to an independent group exhibition.
Holguin's curatorial contribution was the La Mancha Gallery segment — a focused, gallery-presented selection of ten artists personally brought in by Holguin, whose works collectively spanned painting, photography, printmaking, mixed media, and documentary practice across a deliberately international and culturally diverse roster.
Special Appearance
Robert Vargas
Live Art.
Painting · Live Portraiture · Los Angeles, CA
Robert Vargas
By 2009, Robert Vargas was one of the most recognized artists in Los Angeles. A sixth-generation Angeleno raised in Boyle Heights, Vargas had painted his first museum mural at the Autry Museum at age 16 before going on to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and had since become a central presence at the DTLA Art Walk, known for producing freehand mixed-media portraits live before an audience. At Art at the Braley, Vargas performed exactly that — executing live portrait work of guests throughout the opening, transforming the exhibition floor into an active studio and drawing hundreds of attendees into an immediate and unrepeatable encounter with the creative act itself.
Participating Artists
Ten Artists. One Living City.
Painting
David Taveras
Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and trained in Graphic Design at the National University of Santo Domingo before earning an Associate Degree in Digital Media Arts from TCI College in New York, Taveras arrived in Los Angeles with an already formidable exhibition record across the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and the United States. A self-taught painter whose practice draws on the influence of Julian Schnabel, Antoni Gaudí, Picasso, and Ramón Oviedo, Taveras works in a free, experimental style that resists easy categorization. By the time of Art at the Braley, he had been recognized by Amnesty International as one of the artists selected to address violence against women on canvas — a testament to the moral weight his work carries.
Painting · Coyoacán, Mexico
Xavier Yarto
Born in Coyoacán, Mexico, and a painter for more than three decades, Yarto brought to the exhibition a charged and internationally recognized body of work. Rooted in the Pop Modern Expressionist tradition, his canvases fuse chromatic intensity with the iconographic weight of pre-Hispanic culture — what the artist himself describes as a recreation of Hispanic culture in a modern language. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States, Mexico, Spain, France, England, Italy, Denmark, South Korea, Japan, and beyond, and has earned him eleven international awards.
Painting · Milan, Italy
Silvio Sangiorgi
A self-taught painter, draftsman, and author based in Milan, Italy, Sangiorgi contributed a body of portraiture of rare psychological depth. His subjects are drawn from the world of performance and entertainment: mimes, acrobats, clowns, storytellers, and street performers, rendered at the precise threshold between anticipation and action. His practice holds that the portrait must reveal the inner tension marked on a face — the tremor of an eyelid, the tautness of a hand — and that the eyes are, ultimately, the form and substance of the secret we are looking at in ourselves.
Painting · Mixed Media · Zacatecas, Mexico
María Teresa Chávez Montes
A self-taught visual artist from Zacatecas, Mexico, with more than 25 years of international exhibition experience, Chávez Montes works across oil painting, egg tempera, digital art, and mixed media. Her series A Present Past in the Magical Towns of Zacatecas, comprising 30 works declared national heritage by the Government of Zacatecas, exemplifies her commitment to documenting living cultural traditions. Her work is represented in Mexican embassies across four continents and in private collections worldwide — her presence at Art at the Braley marking a significant point of intersection between the Los Angeles independent art scene and the broader Mexican cultural diaspora.
Painting · Printmaking · San Diego, CA
Velma Gay
A painter and printmaker born in Colorado Springs and based in San Diego, holding a B.A. in Painting and Printmaking from San Diego State University, Gay contributed a practice rooted in the lived experience of the Black community: bold, direct, and charged with social conscience. The American flag appears throughout her canvases as a recurring and deeply personal motif — a tribute to her father, a Sergeant who died in the Vietnam War, and a persistent interrogation of American identity, freedom, and belonging. Gay describes her practice as a transformation of the spirit of Rap music into visual form: raw, rhythmic, and uncompromising in its demand to be heard.
Photography · Los Angeles, CA
Natalie Marie Franco
An award-winning fine art photographer, master educator, and curator based in Los Angeles, Franco brings to her practice a vision shaped by her Mexican-American heritage and an international perspective trained across Russia, Morocco, Turkey, and the UAE. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, and Islamic Arts Magazine, and recognized by the International Photography Awards and Prix de la Photographie Paris. She has exhibited in more than thirty collective exhibitions across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, with institutional representation including the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Bergamot Station, and the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture.
Photography · California
Nicole Franco
A Mexican-American documentary and commercial photographer, graduate of the Academy of Art University and alumna of Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy, Franco has built a practice that moves with equal authority between editorial, commercial, and social documentary work. Her clients include Netflix, Hulu, National Geographic, Amazon Prime Video, the Los Angeles Times, and the World Wildlife Fund. An Eddie Adams Workshop alumna and member of Women Photograph and Diversify Photo, her work is defined by a commitment to authentic representation and visual storytelling across cultures.
Painting · Printmaking · Mixed Media · Boyle Heights, Los Angeles
Stephanie Mercado
An interdisciplinary artist and art administrator born and raised in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles, to a family of self-taught artisans, Mercado grounds her practice in the culture of manual labor and the working hand. Raised within her family's upholstery business and her mother's fabric store, her print-based collages comprise relief carvings printed on handmade colored papers — labor-intensive works that pay homage to historical traditions of craft and to the professions rooted in labor and love. Her practice spans painting, printmaking, fabric sculpture, video, and design, driven by a vision of empowerment rooted in the lived experience of working-class Los Angeles.
Photography · Long Beach, CA
Baron Norris
A Long Beach-based photographer specializing in tabletop, food, product, portrait, and event photography, Norris contributed a technically refined photographic presence to the La Mancha Gallery installation — providing a precise counterpoint to the painterly and mixed-media works surrounding it.
Exhibition Notes
The Alternative Venue
Exhibition Model.
The La Mancha Gallery installation occupied 30 linear feet of exhibition space and featured 28 works under consignment in various frame sizes. The three-day run, anchored by a heavily attended opening night, affirmed both the organizational strength of the collaboration between Holguin and Gates, and the sustained public interest that La Mancha Gallery's curatorial programming reliably generates.
Art at the Braley stands as an early and defining demonstration of La Mancha Gallery's Alternative Venue Exhibition Model — identifying architecturally and historically significant spaces beyond the traditional gallery circuit, assembling rosters of genuine range and international depth, and presenting artists whose work, across every medium and from every corner of the diaspora, merits the most serious institutional attention.
