Event Info

This panel discussion between photographer Tamara Cedré (Pitzer College), scholar Hilda Lloréns (University of Rhode Island), and exhibition curator Cathy Gudis (UCR) explores recent projects by Cedré on view in the exhibition To Rise Above Ruins at the Riverside Art Museum (through September 28, 2025). In these works, Cedré brings archival materials (ads, historical photos, news articles, family scrapbooks) into visual dialogue with her own contemporary photographs. Taken together, they reveal changing land use and impacts of military and industrial developments in the communities the photographer calls home in Puerto Rico and Southern California.

Panelists will explore the processes of U.S. colonization over the 20th century, dubbed the “American Century,” as the U.S. exerted its global economic power and “soft” power of mass media and consumer culture to extract from land and labor in both regions, with huge environmental and human costs. Clips will be screened from Cedré’s Diario de Verano, 2015-2023, a video collage composed of personal moments which chronicle the artist’s experiences with family in Puerto Rico through hurricanes, earthquakes, power failures, and economic downturn.

Following the discussion, all are invited to a reception (7 – 9 pm) and to view the exhibition at the Riverside Art Museum.

Tamara Cedré is lens-based artist and educator who uses documentary forms to reveal the conditions of underrepresented communities. Her artistic practice employs archives to address issues at the nexus of land, labor, migration and identity. A first-generation stateside Puerto Rican, Cedré brings a deeply personal perspective to her exploration of colonial histories and their enduring impacts. Her projects are rooted in the landscapes of Puerto Rico and Southern California, which she considers home. Cedré received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and has been the recipient of awards and grants from the Center for Creative Citizenship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the California Arts Council. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Pitzer College and UCLA and lives/works along the route of the supply chain between Los Angeles and the Inland Empire.

Catherine Gudis is a Professor of History, directs the Public History Program, and is faculty in the Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity at UC Riverside. For over 20 years, she has worked with art and history museums, in preservation, and on multiplatform site-specific environmental humanities projects. As founder and a co-director of the digital archive and mapping platform, A People’s History of the Inland Empire, she co-curated Live from the Frontline, a series of exhibitions and community art projects that explores 8 neighborhoods linked by the long history of logistics. She guest curated To Rise Above Ruins at the Riverside Art Museum.

Hilda Lloréns is a Professor of Gender & Women Studies, Anthropology, and Marine Affairs at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race, and Gender during the American Century (2014), and Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice (2021). Dr. Lloréns’s research, writing, and teaching focus on race, gender, ecology, and environment, and culture and power in the Americas. She has written widely about these topics.

Cosponsored by the UCR Center for Ideas and Society and Departments of History; Anthropology; and Society, Environment, and Health Equity.

Image: Tamara Cedré, Cartel, 2018