☆ ☆ ☆ HAPPY NEW YEAR Pilele Folks! ☆ ☆ ☆
Dear Pilele family and friends,
We are deeply thankful for your support of Pilele Projects. Your donations have kept our doors open, lights on, and spirits up in 2025.
As we move into 2026, we look forward to continuing our work of uplifting Pasifika artists in Southern California, and we need your support. While our fundraising efforts have grown, we continue to rely primarily on small (and large!) donations from friends and family like you. Your donations help subsidize our rent, the expenses of facilitating exhibitions and events, and support our artists with a stipend. All of our programming is free and open to the public. We do not sell art to profit the space. We make space for artists and the communities nourished by their work.
We are incredibly proud to share highlights from 2025 below, which were only possible thanks to community support like yours. We hope you continue to invest in Pasifika contemporary arts.
Join us in 2026. Your support truly matters.
Migai ma'åse yan bula guinaya (Big thanks and much love),
The Pilele Family
2025 at Pilele Projects
We hosted and participated in so many exciting exhibitions and events in 2025!
Our first exhibition, titled Taotao'mona Portraits: Mali'e Inetnon was a memorial for the late Jeremy NC Cepeda, co-founder of Gi Matan Gu’ma. Centered around an altar dedicated to Jeremy, the exhibition featured photographic portraits of fellow Mali'e members taken in their ancestral homes across Guåhan by our very own Mariquita "Micki" Davis. Her Taotao'mona Portraits weave Chamoru cosmology into the conventions of portraiture, using a large format film camera and wide angle lens to make the surrounding land and seascapes as integral to the each image as the individuals themselves.
Our second exhibition, TāVā: a prism of time through space, by JP/Jason Pereira, began from a workshop that we hosted with ART25. They donated a series of large scale off-prints to the Pilele Projects community from an exhibition they had at Yerba Buena Arts Center. JP transformed one of these prints by physically interweaving it with a painting made from re-used materials, placing it in conversation with earlier works, including a mirror column self-portrait, two smaller text portraits, and a large scale ceiling-mounted abstract painting. We also recorded a beautiful talk story with JP about his process and the layered narratives connecting the works. listen to it on our website, and enjoy the photos that Micki took of the community weaving event that brought TāVā Woven into being.
Our third exhibition, I Hagan Sirena (Daughter of Sirena), featured the work of Isa Gagarin. Though she could not be in residence, we were so excited to work with her during this special time, and she graced us with an extraordinary bi-lingual talk story about how learning her maternal heritage language has transformed her artistic practice. The exhibition included three interconnected works on paper: a large-scale ink painting documenting her pilgrimage to Laso' Fuha, the cosmological birthplace of Guåhan; a sound piece with subtitles printed in ink on paper that tells the story of the pilgrimage in verse; and a printed book featuring the score of an experimental musical performance composed and performed in collaboration with Minneapolis-based musician Nona Invie.
Our final exhibition of 2025 is also our first exhibition of 2026, Melilt | ak ngiltii a kotek (where I come from). We are so proud to show the work of Sequoia Tangerine Kimmel, an extraordinary ceramicist and story teller of the Palauan tradition. Tangerine brings their expansive knowledge of the tradition of Palauan storyboard carving into the medium of clay. Their work is intricate and exquisitely laborious, but also playful and accessible in a way that brings viewers into the deep time of Palauan storyboards and the stories which animate them. Come see the work if you are planning to be in Los Angeles in January, and don't miss Tangerine's talk at the closing event (more details to follow shortly!).
We also hosted members of MALI'E' and GI MATAN GUMA' for a morning of talk story and preparations for their workshops at Ta Fan Apåtte, organized by Kutturan Chamoru Foundation.
The cast of The Stirring Place held a table read at the gallery. Written and directed by Neil Tinkham, the film follows a military-dependent Chamoru family as they visit Guam for a funeral when the son, eager to prove his Chamoru-ness, joins an activist group protesting a planned military shooting range.
CHamoru multidisciplinary artist Roquin-Jon Quichocho Siongco led a hands-on weaving workshop at Pilele, where participants created and took home their own pieces. For many, it was their very first experience with weaving, making the workshop an exciting introduction to this traditional art form.
We partnered with Dr. Tiara Naputi of UC Irvine’s Global Studies Department to guide students of the Canoe Caretakers Club in imagining the future of their project to revitalize connections with a Samoan canoe currently housed on campus. We hope to develop programming at Pilele Projects with them in the future.
Micki was featured in the inaugural Che'lu Chats, a new video series from the Chamoru cultural platform I SAKMAN I FINO’-TA. The video was directed and edited by our beloved Pilele mañe'lu Olivia Diaz Anderson and Bryson Nihipali.
Pilele was also invited by Yvette Cabrera of Los Angeles Public Library to participate in the second annual Songs of the Earth: Celebrate Indigenous Languages event. Members of our community recited chants in Chamorro and presented testimonials of the importance of Indigenous community spaces in Los Angeles. We've been so grateful to be included in Yvette's programming, and look forward to more next year!
Your generosity played a huge part in making all of this possible!
Join us again in 2026! Invest in Pasifika Contemporary Arts!