Graciela Iturbide: Las Californias

October 1, 2026 - February 7, 2027

Sponsored by City of Bakersfield, Robert Raskind Charitable Foundation, California Resources Corporation, and Kathy & Steve Hair

The Exhibit | Artist Biography | Images | Events

The Exhibit

Internationally acclaimed Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide has spent more than five decades creating images that explore the relationships between identity, culture, place, and everyday life. Working primarily in black and white, Iturbide approaches photography through observation and personal connection, developing relationships with her subjects that allow moments of intimacy, spontaneity, and self-expression to emerge.

Las Californias brings together photographs spanning East Los Angeles, California, to Tijuana, Baja California. A significant portion of the exhibition comes from Iturbide’s White Fence series, which began in Boyle Heights in 1986 when she photographed a group of predominantly deaf Mexican American women connected to the White Fence gang. The encounter developed into a decades-long relationship, resulting in photographs of Rosario, Lisa, Cristina, Boo Boo, and others that capture friendship, family, gesture, cultural identity, and daily life. The exhibition includes numerous works from this series alongside photographs made in Tijuana and Baja California, where Iturbide turned her attention toward the border and the experiences of those living within its physical and cultural landscape.

These histories also extend into the San Joaquin Valley through Iturbide’s 1991 portrait of labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta in Kern County. Together, the photographs resist a singular understanding of Mexican and Chicano identity or of the border itself. Instead, Las Californias reveals interconnected cultural landscapes shaped by migration, labor, friendship, resistance, aspiration, and memory, offering a meditation on the complicated and enduring meanings of belonging and home.

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Artist Biography

Born in Mexico City in 1942, Graciela Iturbide has developed a celebrated photographic practice shaped by a deep curiosity about people, place, and culture. She initially studied filmmaking before turning to photography and working with influential Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo in the early 1970s. Inspired by Álvarez Bravo as well as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Tina Modotti, Iturbide developed a distinctive photographic language that combines documentary observation with lyricism, portraiture, and spontaneity.

Describing her photographs as “photo essays,” Iturbide has spent decades documenting communities and landscapes throughout Mexico and beyond. Her work is particularly attentive to Indigenous communities, women, cultural traditions, and societies experiencing social and cultural change. Through relationships developed with the people she photographs, Iturbide explores questions of identity, diversity, selfhood, and belonging while creating images that reflect both the histories of the communities she encounters and her own deeply personal vision.

Iturbide’s work has been exhibited internationally, including presentations at Tate Modern in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid. Her photographs have been the subject of more than thirty-five monographs and are held in major museum collections throughout the world. She continues to live and work in Mexico.

Iturbide's work is in the permanent collections of over 40 major international museums, including SFMOMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Pompidou Center. In 2008, Iturbide won the Hasselblad Award from the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg, Sweden. Her many honors include the the Premio Princesa de Asturias de las Artes, Oviedo, Spain, (2025); William Klein Prize (2023); Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award (2021); Infinity Award: Cornell Capa Lifetime Achievement (2015); National Tribute, Mexico (2014); Lifetime Achievement Award, Bangladesh (2013); Lucie Award (2010); National Prize of Sciences and Arts, Mexico City (2009); Hasselblad Foundation Photography Award (2008); Legacy Award from the Smithsonian Latino Center (2007); Hugo Erfurth Award (1989); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1988).

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