Step away from Frieze LA for an intimate gathering of arts writers grounded in a conversation about Los Angeles with artist Felix Quintana and Rabkin Prize winners Eva Recinos and Harmony Holiday.
Felix, Eva, and Harmony will invite us into a conversation about underrepresented creative communities in LA; personal and institutional archives; storytelling and family histories; and more.
After the discussion, we will be welcomed into Quintana’s East Los Angeles studio. Felix will share about his practice and current projects. Raised in Lynwood, Quintana’s work ranges from photography to cyanotypes, with a focus on capturing the people and neighborhoods with personal resonance for him. Quintana’s work “Hawaiian Gardens,” capturing local vendors and the distinctive flora of the neighborhood, is currently on view in Metro buses across the city.
“Artist and educator Felix Quintana acts like a curator as much as a photographer, carefully selecting images of the Southeast L.A. neighborhoods he grew up in and around by scanning the photographic footage captured by Google Maps Street View,” KCET Artbound wrote about his exhibition “Cruising Below Sunset.”
“Multidisciplinary artist, Felix Quintana, documents their South LA and Bay area neighborhood in a poetic and creative way,” Totem magazine said.
Attendees will receive a copy of Eva’s collection of essays, Underneath the Palm Trees, which will be released in January 2027 from Northwestern University Press. The book touches on her childhood in South Central LA; the pressures of being a first generation student; and her love of LA.
“From the very first page, her writing pulls you into the intimate, electric world of girlhood, set against the vivid rhythms of South Central Los Angeles. With tenderness and precision, Recinos captures the quiet becoming of a young woman coming into her own, navigating identity, ambition, and the courage it takes to call yourself a writer,” wrote Glory Edim, author of Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books that Saved Me.
Event Schedule
10-10:45 am: Donuts, coffee, and socializing
11 am-11:45 am: Conversation with Felix Quintana, Harmony Holiday, and Eva Recinos
Noon-1 pm: Studio visit with Felix Quintana (Note: The studio tour will be split into two groups of about 10-15 people.)
Participant biographies
Felix Quintana is a Salvadoran-American visual artist and educator. Quintana’s art practice spans photography, digital media, collage, and installation. He received an master’s in fine arts in photography from San Jose State University and bachelor’s from California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt.
Solo exhibitions include Donde Nace El Agua at Wende Museum, Fantasma Paraiso presented by Los Angeles Nomadic Division, and Cruising Below Sunset at Residency Art. Select group exhibitions include Vincent Price Art Museum, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Craft Contemporary, Chinese Culture Center San Francisco, and Center for Photography Woodstock, among numerous others.
Eva Recinos is an award-winning arts and culture journalist and creative non-fiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her articles have been published in the Los Angeles Times, KCET, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, Art21, Aperture, Poets & Writers Magazine, and more. Her essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Georgia Review, PANK, Blood Orange Review, Air/Light, Electric Literature and more. She was a 2025 Rabkin Award recipient.
Her first collection of essays, Underneath the Palm Trees, is forthcoming in early 2027 from Northwestern University Press.
Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker, and the author of five collections of poetry including Maafa (2022), Hollywood Forever (2017), and Negro League Baseball (2011), all with Fence Books, as well as A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom (Birds, LLC, 2019) and Go Find your Father/A Famous Blues (Ricochet Editions, 2014).
Holiday curates a standing archive space for griot poetics and a related performance and events series at LA’s music and archive venue 2220. She’s a contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times’ Image magazine and 4Columns. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Bookforum, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Drift, and others. Holiday’s first solo exhibition, Black Backstage, exploring the aspects of black performance culture that cannot be spectacularized through film, and sound sculpture, opened in 2024 at The Kitchen in New York.
Holiday has been awarded fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, among others.