Coming this fall…
Redrawing the Rancho
November 8, 2025 + November 9, 2025
afternoon
Rowland Mansion
City of Industry, CA
homeLA, in partnership with the La Puente Valley Historical Society, presents Redrawing the Rancho, a site-sensitive performance and installation series activating the Rowland Mansion in La Puente, California. This one-weekend-only event will take place on Saturday, November 8 and Sunday, November 9, 2025, with performances unfolding throughout the day across the mansion’s grounds and interior spaces.
Curated by Chloë Flores, Redrawing the Rancho features new work by artists Nao Bustamante, Eva Aguila, Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier, and Victoria Marks. This program reinterprets the narratives tied to the Rowland Mansion—Southern California’s oldest surviving brick structure—and its surrounding histories of colonization, agriculture, and industrialization. In dialogue with the La Puente Valley Historical Society and the family archive, these artists investigate what stories are preserved, omitted, or obscured at historic sites, and respond with artworks that layer critique, care, and embodied remembrance.
Once part of a nearly 50,000-acre land grant given in 1842 to John Rowland and William Workman—settlers who led a mule train from New Mexico to Alta California—the Rowland Mansion site bears the layered legacies of the Kizh nation, Spanish missions, Mexican land tenure, and American expansion. Today, the partly restored mansion sits behind a chain-link fence in an industrial corridor of the City of Industry. It is stewarded by the volunteer-run La Puente Valley Historical Society, whose president—Amy Rowland, a descendant of the original family—offers intimate, nuanced, and evolving interpretations of the site’s history.
Redrawing the Rancho builds on this layered perspective and introduces new counter-narratives that reclaim overlooked identities, voices, and contributions from the mansion’s past. The performances and installations highlight themes of displacement and dwelling, Indigenous land stewardship, Mexican-American identity, labor, and environmental change. Each artist’s project engages with specific spatial, material, and historical elements of the site, inviting audiences to experience the home—and its history—through a critical and imaginative lens.
Redrawing the Rancho invites visitors to consider how history is preserved, whose stories are told, and how artistic intervention can transform how we relate to place.
Redrawing the Rancho is generously supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts and the California Art Council, a state agency.
About the Artists
Eva Aquila is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist and organizer. A first-generation born in Los Angeles, her work centers on oral histories of the Mexican diaspora and immigrant experiences, with a focus on her ancestral roots in rural Michoacán. Through video, sound, and installation, Aguila examines personal histories and the in-betweenness of the Latine experience. Drawing from both research and personal archives, her current work reflects on the materiality of memory. Influenced by ephemerality and Indigenous Futurism, she uses time-based media to depict alternative narratives and reinterpret cultural portrayals of the diaspora.
Aguila is also the co-founder and Board President of Coaxial Arts Foundation, an artist-run nonprofit dedicated to supporting experimental sound, video, and performance art. She helped establish Coaxial as a space to cultivate and strengthen LA’s interdisciplinary media arts community, particularly for artists working outside traditional gallery frameworks. Her dedication to grassroots organizing stems from a commitment to uplifting underrepresented artistic voices and ephemeral practices. Her work has been exhibited and performed locally at the Vincent Price Art Museum (2025), SUR:biennial (2023), CURRENT:LA FOOD (2019), and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2013), and internationally across Mexico, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Aguila holds an MFA from the USC Roski School of Art and Design and a BFA from the School of Theater at the California Institute of the Arts.
Nao Bustamante is from the Central Valley of California, and is now a proud Angeleno. Her precarious artwork encompasses performance, video installation, filmmaking, sculpture, writing and often includes community collaboration. She recently opened a project space, called Grave Gallery, on the site of her burial plot in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Bustamante has presented in institutions and underground sites around the world. She has exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Performance Biennial Deformes, (Chile), the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki, and the International Sundance Film Festival, where she received the Chase Legacy Award in Film, co-sponsored by Kodak and HBO. Bustamante received the Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, a Lambent Fellow, and was awarded The Mike Kelley Foundation Artist Project Grant and the California Community Foundation Fellowship. For her work looking at the history of the pelvic examination, she has also received a Creative and Research Grant from University of Southern California. Nao is a 2024 recipient of the Rome Prize and a 2025 Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant awardee.
Rosa Rodríguez-Frazier is an educator, dance-maker, and performing artist based in Riverside, California. As a first-generation Mexican American woman artist, she values “movement” as a means to wrestle with and rejoice in her Mexicanidad. Her movement aesthetic and choreographic interests are rooted in a mix of soulful Contemporary and Latin social dance forms approached by “experimental” dance-making processes and Post-Modern frameworks. Frazier holds a BA in Dance and an MFA in Experimental Choreography from the University of California, Riverside and is a full-time Associate Professor of Dance at Riverside City College. Over the past twenty years, she has created and performed work throughout the U.S. and Mexico. She has collaborated extensively with her long-time dance partner, Joey Navarrete-Medina, and is a founding member of Primera Generación Dance Collective (PGDC), which was named one of Dance Magazine’s 2025 "25 to Watch" this past January. Alongside PGDC, Frazier currently serves as a board member for Show Box L.A., a Los Angeles-based non-profit, and for Latina Dance Project, a cultural non-profit organization and the originators of the BlakTinx Dance Festival. For more information, visit larosadance.com.
Victoria (Vic) Marks is an Alpert Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim and Rauschenberg Fellow, and Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, who has been making dances for stage and film for the past 44 years. Her work migrates between choreo-portraits and action conversations for people who don’t identify as dancers (veterans, dads, moms, sorority and fraternity students) -- and dances for dancers that fuel Marks’ inquiries into movement. Recent projects include the Dancing Disability Lab at UCLA, a gathering of disabled dance artists who work together to challenge “ability paradigms,” and The Disability and Ecology Performance Exchange (also at UCLA), a group of artists, poets and scholars who gathered to consider the way unique corporealities shift our understanding and connection to the natural world. Marks has been selected to serve as Culver City’s Artist Laureate for the next two years, building Action Conversations and creating performances in public spaces. Her work in progress, “A Deer Walks into a Dance,” will be premiered in 2026-27 in Los Angeles. Marks is a professor in the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and Chair of UCLA’s Disability Studies new major.
About La Puente Valley Historical Society
Founded in 1960, the La Puente Valley Historical Society is dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of the Rowland Mansion and surrounding regional history. With a mission rooted in stewardship, education, and community, the Society is committed to sharing stories of the past in ways that reflect the diversity and complexity of Southern California’s history.
