Holding, Ceremony was a multimedia group exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center featuring works by Angelica Trimble-Yanu, Tricia Rainwater, Lynette Betancur, Loreum, and Alma Landeta. The show ran from October 16, 2022 – November 11, 2022, and was curated by Angelica Trimble-Yanu as a part of her residency with the Art Center. Reflecting on process and movement as individual and collective ceremony, there is a sense of repetition and desire to harmonize through making. The artists explore their respective mediums of painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, or performance to embrace and recognize a relationship between movement and ceremony as fundamental to their process. There is a sense of experimentation and a detachment from external influence in each body of work. The contributing artists incorporate a sense of intuition and narrative coupled with ritualistic motion, creating a sense of individual ceremony within their processes. This exhibition is a passing and holding of space for our past, current, and future generations and ancestors to come.

In this exhibition, Alma explores concepts of code switching and the co-construction of identity based on perception. Their work uses drawing and painting techniques as a way to engage in this dialogue, allowing each mark to inform the next. Alma’s practice ranges from intimate works on paper to large-scale art installations. For Holdings, Ceremony they created a new body of work through an intuitive and emergent process. Through this process Alma is exploring themes of embodiment, noticing the ways the body can be our greatest teacher. Some of the works were made with the artist’s own body as reference, while others were made in collaboration with models. Each work is a unique expression of the emerging feelings from that moment in time.