LETTING YOURSELF HAVE ROOM

She is full of energy. She is fun, captivating, and seems completely confident in the choices she makes, both in art and in life. Ser Serpas is young and has a promising future ahead of her, but she has already achieved so much. Born in California in 1995, she made her artistic debut over seven years ago, when, barely in her twenties, she was still attending Columbia University in New York, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in 2017. However, she had already started working and exhibiting her art in 2016. With her radical approach to life and work, she quickly rose to prominence within the art world, attracting the attention of major museums, kunsthalles, private galleries, foundations, and large collections across the U.S. and Europe.

Today, she is in high demand, with many following her and seeking her out. Her work spans a range of mediums, including performance, poetry, drawing, painting, and the assemblage of found objects, and it always represents a unique experience. In her art, chance interacts with imagination, and the discarded finds its voice. Her original and engaging work synthesizes an inclusive creative process that redefines the form, meaning, and fate of the “useless,” while exploring the role of words, the body, and the transformation of places and discarded materials. All this unfolds with an underlying commitment to a deeply personal, autobiographical form of LGBTQIA+ activism.

The period between 2023 and 2024 has been particularly significant for Ser Serpas, who was featured with a performance and installation at the Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection in Paris. Shortly thereafter, she headlined a solo exhibition at the Maxwell Graham Gallery in New York, appeared at the Whitney Biennial, and was included in the group show “The Uncanny House” held at the Casa di Goethe in Rome, further expanding her international visibility and reputation.

Serpas creates her installations by collecting materials from the streets around the sites where she works. These are items destined for disposal, which she temporarily rescues from their fate. She arranges and layers them, assembling them in raw form to create mobile, transient structures that accompany or support paintings of human figures and fragments of poetic writing. The figures, whole or cropped, are based on photos she downloads from her phone and transfers onto paper, wood, or canvas, blending anatomical details with broad, fluid brushstrokes. She explains that “the act of making is a choreographed performance, of which the assemblage is a consequence.”

Once each exhibition ends, the materials—ranging from furniture pieces and car parts to painter’s buckets, sinks, strollers, scanners, ironing boards, mattresses, tables, planks of wood, and more—are returned to the street, where she originally found them. Yes, that’s right. After having transformed these remnants of time and existence, the decay and degradation of so-called evolved society—what Serpas skillfully invites us to briefly reconsider through fresh eyes—are returned to their destiny, whether that’s the landfill or potential reuse by others.

Her work is imbued with a sense of melancholy, tumult, and humor, with elements of feng shui, ghosts, psychology, and psychedelia, but also much more. It is a search for self that blends into an interaction with the audience, reflecting a deliberate and conscious choice to observe, recontextualize, narrate, and express both herself and her world.

With a voluptuous feminine physique, long, straight hair typical of a classic Hispanic woman, and a voice that still carries a masculine tone, Ser Serpas signs her emails as “Sera” and I ask if I can call her that during the interview. Without hesitation, she says, “Of course!” Today she is Sera, and Sera she will be. Here she is.

M: I’d like to start with Boyle Heights, the Los Angeles neighborhood where you were born, one of the most politically active in the country. I want to explore your radical, activist roots. What were your parents like?

S: I’m the first in my family to be born in the United States. My mother is from Zacatecas, in northern Mexico, and my father is from San Salvador, El Salvador. They met when she was still in high school and he was a 25-year-old driving a Corvette that caught the attention of young girls. My mother told me he was shorter than her, small but well-built, and definitely knew how to carry himself. Both of them are Geminis—two crazy people. I can imagine the spark between them… although I’m a Cancer and not too great at understanding those things, I do know I’m the product of two very intense and stubborn people.

M: That sounds like a charming encounter—could be the beginning of a movie. How does the story continue?

S: She stopped flirting with him, the guy ten years older than her who would take her out in the Corvette, when she found out the car was stolen. He was a car thief, though I don’t think he ever did it professionally, but he definitely knew how to break into them, start them with wires, and take off in the dead of night. So my mom began to ignore him. She would go straight home from school in her cheerleader uniform and only stopped to talk to a guy who lived across the street. She had gone out with him once, really liked him, but he wasn’t interested. She kept talking to him anyway, just to make my future father jealous. That should already give you a sense of my mother’s determined character.

M: Ah ah ah! I had a feeling, and I like it!

S: I really like it too! Four years later, I was born.

M: Are you an only child?

S: Yes, my mother and I are very close, inseparable. We talk every day, and now they either let her come with me, or they allow her to join me wherever I go for work.

M: You had mentioned that… What connects you two, what kind of relationship do you have?

S: When I think of space, the kind I had in Los Angeles, where I grew up, was very limited, and I always shared it with her. Until I left for college at 18. Given our financial struggles, it was me, her, my aunt, my cousin, and my grandmother in a studio apartment. Later, we all moved into a two-bedroom apartment. So, I always shared a room and bed with my mom, and that brought us even closer.

M: How has your relationship evolved? What do you share now?

S: She’s an extraordinary person! She does much of the work I used to do in Boyle Heights. She’s an activist in our community, and that neighborhood in Los Angeles has a history of being politically engaged and left-leaning. She especially works with parents and families of queer youth. I started doing it after I came out, and now she’s carrying it forward.

M: Do you want to tell me how your coming out went?

S: I came out at the start of high school. I had actively tried to hide it from my mom, but as you can imagine, it’s pretty hard to do when you share the same room. Eventually, she figured it out.

I found my path with the help of school guidance and experiences like a queer youth camp run by a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles that one of my teachers had heard about. That camp was a full immersion in activism, and in the ideas of educators and theorists like Paulo Freire. It was also a place where, for the first time, I met other queer teens my age. It was an opportunity to experience small romantic moments too. Can you imagine? Otherwise, it would’ve been tough for me—I came from a Catholic school!

M: How did moving to New York change things for you? I’d love to hear about the difference that I’m sure exists between your experiences as a teenager in Los Angeles and your activism in New York. I imagine they are two very different contexts and approaches…

S: You know, the many neighborhoods in Los Angeles are like separate worlds. East LA, where I grew up, is like being in Central America, but there’s also an African-American community there. And in Long Beach, there’s a Southeast Asian community… Even if we feel and think the same things, we’re not able to share them. So, as a Mexican girl from LA, when I got to New York, I really didn’t know how to fit in. At university, I was surrounded by left-wing people, but they were all taking these quirky prep courses—stuff I didn’t know about, wasn’t sure I was interested in, or even if I wanted to like.

M: In the end, you chose art, but then you realized that fashion was also something that resonated with you. And that activity and activism are what define New York’s underground—a creative left-wing scene unlike any other in the world. How did you get your start?

S: I started by working for Suzanne Bartsch at the Chelsea Hotel. It was an experience I loved, a fantastic job that I probably wasn’t very prepared for. It was 2013, and I did it for a year. My task was to catalog and document her collection of clothes for an exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

M: That’s how you began to realize that fashion really interests you and is an important means of expression for you. You have clear ideas about what you like and what you enjoy wearing.

S: I’m not focused on fashion, but of course, most of my friends still work in the industry, so at the very least, I feel the need to follow them on Instagram. I love knowing about their influences and everything they study and research. These are ways of working that still engage me—work with a strong presence and its own moral code.

M: It seems like you have a pretty clear idea of what you enjoy wearing these days.

S: Let’s just say I’ve always been really into fashion, but what I love most is wearing tailored men’s clothing. I’m truly obsessed with Savile Row and anyone who can get close to that level of perfection. Shoes are also super important. I almost exclusively wear loafers. Someone once said they found it strange to visit someone’s house and not see at least one pair of lace-up shoes lying around. So I pulled out a pair from my closet, and next time someone visits, they’ll be on display so people can understand just how irrelevant they are to me.

M : You mentioned your home, so I think we can move on to the topic of your important relationship with space. In a past interview, I read a comment of yours that really stood out to me, so I wrote it down: “I know how to place things so they look their best. I used to photograph all my work for Instagram, and I knew it would only work if it looked good in my iPhone shots.” Is that still true?

S: I definitely believe I know how to arrange a room. I know how to make it more relaxing in some way, but I also know how to create spaces that are unsettling, that can drive people crazy, provoke hallucinations, or create negative energy. What I do for myself are livable spaces, but sometimes they become too livable… and then it all borders on a psychedelic trip, the discomfort of being stuck in one place for too long.

What I just said applies to my home, but when I’m setting up an exhibit, collecting objects, furniture pieces, construction materials, car parts, or whatever I can bring into the space, I aim to trigger responses that go beyond their intrinsic value. I want to make the audience see visual culture in what comes from their consumer culture. I’m telling a story with materials I don’t alter—I just reconfigure them, turning them into functional elements of my exhibit’s design. If the audience walks into a room and sees maybe a dozen objects lined up, I know I’ve given them a visual map of the story. Those objects become almost anthropomorphic presences, and I feel like people respond to them on a human level, reacting in different ways to what they perceive.

M: And after having appreciated human features and the soul of the objects you’ve found, don’t you think they’ve permanently acquired artistic value? I mean, why, when you take down the exhibit, do you return them to the same street corners where you collected them, destined for disposal?

S: They’re like elements of a language I can find in any city, immediately accessible for creating my compositions, which I see as storyboards, but they can also be read like poems in space. But I’ve also realized that some people won’t let me take the objects back to where I found them anymore. Especially gallery owners, who say, maybe we should preserve some of these things. And I tell them they’re free to do so or not. As for me, my real work doesn’t involve preserving them. I don’t even know how well they hold up in collections.

M: It’s clear, though, that your true calling is to write, think, and explore. What do you plan to do next, and what are you still missing?

S: I like pen on paper or hands on a keyboard. I like the idea of writing stories, novels, screenplays. I’ve tried a bit of all of these, but soon I’ll succeed. The use of words is important—you need to find a way to engage with all forms of communication. I’m sure even psychoanalytic therapy, which I’ve just started, will help me a lot.