Munch and Learn | Memphis as Nepantla: World-making through Art, Arely Herrera, artist

Memphis as Nepantla: World-making through Art

Arely Herrera, artist

Arely Herrera is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher based in Memphis, Tennessee, with cultural roots in Zacatecas, Mexico. Working across visual art, performance, writing, and ethnographic inquiry, they explore how movement, memory, and material culture shape place. Drawing from familial stories, inherited materials, and Mexica symbolism, Herrera weaves visual and written forms to examine how identity is constructed through lived experience. Herrera's work explores how migration deconstructs and reconstructs ways of being, tracing how inherited labor, memory, and cultural practices are transformed across generations into new identities and realities.

Through close attention to everyday practices, labor, and acts of care, Herrera creates work that examines how communities sustain, remake, and imagine the worlds they inhabit. Grounded in cultural memory and relational research, Herrera creates work that centers presence, care, and the shared movements through which communities respond to and reimagine space. 

Wednesdays can be especially busy at Park and Cherry. If you're attending Munch and Learn, please plan ahead and place your lunch orders early. To reduce disruptions during the lecture, guests are asked to bring their own food from the cafe to the auditorium. You may request to-go containers to make the trip to your seat easier.

▶ Pre-order by calling (901) 312-1277.

MUNCH AND LEARN IS ENDOWED BY THE LANDAU FAMILY IN MEMORY OF LESLIE MANN LANDAU

FREE