Onview from: April 3rd – July 2nd 2026
Artist Reception: May 1st 2026 5-6:30 PM
Location: Highline Heritage Museum 819 SW 152nd St. Burien, WA 98166
Nepantla is a Nahuatl (Aztec language) term describing “being in the middle” or “the space in the middle.” Popularized by Chicana writer and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa, the concept often references endangered communities, cultures, and genders who, due to colonialism, marginalization, or historical trauma, develop resistance strategies for survival. Nepantla becomes an alternative space in which to live, heal, function, and create.
In Nepantla: Painting the Space In-Between, Jake Prendez positions his painting as both aesthetic practice and decolonial intervention. Born in San Jacinto/Hemet, Jake grew up going back and forth from California and Washington. He received a Bachelors from UW in American Ethnic Studies and a Masters in Chicana/o Studies from California State University, Northridge. Prendez navigates multiple cultural, geographic, and intellectual terrains. His work reflects this lived in-betweenness, synthesizing Indigenous iconography, social realism, portraiture, and pop cultural references into a visual language grounded in Chicana/o experience
Prendez’s paintings operate as acts of cultural affirmation and resistance. They challenge erasure while centering visibility; they honor ancestral memory while engaging contemporary social justice struggles. Through bold color, symbolic imagery, and figurative representation, he constructs visual spaces where marginalized identities are neither peripheral nor endangered, but sovereign and self-defined.
As co-director of the Nepantla Cultural Arts Gallery in Seattle, along with his wife Judy Avitia-Gonzalez, Prendez extends this philosophy beyond the canvas, cultivating community-based platforms rooted in Chicana/o arts traditions. The exhibition frames Nepantla not as a condition of fragmentation, but as a generative site of transformation—where survival evolves into empowerment, and the in-between becomes a locus of cultural production, collective healing, and creation.