Artist Statement

Carmen Argote is a multidisciplinary artist whose work points to the body, class, and economic structures in relation to architecture and personal history. Argote’s practice draws upon their immediate environment and the networks of labor and consumption that mark these spaces. They manifest these connections through drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, video and performance that directly reference the visual language of abstraction.

Argote’s art-making begins with the process of searching, digesting, and conversing with the spaces and places they inhabit to understand their relationship between personal history, memory, cultural systems, and the collective psyche. Argote uses the action of walking to construct and develop the visual language of their work. The slowness of walking offers context to the scale of their body to a surrounding environment. They use photography and recordings as a way to visually capture fragments and gestural moments to bring into artworks.

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, Argote lives and works in Los Angeles and received their  MFA in 2007 from the University of California, Los Angeles, where they also received their BFA in 2004. Argote is the recipient of the City of Los Angeles Independent Master Artist Award (2024), City of Los Angeles Cultural Trailblazer Award (2023); the Fellows of Contemporary Art Award (2020); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019); the Artadia Los Angeles Award (2019); Artist Community Engagement Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2015); Nancy Graves Foundation Artist Grant (2018); and awarded a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2013). They are represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, California, and serve as co-chair of the Artist Council at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 

Argote’s works are in private and public collections including: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Museum of Latin American Art Long Beach, El Museo del Barrio, New York.