Alyssa Aviles is a visual artist and arts educator based in San Francisco, CA. Alyssa is a
printmaker by trade and utilizes printmaking techniques across the various mediums
that she works in. Embodying the printmaker as both an alchemist and a machine,
Alyssa portrays personal and collective narratives through ritual and repetition. Her
work reimagines traditional Chicano illustration and symbolism, exploring themes of
liminality, mysticism, identity, ancestry and the feminine. Alyssa believes in the power
of printmaking as a tool for mobilization and makes accessibility to the art form a pillar
of her practice. She graduated with a BFA in Printmaking from Massachusetts College of
Art and Design and is currently a studio apprentice at Mullowney Printing Co. in Portland,
Oregon.
Through the ReGen Artist Fund, Alyssa’s work will document the preservation of cultural
memory in Southeast San Francisco. She will explore how these communities have
sustained their cultural legacies, and the ways that this preservation is reflected within
the welfare of their neighborhoods. The work intends to capture how these communities
envision their future societies, and what is needed in order to maintain safe and healthy
communities.