The Inter Latin American Artist Collective (ILAAC) was founded on a simple but urgent belief: that Latin American artists in North Carolina and the South deserve spaces where our stories, identities, and creative visions can flourish without limitation. ILAAC emerged as an affirming, artist-led collective committed to visibility, solidarity, and creative sovereignty.

This exhibition brings together a group of voices shaped by migration, memory, and joy. The works on display arise from a moment when our communities were navigating profound challenges and the quiet weight carried by those living between cultures. Yet despite this – or perhaps because of it – the artists here choose to create. Our practices push back against despair and insist on tenderness, imagination, and collective care because we deserve spaces of joy.

As a collective, we were guided by the idea that art has the power to rebalance the world. Artists can tilt the scale toward beauty, connection, and possibility. The pieces in this exhibition reflect that truth: they hold our grief and our hope at once. They remind us that creativity is not a luxury but a form of survival, a practice of naming ourselves, of honoring our ancestors, and of imagining futures where we belong.

Our Sources of Joy emerged for us from moments of connection, between color and emotion, between material and gesture, and ultimately between the work and the viewer. We find joy in the quiet surprises that happen during the creative process: the way a line can shift the mood of a piece, how texture can hold a memory, or how a color unexpectedly changes its character when placed beside another.

There is joy, too, in the search itself, the experimentation, the failures that lead somewhere new, and the way art cultivates space for curiosity. When we create, we are most alive to the world around us: its rhythms, its contradictions, its fleeting beauty. Art becomes a space of joy when it reveals something true, however small, about what it means to be human. Our sources of joy are often those little, daily, seemingly small things that make us unbelievably happy. Our work aims to hold viewers’ complex feelings tenderly, inviting viewers to pause, breathe, and recognize their own sources of joy reflected in this exhibition.

ILAAC’s mission extends far beyond a single exhibition. It is a commitment to building infrastructure for Latin American artists, fostering intergenerational exchange, and cultivating a cultural home where our multigenerational, multilingual, multinational entities take center stage. This show is one chapter in that ongoing work. It is an

invitation to witness Latin American creativity as a vibrant, evolving ecosystem shaped by many countries, languages, and lived experiences.

We offer this exhibition in gratitude and as an offering to North Carolina and to the United States. This exhibition could not have been possible without all the artists: Caro Arias, Leticia Alvarez, Antonio Alanís, Jennifer Cruz Ciprian, Cornelio Campos, Pepe Caudillo, Lisania Cruz Celestino, Jose Manuel Cruz, Jason Franklin, Anthony Garza, Raalo Howard, Luis MacKinney, Danny Peña, Nora Phillips, Jorge Luis Ramos, Karen Rose, Alida Gonzalez Sanchez, Ambiorix Santos, Miriam Ximil, and Jorge Zuluaga.

Thank you to everyone who trusted us with their visions; to our communities, who sustain us; and to everyone who enters this space willing to see, feel, and listen. Without you, none of this would be possible.

Here, in this room, we hold the weight of the world together and we choose to respond with Our Sources of Joy.