October 2022

Tugboat Gallery Proudly Presents “A place to see it” featuring Oria Simonini, David Manzanares and Kendra Limón, opening First Friday October 7th from 7-10 – with DJ ol’ monin – closing on October 29th.

“A place to see it” captures the immigrant’s journey that is visible and hidden in plain sight by using visual metaphors such as butterflies in flight and figures suspended in water painted in oil, watercolor, gouache and spray paint.

Oria Simonini

Oria Simonini is a Latinx artist currently based in Omaha, Nebraska. In December of 2018 she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Born in French Guiana to Argentine parents. Her paintings explore migration and the complex dialogue between the migrant and non-migrant experiences. She has shown in Tugboat, Kiechel, Constellation among other places in Lincoln, and The Little Gallery, Josyln, Gallery 1516 in Omaha. In 2021 she began painting murals; she has collaborated with local artist David Manzanares, and other Mexican muralists, working in Omaha, Lincoln, South Sioux city and Minneapolis. Her first solo mural was painted on The Lux Center for the Arts building, as part of the Emerge_LNK Mural festival in Lincoln, Ne. In 2022, she painted a mural for the city of Imperial in their new Art Park and was awarded the Populus Fund by the Union for Contemporary Arts for a community based mural project taking place in Schuyler, Ne, and in Guatemala.

Oria Simonini – “Most of my paintings evoke the migrant and refugee experience, they are also images of bodies suspended in water: the shore, the river, the seaside are spaces inhabited in dramatically different manners depending on class, race, and country of origin. I have tried to capture some traces of the immigrants’ journey. Visible and hidden from view at plain sight, in movement, despair, joy, and hard work.”

David Manzanares

David Manzanares (American, born Mexico. 1985-) is an indigenous Oaxacan artist living in Omaha. David is heavily influenced by ancient Mexican art and his grandmother, an indigenous medicine woman skilled in textile weaving who taught him handcrafting from a young age. His sculptures and murals reflect collective identity, migration, and indigenous cosmovision.

Over the last eleven years, Manzanares’ focus has been serving Indigenous, brown, Black, and underserved communities through art education and collaborative projects bringing equity to the places he lives: building relationships on the block while painting murals that celebrate specific community members, teaching multilingual intergenerational workshops that bring people together across difference, painting murals sharing his traditions like Dia de Los Muertos, and sculptures in the form of street art to bring art to the streets.

Manzanares’ primary medium is sculpture, and, more recently, he expanded into murals and street art around the Midwest to share his indigenous culture. His public art exhorts society to appreciate indigenous peoples and immigrants’ active contributions to our city. The works allow community members to connect, cocreate installations, generate spaces for meetings and parties, encourage a sense of belonging to their locality, and become more forcefully involved in improving their living conditions and neighborhood.

His art brings visibility and empowerment to underserved populations reinforcing their voices and generating a better space for his kids and future generations. It explores reciprocal relationships between humans, the land, and the spirit, focusing on the role of migration, animals, and plants in Native American and Western traditions.