La Mancha Gallery · Los Angeles, CA
Lessons from Underground
A Group Exhibition Curated by Omar Holguin
December 1, 2007 · Alternative Partner Venue · Los Angeles, CA
Some texts refuse to age. Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground is one of them — a novella that burrows beneath the surface of civilization and returns with something uncomfortably true about the human condition.
Curatorial Statement
"When I first conceived Lessons from Underground, I wasn't imposing a literary framework onto artists. I was recognizing something they were already saying."
— Omar Holguin, Curator & Founder, La Mancha Gallery
The Underground Man's restless interiority — his refusal to reconcile with social expectation, his insistence on the irrational, the unresolved, the deeply felt — is not so distant from the creative impulse itself. Artists live in that territory. They always have.
Dostoevsky's novella was not a framework imposed upon this exhibition — it was a shared lens. A way of naming what the artists in this room were already exploring: the tension between authenticity and social constraint, between the interior life and the world that demands conformity. Lessons from Underground did not illustrate the novella. It inhabited its questions.
Exhibition Details & Highlights
A Multidisciplinary Evening in Los Angeles
Date
December 1, 2007
Location
Alternative Partner Venue · Los Angeles, CA
Curator
Omar Holguin · Founder & Director, La Mancha Gallery
Exhibition Type
Group Exhibition · 13 Artists
Attendance
300 Attendees
Thematic Anchor
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground
Exhibition Highlights
Live Art Installation — Antonio Escalante
A defining moment of the evening — Escalante's live installation unfolded in real time before the audience, collapsing the distance between artist and witness, between process and presence.
Multidisciplinary Program
The exhibition encompassed painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, multimedia installation, short film, spoken word poetry, and live music — a full sensory engagement with the exhibition's themes.
Literary Framework
Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground served as a shared lens — not an imposed theme, but a recognized truth already embedded in the artists' practices and lived experiences.
300 Attendees
A testament to Los Angeles' hunger for art that takes its audience seriously — and to La Mancha Gallery's growing presence within the city's cultural landscape.
Participating Artists
Thirteen Voices. One Underground.
Four artists anchored the exhibition's curatorial argument. Nine more expanded its constellation — together forming one of La Mancha Gallery's most ambitious and multidisciplinary programs to date.
Curatorial Spotlights
Painting · Street Art
RETNA
An internationally recognized street artist, RETNA arrived with the full force of his visual linguistics — typography dissolved into urban poetry, letterforms functioning simultaneously as language and image. His bold compositions held the street and the gallery in precise, unresolved tension, speaking directly to the Underground Man's refusal to be categorized or contained.
Illustration · Design
GERMS
Jaime "Germs" Zacarias — Chicano artist and South L.A. native — brought futuristic characters and three-dimensional design that rooted the exhibition firmly in the living culture of Los Angeles and Chicano history. His work reminded audiences that the underground is not an abstraction; it is a place, a people, a lineage.
Drawing · Illustration
Shizu Saldamando
Saldamando's exquisite drawings surveyed the social subcultures of Los Angeles — its backyard parties, dance clubs, art receptions, and hang-out spots — rendering the informal architectures of community with intimacy and precision. Her work illuminated the underground not as rebellion but as belonging.
Printmaking · Film · Illustration
Poli Marichal
Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, Marichal is a filmmaker, printmaker, and illustrator whose practice moves between political inquiry and personal introspection. A founding member of the Los de Abajo Printmaking Collective and Rockefeller Media Arts Fellow, her work is held in the collections of LACMA and the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Her presence lent the exhibition an institutional gravitas that extended well beyond Los Angeles.
Exhibition Ensemble
Live Installation
Antonio Escalante
A multifaceted artist with an international exhibition history spanning Mexico, the United States, and Europe since 1994. His live installation unfolded in real time before the audience — the evening's most indelible and unrepeatable moment.
Painting
Melly Trochez
Known for her emotional depth, Trochez's works offered reflective narratives drawn from personal experience and the lives of those closest to her.
Painting · Sculpture · Mixed Media
Oscar Magallanes
A Los Angeles-based artist whose work is informed by the cultural and social elements of his upbringing in a Mexican-American barrio east of downtown Los Angeles.
Printmaking · Letterpress · Graphic Design
Daniel Gonzalez
Printmaker, provocateur, mezcalero. Zacatecano by way of Boyle Heights — Gonzalez brought the sharp political edge of letterpress and graphic design to the exhibition's underground dialogue.
Graffiti · Street Art
RASK
A staple of the LA street art scene, RASK injected raw urban energy into the gallery space — vibrant work that refused to be domesticated by four walls.
Mixed Media
Daniel Ortega-Flores
Ortega-Flores's work touches on themes of migration and identity, reflecting personal and community experiences that resonate deeply within the exhibition's thematic landscape.
Multimedia Installation
Manuel Barillas
A multimedia artist whose installations challenged traditional notions of space and interaction — expanding the exhibition's physical and conceptual boundaries.
Photography
Baron Norris
Norris's abstract photography played between color, black and white, and form — inviting viewers to find personal interpretations within the chaos, mirroring the exhibition's deeper invitation to sit with ambiguity.
Portraiture · Painting
Velma Gay
Renowned for her larger-than-life portraits, Gay's works captured the inner lives of her subjects with profound realism — figures that seemed to reach inward as much as outward, holding the room with quiet authority.
Curatorial Process & Legacy
Art That Dares to Be Difficult
13
Artists & Creative Voices
300
Attendees
2nd
Major Exhibition · La Mancha Gallery
On the Curatorial Process
To curate Lessons from Underground was to hold open a conversation between eras. The works on view did not illustrate Dostoevsky's novella — they inhabited its questions. The curatorial process began not with a checklist of themes but with a recognition: that the artists I was bringing together were already living inside the tensions the Underground Man articulated. Identity under pressure. The self in conflict with social expectation. The irrational as a form of resistance.
The decision to present the exhibition at an alternative partner venue was itself a curatorial statement — consistent with La Mancha Gallery's founding conviction that the most vital art does not wait for institutional permission. It finds its audience where the audience already gathers.
The inclusion of live installation, spoken word, short film, and live music alongside painting, printmaking, photography, and sculpture was not programmatic — it was a response to the artists themselves, whose practices demanded a broader stage. Lessons from Underground was never just a visual exhibition. It was an experience designed to be felt.
"That three hundred people gathered to engage with these questions on a December evening in Los Angeles speaks not only to the power of the work, but to the hunger for art that takes its audience seriously."
Lessons from Underground affirmed, early in La Mancha Gallery's history, a curatorial commitment that has guided every exhibition since: that the most culturally urgent art is art that dares to be difficult — and that Los Angeles has always had an audience ready to meet that dare.
Exhibition Credits
Exhibition: Lessons from Underground
Curator: Omar Holguin · Founder & Director, La Mancha Gallery
Date: December 1, 2007
Location: Alternative Partner Venue · Los Angeles, CA
Presenting Organization: La Mancha Gallery · Est. 2006 · Central Avenue, Los Angeles
Participating Artists: RETNA · GERMS · Shizu Saldamando · Poli Marichal · Antonio Escalante · Melly Trochez · Oscar Magallanes · Daniel Gonzalez · RASK · Daniel Ortega-Flores · Manuel Barillas · Baron Norris · Velma Gay
