About

David Peña’s work engages questions of generational healing and care through his Mexican-American identity. “I reflect on my various cultural orientations, investigating my family history, what is lost over time, where I come from, and what I want to intentionally carry into the future. My current work explores the life of my Abuelo Encarnación, a welder for NASSCO (National Steel and Shipbuilding Company) in Barrio Logan, San Diego, who welded the front yard fence to our family home.” Peña’s work considers resilience in the face of loss and grief and explores how we carry on links to ancestral cultures even after our elders, our links to those cultures, have passed on.

This two-person exhibition features the work of ICA San Diego’s 2024 artists in residence, Ethan Chan and David Peña. Over the course of the past year, Chan and Peña each produced a body of work in response to healing; in the case of Chan, healing from the loneliness and isolation intensified by the pandemic, and for Peña, healing from grief after the loss of his grandfather.

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ICA San Diego Exhibition Support Provided by the Linda Brandes Foundation, City of San Diego, The Prebys Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.