project/room, much like the well-known WINDOW DRESSING program that inspired it, is a newly-established cycle of short-term installations held in Cerritos College Art Gallery’s Projects Room space. The first four Projects, taking place early in the Spring semester of 2026, collectively emphasize craft, process, and/or performative actions. Each incorporates various interactive moments designed for student and visitor engagement – some scheduled, others spontaneous – including workshops, happenings, and live performances.
PROJECT #4 ECOSYSTEM Pavel Acevedo Mar 9 – Mar 27, 2026
Pavel Acevedo, originally from Oaxaca, Mexico, is a contemporary relief printmaker whose work explores themes of migration, identity, and cultural hybridity. He has built a practice rooted in both his Oaxacan heritage and his lived experiences as an immigrant in the United States, drawing upon aesthetics and symbolism inspired equally by pre-Hispanic codices, folk art traditions, and contemporary urban life. His evocative imagery exists in a dialogical ambiguity that is neither Mexican nor American alone, but instead reflects a complex cultural reality shaped by crossing borders and adapting to new environments. Not surprisingly, animals like raccoons, rats, and coyotes are heavily featured, those perpetually-evasive, nocturnal creatures that somehow continue to thrive, even in an otherwise-hostile urban core.
For his latest installation, Ecosystem, Acevedo combines and layers both new and existing carved plywood and linoleum prints; depicting plants, animals, and endearing human-animal-plant hybrid characters that evocatively express their own creative energy and assert their own agential power. By weaving together references to ancient visual traditions and modern narratives, he constructs imagery that speaks to continuity, resilience, and transformation within migrant experiences. Along with printmaking students and select visitors, Acevedo will develop an evolving installation of printed pasteups, assembling a fantastical landscape populated by these powerful and imaginative characters. Pavel Acevedo is a printmaker and muralist from Oaxaca, Mexico, now based in Southern California. Acevedo holds a BFA from Escuela de Bellas Artes Oaxaca, complemented by earlier training at the famed Rufino Tamayo Workshop, where he established his knowledge of printmaking techniques.
After relocating to California, he established himself within the artistic communities of both Riverside and East Los Angeles. His studio, Urge Palette Art Supplies in downtown Riverside, serves as both a workplace and a hub for creative engagement. He has worked as an independent arts educator at Self Help Graphics, Plaza de la Raza, Breesee Foundation, Riverside Art Museum, and I Learn America. His past residencies include Beyond the Press at Self Help Graphics, KALA Art Institute, Fullerton College, College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, and Horned Toad Print Shop in El Paso, TX. As a mural artist, he’s been commissioned to create murals by Chaffey College’s Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, La Sierra University’s Art & Design Department, and the city of Riverside.
He has also crafted murals for We Rise LA and Self Help Graphics and for private collectors commissioning public murals throughout Los Angeles. His artwork is in public collections at The Cheech Center for Chicano Art and Culture, Center for the Study of Political Graphics, the Wignall Contemporary Museum, Mexic-Arte, Museum of El Paso, the Huntington Library, and the Thomas J. Watson Library at the MET.