Project title: Nuestras Historias
Roles:
Curation & Coordinator
Facilitation with youth
2024-2026
Location: Museo de las Americas, Denver, CO USA
Nuestras Historias is an exhibit and research project dedicated to reimagining whose stories, ideas, and artwork show up in professional museum exhibits.
For the past two years, youth from across Denver worked with professional artists, community members, researchers, educators, and museum experts to develop this art exhibit. This book documents their experiences, artist statements, and ideas about how to make the world a better, more creative and joyful place. The exhibition features youth from Museo's Lxs Jóvenes Leadership Lab and professional creatives in a powerful artistic conversation. Our research asks how youth can be invited to collaborate with elders to tell stories of their experiences and identities in public spaces.
Throughout the project, artists and educators invited the teens to explore: Who is a museum for? Whose stories does it tell? What stories would you share? Youth answered through artwork, displayed here alongside that of the professional artists as equally valid expressios of identity, justice, tradition, and play.
My roles within this project started in 2024 as a facilitator for workshops on collage and using creative processes to (re)tell stories around identity and culture.
Working with the project director, Kristina Stamatis, was an amazing experience and we quickly recognized our shared values around intergenerational education and creative practice. I continued working alongside
Working with the project director, Kristina Stamatis, was an amazing experience and we quickly recognized our shared values around intergenerational education and creative practice. I continued working alongside
As curator and coordinator, I pieced together the sketches and works the youth created and continued to plan new prompts and workshops that would contribute to the overall themes incited by the youth: identity, justice, tradition, and play. The works range from: collages, embroideries, drawings, ceramics, graffiti stencils, zines, and paper flowers. In the Fall of 2025, Kristina and myself designed the Lxs Jovenes Youth Leadership Program to be about curation and giving the youth agency on decision making and editing for the exhibition. In this time, I was also preparing a lot of the artworks to be exhibition ready. Youth helped with curatorial design decisions, color themes, text and had a voice on which artworks should be included or not. The final result of the work from the youth in collaboratino with myself along with othe professional artists and adults in the area is the exhibition Nuestras Historias, on view from January 29 - May 17, 2026.
Images of the exhibition at Museo de las Americas and the opening reception on Jan 29, 2026.
Photography by Janelle Elias
