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Sharing more of the extended research & photography of my month long ARROZidency artist-in-residence. If you are just starting here, I recommend scrolling to the bottom to start at the beginning. View from a computer for the full experience! As another reminder, I've split up the work from my residency into 2 separate tags: For my main residency project only, visit: For the full extended roundup of my research during my residency, visit: It was Sunday, February 2, 2025. The rain was making its way through San Francisco & I had a ticket to the Asian Art Museum's free admission day. The rain was coming down & I remember being on the phone with my partner in the morning, asking him if I should still go, because it was raining & I wanted to be cozy. 😅 He encouraged me to go, because I may never get another chance to experience this again. I got dressed & had a short bike ride over to the museum from my sublet in Nob Hill. I was hoping that even though it was the free admission day, that not many people would be there because it was raining. I was sadly mistaken, haha! It was a bit too crowded for my taste, too noisy, I had a hard time navigating the galleries, some of the galleries were closed for installation, & from what I did get to see, I wasn't really impressed with the exhibitions. However, the main thing I wanted to experience at the museum was the lion dance performance. Having experienced my first lion dance performance just the year prior, I wanted to relive that electrifying feeling again. While the program was sadly so unorganized, the performance itself was so much fun to experience. At this time, having just left LA for this residency as the fires were erupting, I wanted to bring back some good fortune and cast off any lingering bad energy before returning to LA. 🐍 I hope everyone is feeling the energy of rebirth and renewal as we all finish shedding our skin from the year of the wood snake. Now, as we enter the year of the fire horse, I wish everyone a happy Chinese New Year, Tết, and Seollal! Fun fact: I was born in the year of the horse (in the 1900s)! The horse is known for being strong, independent & anti-authoritarian by nature. May we all channel our big fire horse energy this year as we dream of a future where authority & hierarchies no longer exist. ❤️🔥🐎 Shout out LionDanceME for their high-energy performance! Here's some photos of their performance from last year. Photographs were created with my Nikon ZF & a 24-70mm lens. Click any image below to enlarge.
  
  
    
     
 Additional photos & research from the rest of my residency are forthcoming & will be tagged under ARROZidency.
Make sure to keep checking this space, follow me on Instagram, subscribe to my YouTube channel, or subscribe to my newsletter for updates on my blog posts, projects, or upcoming programs. If you've read this far, thank you! Please feel free to share your thoughts or any questions in the comments.
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This is the last section of the second part of my VENERATING AN ICON documentary photo essay. If you are starting here, I recommend scrolling to the bottom of this series & starting from part 1. In case you missed it, I've split up the work from my residency into 2 separate tags: For my main residency project only, visit: For an extended roundup of my research during my residency, visit: For this project, I was really excited to go back to my documentary photo roots. In my earlier photo work, I focused on documenting multicultural communities, sometimes with a special focus on their spiritual practices. I've documented many communities from Nichiren Daishonin Buddhism, Khmer Buddhism, Krishna Consciousness, to precolonial ritualistic practices of Mesoamerica, to Native American pow wows. Religion and spirituality weren’t central to my upbringing, but it was always present. Though I wasn’t raised Catholic, I was excited to document a community tied to my culture & the history of the Philippines. There's some major reasons why my parents decided not to raise me religious, which was a bold move for immigrant parents of their generation, but I'm grateful for that choice they made in raising me. Their choice allowed me to deepen my curiosity for diverse spiritual practices & led me to discover, study & practice my own spiritual & metaphysical beliefs in my day-to-day life & art. Anyways, a lot has changed since my early documentary photo days. I first started off shooting strictly black & white film. I eventually started shooting color film once I lost access to a lab & discovered color film was cheaper to process. A couple of years ago I decided to expand my toolkit and purchased a digital camera for the first time, which I've enjoyed practicing & playing with. I recently took an advanced lighting class & hoped to expand my toolkit even further. One thing I can say for sure is that these are some of the hardest photos I've ever edited. The church banquet hall had all sorts of different tinted overhead lightbulbs. I had to do so much masking to color correct different parts of the room in these photos, which was a time-consuming challenge on top of not compromising the high saturation aesthetic I go for in my color work. All this to say, after taking this lighting class, I have a new appreciation for using flash & wonder if this could have been remedied had I brought my flash with me this time? Flash still intimidated me at that time, & after taking this class, I hope I can apply the skills I've learnt to continue documenting cultural events like these & producing the best images I can each time. I'm trying not to be scared of flash anymore! Check out the photos & let me know what you would have done differently! Images were photographed using my Nikon ZF & 24-70mm lens. Click on an image below to enlarge. I recommend viewing from a computer for the full experience.  Even more people brought their Santo Niños this time & it was so cute seeing the diverse kinds that people owned! Some titas even shared interesting stories with me about how they came to own their Santo Niños. One tita told me she allegedly rescued her Santo Niño from the trash. 🤣 She legit told me this. Y'all think she was telling the truth or was she lying at church?
 
 
 
This is where all the titas got up & started dancing with their Santo Niños! France on the right with the sheer shawl dancing with the Santo Niño I brought from Cebu. 🕺🏻
       Additional photos & research from the rest of my residency are forthcoming & will be tagged under ARROZidency.
Make sure to keep checking this space, follow me on Instagram, subscribe to my YouTube channel, or subscribe to my newsletter for updates on my blog posts, projects, or upcoming programs. If you've read this far, thank you! Please feel free to share your thoughts or any questions in the comments.
The second part of this 3-part series is split into 3 sections, as it's quite long. If you are starting here, I recommend scrolling to the bottom of this series & starting from part 1.
Because these blog posts cannot support video embeds if there is a lot of media content, here is a short video from my YouTube channel that documents part of the Sinulog performance at the second Santo Niño Fiesta we attended. It was so cute seeing the titas get up & dance with their Santo Niños! The last part will have photos of the performance, but it just hits different watching the movements & hearing the sounds of the music & singing. Video was filmed on my iPhone.
And again, in case you missed it, I've split up the work from my residency into 2 separate tags:
For my main residency project only, visit:
For an extended roundup of my research during my residency, visit:
2.3 will be the last section of part 2 of my main residency project series!
Make sure to keep checking this space, follow me on Instagram, subscribe to my YouTube channel, or subscribe to my newsletter for updates on my blog posts, projects, or upcoming programs. If you've read this far, thank you! Please feel free to share your thoughts or any questions in the comments. The second part of this 2-part series will, in itself, be split into 3 sections, as it's quite long. If you are starting here, I recommend scrolling to the bottom of this series & starting from part 1. And, in case you missed it, I've split up the work from my residency into 2 separate tags: For my main residency project only, visit: For an extended roundup of my research during my residency, visit: The second Santo Niño Fiesta we visited was at Saint Augustine Catholic Church in South San Francisco (which is its own city separate from the City of San Francisco). SSF is the city next to San Bruno, where the first fiesta took place. It is also adjacent to Daly City, where a large FilAm community resides. South San Francisco was just a BART ride away from where I was staying in San Francisco proper. While the interior architecture of this church wasn't as interesting as the first church, there was a lot more to look at within the exterior church complex itself. It reminded me a lot of the churches I've visited in the Philippines. The church was also a lot more spacious, with more room for the Sinulog performance later on. I'll share those photos in parts 2.2-2.3! This event was similar to the last one, where they had a procession for the Santo Niño, Mass, & people brought their own Santo Niños to be blessed. It was actually very exciting to see more people bring their images, & to see the many diverse kinds! Images were photographed using my Nikon ZF & 24-70mm lens. Click on an image below to enlarge. I recommend viewing from a computer for the full experience.
   
   
Sections 2.2 & 2.3 of part 2 are forthcoming, which will contain both photo & video!
Make sure to keep checking this space, follow me on Instagram, subscribe to my YouTube channel, or subscribe to my newsletter for updates on my blog posts, projects, or upcoming programs. If you've read this far, thank you! Please feel free to share your thoughts or any questions in the comments. Back at the beginning of November, I got to check out one of Artronika's shows again. As some of you know, I've attended a couple of their events already & have had the opportunity to do some photography for them last year. This time, I got to check them out at the DS Night Market! I went to the night market once before, back when they were still located at Lax-C. Now they've relocated to the Chinatown Plaza & it seems like a great location for them. More foot traffic, more visibility, space, & also helps bring a little more life back to Chinatown. LA's Chinatown has seemed dead these days, among other underlying issues of gentrification that exist in Chinatown as well. With the cost of housing skyrocketing across LA County, we have vacant "luxury" apartments in Chinatown adjacent to small 1-bedroom apartments cramped with low-income Chinese seniors struggling to get by & survive — especially in Chinatown, where there are no grocery stores within walking distance. I often find myself riding the bus among Chinatown seniors on their way to Super King by our house, which is already nearly 4 miles away from Chinatown. That aside, it's nice to see community coming together in Chinatown again, united by art, music & the mouth-watering aromas of Thai street food — arguably some of the best I've had in ages, because the Thai food in Northeast LA sucks. 💀 Anyways, I'm not a food critic. I'm here to share some photography! I published a few videos on my YouTube channel as well. Check out my Artronika playlist. Unless otherwise stated, photos were created with my Nikon ZF, a 24-70mm lens & Lightpix Labs Flashq Q20ii. If interested in event photography, please send me an email! Click any image below to enlarge. I recommend viewing from a computer for the full experience.
 A few misc photos to start, haha. The top 4 were made using a Pocket Dispo lens. Below, we have Artronika’s Executive Director, Ireesh Lal, playing jazz trumpet over his DJ mixes of world music, with a focus on South Asian sounds. Neel Agrawal joined on tabla and Indian percussion, while artist Norton Wisdom painted live on a fiberglass canvas. Flyght Club also joined the lineup, performing a few of his original tracks.
 Make sure to keep checking this space, follow me on Instagram, or subscribe to my YouTube channel for updates on my blog posts.
If you've read this far, thank you! Please feel free to share your thoughts or any questions in the comments. Tomorrow, 3 May, is the last day of my Balay da Judge artist residency with the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library in San Fernando, La Union. 🥲 This will be my last update on this project for a while. I am returning to the US next week, where I will prioritise processing the 35mm film I used to create the main part of this project. The digital photos published in this blog series are meant to serve as previews of the work-in-progress, not final works, but I hope you all enjoyed what you saw. I am hoping to get all film scanned & edited before the end of this year. It will be a priority! These were a few photos I was able to create during the photo walk portion of my photo workshop, using the prompts from our photo scavenger hunt list. These were the very last photos I made with my Nikon ZF (and Pocket Dispo lens) on this trip. View from a computer for the full experience. Click any image to enlarge.   
 Below is an event recap photo gallery provided by the library as well.                      I am also very excited to soon share the workshop participants' photos they created during our photo walk! The submissions are rolling in & already they're all SO incredible! As an art educator, the proudest moment you can experience is seeing your students put your lessons to practice & witness them create. So please stay tuned for updates on that as well! The library & I will be collaborating to publish an online exhibition of the complete collection of photography, & hopefully a printed zine (still TBD).
Make sure to keep checking this space, follow me on Instagram or subscribe to my YouTube channel for updates on my posts. All updates on my residency will be tagged under Balay da Judge. If you've read this far, thank you! Please feel free to share your thoughts or any questions in the comments. ***CONTENT WARNING*** Some adult imagery below. Scroll with caution! This summer, I was invited to be a mentor to Arts at Blue Roof's summer artist in residence, Clarisse Abelarde, an emerging oil painter from the Philippines. I had the privilege to witness Clarisse's creative process & explore her new body of work, which is now culminating as her solo exhibition A Fort Held Together by Spit & Prayers. Please join us at the opening reception, as we celebrate her creativity & hard work over the summer. No RSVP required to join the opening. Here's some behind-the-scenes photos of Clarisse at her summer studio at Arts at Blue Roof. Photos by me on my Nikon ZF with 24-70mm lens. 🙂 View from computer for the full experience.
I never really experimented with off-camera flash for personal work, especially not with colored gels. While I continue to practice my digital photography & portraiture skills, I want to keep pushing myself to try new gear & techniques I haven't used for personal work in the past. Thank you, Clarisse, for allowing me to experiment with my new Lightpix Labs Flashq Q20ii! And thanks to my homie Art Bueno for recommending this flash unit & for always encouraging me to push my photography boundaries even further. Fair warning, the first photo with the red gel was a complete accident, but we both agreed we really liked it. 🤣 Hopefully one day I can figure out how to replicate this look on purpose! (For someone who's done photography for nearly 20 years, I've got the photography skills of Britta Perry.)
Rare admin reveal – me on the bottom right. 😉 I'm usually the one behind the camera, not in front of it. It took us a good 5 mins to figure out how to find the self-timer on my camera, too. 💀 If you've never been, Arts at Blue Roof is a unique art space that looks like it inhabits a former church. For those of you who are close to me, you know that one of my dreams has been to buy an old church in the Philippines & convert it to an art gallery & studio. Walking through Blue Roof was big inspo. 🙌🏽 During my time living in England, I was inspired by all the former churches that were converted to secular housing, while still maintaining the integrity of the original architecture. Why not convert more of these structures to community spaces, like Blue Roof has done? Here's some pics of the cool lounge area at Blue Roof!
Pics of the exhibition installation to come! Stay tuned & make sure to follow me on Instagram @nica_aquino for updates.
Click "READ MORE" below if you're interested in hiring me for photo work! On Saturday, March 16, 2024, I had the opportunity to join Clockshop for their walking tour of Cypress Park — the neighborhood my partner & I have lived in for nearly a decade. Clockshop's neighborhood walking series was led by Maryam Hosseinzadeh & is part of their Take Me to Your River project. We walked along Cypress Avenue & visited local legacy businesses, street murals, & more. Having explored Cypress Park on foot for so many years, it was remarkable to meet the artists behind the murals I've seen in the neighborhood for the last decade, & also learn about murals I'd never seen before! It was also lovely to learn about the historic buildings and architecture that preceded our time here, such as the original Cypress Park Library, La Morenita (a former bakery), & the old firehouse. I didn't get pics of it all, because I also wanted to learn & take it all in myself, but here's a few snaps of the event through my eyes. Funny thing is, some people thought I was there working. One of the artists thought I was a reporter & some other folks thought I was working doing photography for the event. Sometimes Capricorns do stuff for fun, too, not just for business... 🤣 Click on any image below to enlarge. Best viewed from a computer for the full experience. 
Details of Vistas de Harmony (1997) mural by Leo Limon. Located behind Metro bus division 3, by the Cypress Park Rec Center. Speaking is Joe Ibarra, who shared his memories of assisting Leo Limon with the mural (alongside other artist assistants), as he also worked as a library clerk at the original Cypress Park Library at the time.  Program host Maryam Hosseinzadeh speaking by Leo Limon's Vistas de Harmony mural.  Peter Quezada shared about the barrier put up in the 1990s due to gangs using it as a cut through by the Cypress Park Rec Center. Growing up in Pico-Union for many years, I was surrounded by MS13 gang activity. I'm no stranger to streets with barriers, since the street I grew up on myself had one & so did 3 other nearby streets going along Pico.
Rodolfo Kardona and his daughter Ximena Kardona shared how he works with local businesses, selects colors and themes for each business, and his regular inclusion of the Virgen de Guadalupe. He's painted multiple murals at Cypress Park establishments such as Lupita's Mexican Restaurant & Divine Savior church, & also St. Ann's just across the river in Frogtown. Here we were opposite Lupita's Restaurant by the Metro bus division. Unfortunately, I didn't cross the street to get a pic of his Virgen mural, but I encourage you to check it out in-person & get a meal at Lupita's Restaurant any time on Idell & Avenue 28 (90065)! 
These detailed pencil drawings were drawn by Manny (pictured in the red shirt), who would like to start creating murals in the community. He shared his artwork with us after finding us along the tour route. 
Northeast Los Angeles and Neighborhood Pride (2012) murals by Peter Quezada. Peter talked about his process of painting in alleys close to neighbors and kids, his use of Olde English, cartoon characters and experimenting with other lettering. I appreciate that he also shared why he chose to paint "Northeast Los Angeles" instead of "Cypress Park". "Cypress Park" is the name of our local gang, & he mentioned the mural would have been scratched out instantly. Painting "Northeast Los Angeles" instead was inclusive of all the neighborhoods that make up NELA. These murals were new to me — I'd never seen them before this tour! Sadly, I can't remember where exactly they were at, just that they were close to the Divine Savior church. If you happen to know their location, feel free to leave a comment & let us know.
Details of murals by Rodolfo Kardona at Lupita's Market. Located on Cypress & Merced. Rodolfo spoke about the Aztec warrior he painted on Lupita's Market in 2018, his own repair process, use of high quality house paint that doesn't fade, & the wood carved signs inside & 3D artwork, including this image of Juan Diego with the Virgen de Guadalupe on his cloak. I love Lupita's Market! For years I always wondered if Lupita's the market & Lupita's the restaurant were related or if they beefed it over the name. 😂  Flintstones (1997) by Peter Quezada. This mural was painted by Peter with kids from the neighborhood, whose names are included on the scroll. It is a neighborhood artwork. I got to connect with Peter while we were visiting this mural, & he told me Pebbles & Bamm-bamm were references to his kids, & Fred Flintstone is holding the Land Before Time book because of the movie series that was out at the time. I have probably walked by this Flintstones mural at least 100x & have always wondered about it. It was so cool to meet the person who painted it! 
Murals & signage painted by Rodolfo Kardona at El Quetzal Bird Shop. For many years, we ate at the original Tierra Caliente restaurant formerly located across the alley adjacent to the bird shop. I never knew multiple neighborhood murals were painted by one man. I'm personally scared of birds, but I still think this is a fun amenity to have in our neighborhood. 😅  Andres of Arvia LA (left) & the owners of Cypress Liquor (right). This family is local to the neighborhood & has been serving the community for years. Whether you're looking for beer, liquor, wine, a lighter or a snack, stop by & support Cypress Liquor, the last oldschool business standing on the 1200 block of Cypress & Alice.
LAST STOP: Arvia LA with Andres, Clare & Richard (the cat). Andres shared how his detailed multimedia mosaics not only changed the alley visually, but also recorded the passing of time for him. The further he created down the alley marked a certain time period or memory. Whenever I have friends visiting, I love taking them to check out what's new or ongoing at the Arvia LA alley. It's always fun to look for easter eggs & see what hidden features are around. You can access the Arvia LA murals through the alley entrance on either Cypress or Isabel, between Arvia & Granada. Keep your eyes peeled for Andres' mosaics around the neighborhood, too! If you made it this far, THANKS!
Keep in touch. Follow me on Instagram @nica_aquino or subscribe to my newsletter for occasional updates on my projects, programs & events. Click "READ MORE" below if you're interested in hiring me for photo work! |
NICA AQUINOIn this space I'll share digital previews of my film photography, updates on new artworks in progress, upcoming programs, inspiration & my other misc interests. Archives
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