Guadalupe Rosales Brings Her Living Archive to the 2026 Venice Biennale
When Guadalupe Rosales looks at an archive, she sees more than documents. She sees memory, grief, community, and the energy that survives when stories are passed from one person to another. That approach will now reach one of contemporary art’s most visible stages: the 2026 Venice Biennale, where the Los Angeles artist will appear in the main exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” curated by the late Koyo Kouoh.
Rosales said her invitation followed a remote studio visit after Kouoh’s death, along with contact from adviser Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo. The process, she noted, felt unusual and deeply tied to the exhibition’s larger legacy. Kouoh had shaped the project and the artists she wanted to include, and Rosales understood her participation as part of carrying that vision forward.
Best known for @veteranasandrucas, Rosales launched the Instagram archive in January 2015. Built from her personal photographs and community submissions, the account preserves Chicana life in Southern California in the 1990s. It has since grown to more than 273,000 followers, becoming a widely shared repository of images, memories, and testimony.
Rosales has said the project emerged in part from frustration with the way Latinx people were portrayed in mass media, especially through racist stereotypes and narrow narratives. She also saw that the stories closest to her experience were often told from a male perspective. @veteranasandrucas became a way to widen that frame and make room for women’s voices, family histories, and the textures of everyday life.
That concern with preservation runs through her broader practice, which includes photographs, murals, sculptures, and installations. Her work has been included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and the 2023 Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum. In September, she will publish a memoir, East of the River.
Rosales has also described a personal encounter with grief that sharpened her thinking about storytelling: seeing her cousin Ever Sanchez’s death certificate more than 15 years after his passing. The document, she said, brought her back to 1996 with startling force. For Rosales, that kind of return is central to the archive itself — not as a static collection, but as a living form that can hold joy and loss at once.
As Venice prepares to open its next edition, Rosales’s inclusion underscores how archives have become one of the most vital languages in contemporary art, especially for artists working against official erasure and toward more intimate forms of historical memory.
