
SD Art Prize
2022



2022 SD Art Prize
Alida Cervantes


Alida Cervantes (b. 1972) is a Mexican artist who lives and works in the Tijuana and San Diego border region. Traveling daily between the US and Mexico, Cervante creates work characterized by an interest in power relations between race, class, gender and even species. She explores these hierarchies both at the level of sexual or intimate relationships and on the broad stages of history and politics. Cervantes earned a BA from the University of California, San Diego (1995), then studied at Florence’s Scuola di Arte Lorenzo de’ Medici for two years. In 2013, she earned her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Alida Cervantes’ work is part of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Charles Saatchi Collection, London, and the Jorge M. Perez Collection.
Angélica Escoto


Angélica Escoto (b. 1967) is a multidisciplinary artist and photographer living and working in Tijuana, Mexico. She studied journalism in Mexico City, worked as an editor in several Mexican regional newspapers and has published work internationally. Escoto came to photography and the visual arts more than 30 years ago. Her photographic work explores narratives around existence, origin and identity often using autobiographical subject matter over time. In addition, Escoto uses literature to tie themes from history, geology, biology and astrophysics into her work. Angélica Escoto has exhibited extensively across the U.S., Europe and Latin America.
Carlos Castro Arias


Carlos Castro Arias, is Colombian artist, professor and musician. His practice departs from the appropriation of historical images and the formal and symbolic re-contextualization of found objects. Castro’s work explores elements of the individual and collective identity and aims to bring to light muted histories and ignored points of view. He received a BA from the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, Bogota, in 2002; in 2008 he attained a Fulbright Scholarship to go San Francisco Art Institute, where he got an MFA in Painting in 2010. Castro currently works as an associate professor at San Diego State University. In the last seven years alone, the artwork of
Carlos Castro Arias has been featured in nine solo exhibitions and more than forty invitational group exhibitions. Thosevenues include museums and galleries in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, France, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Spain, Sweden, the United States, and Venezuela.
Cog•nate Collective


Cog•nate Collective develops research projects, public interventions, and experimental pedagogical programs in collaboration with communities across the US/Mexico border region.
Since beginning their collaboration in 2010, their work has interrogated the evolution of the border as it is simultaneously erased by neoliberal economic policies and bolstered through increased militarization. It has traced the fallout of this incongruence for migrant communities on either side of the border. As a result, their inter-disciplinary projects often address issues of citizenship, migration, informal economies, and popular cultural, arguing for understanding the border as a region that expands and contracts with the movement of people and objects. They have exhibited work locally and internationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Getty Center, The Craft Contemporary, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, FLACSO Arte Actual in Quito, Ecuador, and the Organ Kritischer Kunst in Berlin, Germany. Regionalia, a monograph of their work was published by X Artists' Books in 2020.
Cog•nate is a collaboration between Misael Diaz, Assistant Professor of Art, Media, and Design at California State University, San Marcos and Amy Sanchez Arteaga, Lecturer of Art History at San Diego State University. Their practice is currently based in National City, CA, and they work between Tijuana, BC and Los Angeles, CA.