MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia is the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of the artist and will be on view at MOCA Grand Avenue.

In his paintings, Ana Segovia twists assumptions about masculinity through a queer lens. Working with an aggressive palette of fluorescent colors, daring compositions, and cinematographic framing and cropping, Segovia undermines the gendered basis of national identity built around hypermasculine archetypes—such as the charro or cowboy—that have been standardized by film. The artist, who is a direct descendent of major players in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, an era spanning from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, has been using film stills drawn mostly from this auspicious tradition as a source for his paintings.

In MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia, he continues his engagement with film archives, this time turning to Roger E. Alamos’s I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1983). The film, a variation on 1980s musical dramas, recounts a love story between Buck, an aspiring artist, and Mario, an undocumented dreamer working as a ranch hand in a fictional Southwestern town. The exhibition presents three suites of paintings illustrating stills from crucial scenes in the film. Also included are copies of Alamos's script and a mural based on the film's end credits, both of which subtly stage an unexpected plot twist.

MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant, and Anastasia Kahn, former Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

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+ about Ana Segovia 

+ about the exhibition