Melly Trochez is an artist involved with painting and assemblage searching for pop culture and its intersection with kitsch. She underscores the psychological and healing properties of art for insights and tranformations in personal experience. Although her paintings are often biographical, they underline a serch for subjective truth. Melly has studied art history at the Sorbonne University in Paris, France and graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of Fullerton. She has collaborated with graffiti artists, printmakers and has painted murals throughout California. Melly is much concerned with art education and teaching art to children with both typical development and special needs. She is currently working on a body of work for a solo show next year and has enrolled in a graduate program for art therapy in the fall 2009. 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please SUBSCRIBE, LIKE and COMMENT!
Share with your friends.
Thank you for listening.
Donate through VENMO: @DANCNGSOBR 

Find Melly at:
Instagram: @melly_trochez

----
my LINKS:
Merch: http://rafa.LA​​​​​​​​​​​​​​/shop
My photography: http://rafa.LA​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Recorded at Espacio 1839
https://www.espacio1839.com
_____

Recorded on TASCAM Mixcast and Mics

*************************************
Suicide prevention:
Dial: 988, for Suicide and Crisis Lifeline
Online visit: https://988lifeline.org

Substance Abuse and Mental Health
SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357
Online visit: https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/nati...
*************************************

As Executive Director, Allegra creates a sustainable financial foundation for Levitt LA and develops equitable community engagement strategies to connect Levitt LA to the MacArthur Park / Westlake neighborhood and beyond.  She served as the Director of Community Relations & Partnerships with Levitt LA from 2019-2023 and was recently selected to fill this role. A lifelong Angeleno, she brings 15 years of experience in the non-profit field, focusing on community organizing, youth development, arts, and culture. She received her education in the communities where she has worked—Pasadena City College and UC Santa Cruz—earning a BA in Community Studies and Art History. She has worked with: Occidental College, Heidi Duckler Dance, Jewish Vocational Service, 24th Street Theatre, Homies Unidos, and Inner City Law Center. She was a Cultural Policy ACTIVATE fellow with Arts for LA in 2016-17 and a mentee of the Women of Color in the Arts Leadership Through Mentorship Program in 2018. Allegra has also served as a grants panelist with the LA City Department of Cultural Affairs, Long Beach Arts Council, LA County Arts Commission, the MAP Fund, and the CA Arts Council. The approach she takes in fundraising is rooted in building upon long-term reciprocal relationships. Her work demonstrates her commitment to being a strategic community builder who is passionate about social justice and creating equitable access to the arts. During her off time, she can be found hiking, traveling, attending cultural festivals, and attending concerts with loved ones enjoying genres such as global bass, hip-hop, reggae/dancehall, cumbia, soul, funk and more. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please SUBSCRIBE, LIKE and COMMENT!
Share with your friends.
Thank you for listening.
Donate through VENMO: @DANCNGSOBR 

Find Allegra at:
Instagram: @Allegra213, @levitt.la 

----
my LINKS:
Merch: http://rafa.LA​​​​​​​​​​​​​​/shop
My photography: http://rafa.LA​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Recorded at Espacio 1839
https://www.espacio1839.com
_____

Recorded on TASCAM Mixcast and Mics

*************************************
Suicide prevention:
Dial: 988, for Suicide and Crisis Lifeline
Online visit: https://988lifeline.org

Substance Abuse and Mental Health
SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357
Online visit: https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/nati...
*************************************

A pioneer of Chicano rock, Rubén Funkahuatl Guevara performed with Frank Zappa, Johnny Otis, Bo Diddley, Tina Turner, and Celia Cruz, though he is best known as the front man of the 1970s experimental rock band Ruben And The Jets. Here he recounts how his youthful experiences in the barrio La Veinte of Santa Monica in the 1940s prepared him for early success in music and how his triumphs and seductive brushes with stardom were met with tragedy and crushing disappointments. Brutally honest and open, Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer is an often hilarious and self-critical look inside the struggle of becoming an artist and a man. Recognizing racial identity as composite, contested, and complex, Guevara—an American artist of Mexican descent—embraces a Chicano identity of his own design, calling himself a Chicano “culture sculptor” who has worked to transform the aspirations, alienations, and indignities of the Mexican American people into an aesthetic experience that could point the way to liberation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please SUBSCRIBE, LIKE and COMMENT!
Share with your friends.
Thank you for listening.
Donate through VENMO: @DANCNGSOBR 

Find Narsiso at:
Instagram: @rubenfunkahuatlguevara

----
my LINKS:
Merch: http://rafa.LA​​​​​​​​​​​​​​/shop
My photography: http://rafa.LA​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Recorded at Espacio 1839
https://www.espacio1839.com
_____

Recorded on TASCAM Mixcast and Mics

*************************************
Suicide prevention:
Dial: 988, for Suicide and Crisis Lifeline
Online visit: https://988lifeline.org

Substance Abuse and Mental Health
SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357
Online visit: https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/nati...
*************************************

Narsiso Martinez’s drawings and mixed media installations include multi-figure compositions set amidst agricultural landscapes. Drawn from his own experience as a farmworker, Martinez’s work focuses on the people performing the labors necessary to fill produce sections and restaurant kitchens around the country. Martinez’s portraits of farmworkers are painted, drawn, and expressed in sculpture on discarded produce boxes collected from grocery stores. In a style informed by 1930s-era Social Realism and heightened through use of found materials, Martinez makes visible the difficult labor and onerous conditions of the “American farmworker,” itself a compromised piece of language owing to the industry’s conspicuous use of undocumented workers.

Los Angeles artist Ramón Vargas makes paintings that amplify and investigate the cultural reality of Brown communities. Utilizing a representational style, he alternately challenges, celebrates, and subverts prevailing concepts of identity, tradition, and interpersonal relationships. Drawing on his own life experiences, Ramón’s figurative paintings blend realism with a surreal sense of color and place, often incorporating heavy symbolism, repeating patterns, and flat geometrical elements. Throughout his career, he has taught art for non-profit and grassroots community organizations, and is a known mentor for arts education and community outreach in Los Angeles and Orange County. In addition to painting, he is also a muralist and printmaker and has worked in Los Angeles, New York and throughout California.

Valerie J. Bower is a photographer based in Los Angeles. She uses childhood nostalgia, and the visuals and experiences of growing up in the working-class L.A. Harbor Area as influences in her work. Her subtle, dream-like, monochrome street photography show a softer, feminine point of view on typically masculine themes and subjects, such as lowrider, street, punk, and skate culture. Her work focuses primarily on brown and black cultures of Los Angeles, and in other parts of the U.S. (including Northern California, Las Vegas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah). She also documented lowrider/ West Coast culture in Tokyo, Japan. Valerie's work also includes her collection of self-published books and zines, documenting various street cultures, events, and everyday life in Los Angeles.

Alfonso Gonzalez Jr. (b. 1989, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is an artist whose work developed from close observation of his father’s skillful trade in commercial sign painting. He draws inspiration in the permanence of hand-painted signage and the physical weathering remnants of Los Angeles to narrate his own familial histories of labor and image-making.

​Gonzalez’s paintings, while seemingly passive still-lifes, excavate the sedimented interactions that happen on everyday public surfaces. His multi-layered works function as contemporary palimpsests, surfaces in which the original facade has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. Gonzalez’s works are not merely metaphors, but objects that uphold the visual as a form of knowledge and language.

Vel Nine aka Vel the Wonder, is a rapper from Baldwin Park, California and based out of Los Angeles who gained a substantial social and internet following first posting a few incomplete verses uploaded on Soundcloud before she stepped in front of the cameras and introduced the world to her soothingly consistent delivery reminiscent of Bahamadia and Guru.

Without even having an established stage name, Vel's life changed one shoot in 2012. A half-dozen women ready to showcase their rhymes assembled on a rooftop overlooking Los Angeles for The Cypher Effect YouTube series. She has since released a number of albums, most recently 2020's Trophy Wife and 2022's Freakjet. Her song "Mija," off her album La Sena Ave, was featured on the Netflix original series Blockbuster and is a song dedicated to herself from the perspective of her loving father.

Vel's down-to-earth demeanor about her life as a rapper these days owes, in part, to how unlikely the path seemed, even with growing up in a musical family where classic '90s hip-hop proved to be a ubiquitous soundtrack. "I had no desire to make music," she says of her younger days. Her father used to DJ with a party crew back in the day, but had to sell his equipment when he helped bring her into the world. "He always says that it came back to him through me."

"My interdisciplinary art practice interrogates the long history of displacement in the Americas, starting with Indigenous dispossession and genocide to current issues around gentrification, evictions, and homelessness. At its root, however, it is a critical reflection on the commodification of land as private property and the issues that arise out of this. I articulate these subjects through printmaking, installation, and sculpture, to outline the contested use of space and the ways that social and political policies have shaped our contemporary urban environment. I am particularly interested in creating work that exists in the intersections between theory and praxis, articulating a visual form of knowledge production."
- From:  https://www.alvarodmarquez.com/about

Deladeso is the art persona created by Richie Velazquez. Based out of Riverside California, he has been developing his Digital Death and Grime art aesthetic since 2012. As the originator of grime art, he pays homage to those that have molded himself into the Spookek that he is today!