Mercedes Dorame

Mercedes Dorame is a multi-disciplinary artist who calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of (in)visibility and ideas of cultural construction and ancestral connection to land and sky. Born in Los Angeles, California, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA. 

Dorame’s work is in the permanent collections of the Getty, the Hammer Museum, LACMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Triton Museum, among others. She is the recipient of grants and fellowships from organizations such as Creative Capital, the Montblanc Art Commission, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Loop Artist Residency, the James Phelan Award for California born visual artists, and from the Photography Department at the San Francisco Art Institute for her MFA Studies.

She is currently regular faculty at CalArts in the Photo Media Program, and was commissioned by the Getty for her sculptural installation Woosha’aaxre Yaangaro as the inaugural Rotunda Commission. Her work is also on view in the Borderlands exhibition at the Huntington Library. Her work and story were recently explored in the Los Angeles Times article “How artist Mercedes Dorame shares pieces of her Tongva heritage across L.A.’s public landscapes,” and she was honored by UCLA as part of the centennial initiative UCLA: Our Stories Our Impact as an outstanding alumni working in equal justice over the last 100 years. She has shown her work internationally.