Rebeca Méndez is an artist, designer, and tenured professor at UCLA, Design Media Arts, where she is founder and director of the CounterForce Lab, a research and fieldwork studio for art, design and environment. Her research and practice investigates design and media art in public space, critical approaches to public identities and landscape, and artistic projects based on field investigation methods. Méndez’s diverse works are driven by her interest in perception and embodied experience and they develop within science, design and art through immersive installations, sound, video, photography, book arts, and drawing, with focus on post-humanism, eco-feminism, anthropocene and environmental justice. Since 1996, she’s led Rebeca Méndez Studio in Los Angeles and has received significant recognition including her recent inclusion into the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the 2017 Medal of AIGA, induction into the One Club Hall of Fame, New York, and the 2012 National Design Award in Communication Design.
“It never has been favorable to be Mexican in this country. But in the last few years, the words immigrant and Mexican—I am bot—have become dirty words. There was one extremely ignorant ‘account executive’ of a large corporation… I’m sure she held an MBA. In questioning my place of birth, she insisted that she could not call me Mexican as she felt she was insulting me. This profound ignorance, magnified by irresponsible and special interest media platforms, are dominating the conversation. I no longer feel welcomed in this country. So, it has heightened my activism.” — Rebeca Méndez
