The Warriors' Journey
The Warriors Journey
My work focuses on visibility, labor, and belonging within Latino and immigrant communities. I work across sculpture, textiles, installation, and digital media, combining traditional handcraft with technologies such as 3D scanning, laser cutting, QR codes, and augmented reality. In earlier projects such as Encoded Textiles, I collaborated with Indigenous weavers to embed digital stories into handwoven fabrics. Across these works, my practice explores how culture, memory, and identity move between tradition and technology.
The Warriors series brings this focus directly to the people whose labor sustains our society. Inspired by the Terracotta Warriors, these life-sized sculptures honor frontline workers—many from Latino and immigrant communities—whose contributions are essential yet often invisible. Each sculpture is based on a real person whom I 3D scan and reconstruct through more than 500 precisely cut layers of wood, creating detailed portraits of individuals such as farmworkers from the strawberry fields of Oxnard, construction workers, teachers, nurses like Sabrina, and people working in house cleaning and other essential services. These figures represent real lives and stories that reflect a much larger workforce.
While The Warriors have been exhibited in museums and galleries, Latino communities remain significantly underrepresented in the arts. The Warriors Journey addresses this gap by bringing the work directly to the communities it represents. The project centers on a custom-designed “Warriors Truck,” a rugged vehicle that functions as a mobile installation and stage. At each location, the sculptures are displayed on the truck and descend onto platforms, transforming public spaces into temporary cultural gatherings.
Film Component
To further amplify the impact, we will document the entire journey of the Warriors Truck. We will produce a film that captures the traveling exhibitions, featuring interviews with the frontline workers themselves and the communities we visit. These stories will be shared online to engage wider audiences, building an archive of experiences. Ultimately, this will culminate in a short documentary film that can be showcased at screenings, festivals, and as part of the project’s legacy, ensuring these stories are seen and remembered.
Guillermo Bert Bio:
Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Guillermo Bert, born in Santiago, Chile (1959), draws on his bicultural experience to explore urbanism, consumerism, and displacement. His early 1990s bricolage transformed street posters from Los Angeles’s Skid Row into urban archaeology. Later, he incorporated barcodes into laser-cut artworks and paintings. A pivotal 2010 trip to Chile led to collaborations with Mapuche weavers, integrating QR codes into textiles that, when scanned, reveal films featuring indigenous stories. Expanding the project, Bert has worked with Navajo, Maya, Mixtec, and Zapotec weavers, creating 40 short films that connect viewers to indigenous artists.
Beyond textiles, Bert’s films offer a documentary glimpse into cultural narratives. Over 15 years, he has captured artists sharing their voices, often in indigenous languages, forming a mini-series of 40 films from seven countries. With plans to expand to India, his work spans weavings, laser sculptures, photographs, and film.
Guillermo Bert’s mid-career retrospective, The Journey, was held at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2023 and was accompanied by a publication and catalog. His work has been exhibited widely, including recent presentations at William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica (Longing and Belonging), Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the exhibition Grounded, and the Rhode Island Museum of Art. In March 2026, he opened a solo exhibition, Techno/Empathy, at Museum of Latin American Art, curated by Patrick Frank. His Warriors series was also featured at DIVERSEartLA.
Bert’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Renwick Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Rhode Island Museum of Art. He is currently developing an itinerant installation based on The Warriors, designed to travel to rural communities with limited access to cultural institutions, creating opportunities for Latino workers to see themselves represented through these sculptural forms.
He has exhibited at the Queens Museum (NY), Palm Springs Museum, Lille3000 (France), Anchorage Museum, MoLAA, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Museum of Art and Design (NY), and UCR (Riverside). His work has been reviewed in Smithsonian Magazine, ArtNews, LA Times, and LA Weekly.
Awards include the COLA Individual Artist Grant, California Community Foundation Fellowship (2015), and National Association of Latino Arts Master Artist Grant (2010). Bert was an Art Director at The Los Angeles Times (1995-2000) and a professor at Art Center Pasadena.
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