Andrea Castillo: From La Tiendita to the Gallery Wall
A visual love letter to the storefronts that raised us.
Have you ever walked into a corner store and felt like you were stepping into someone’s whole world? Not just a place to grab chips or a lottery ticket, but a space where the rhythm of a neighborhood lives, its smells, its music, its daily rituals. In “Counter Space”, Andrea Castillo’s solo exhibition currently up at SWIM Gallery in San Francisco, she turns those familiar storefronts, floral shops, tire centers, tienditas, into visual monuments. Inspired by her upbringing in Los Angeles and the immigrant-run businesses that shaped it, Castillo paints with both memory and respect. These aren’t just places of commerce, they’re sites of belonging, built by communities that too often go unseen.
What makes Castillo’s work hit different is how personal it is. This isn’t a distant story, it’s real life, shown through bold colors and gentle repetition." Her father ran shoe stores in L.A.’s Santee Alley, and now, decades later, she’s honoring that history. It’s a kind of reclamation. By translating these overlooked architectures of care into the white cube, Castillo insists on their value. She’s saying: these places raised us. They deserve to be seen, not just as background, but as the beating heart of our cities.
✨ A personal message from Andrea:
This show hits home right now with the ongoing ICE deportations and the disparities in Los Angeles. Some immigrant businesses and patrons are not able to show up out of fear and the impact it’s having on immigrant enclaves economically, contributing to longer-term structural vulnerabilities, particularly in neighborhoods already facing gentrification pressures.
What first inspired the body of work that became Counter Space? Were there particular family memories or everyday scenes that stayed with you while building this series?
Memory has a little bit to do with my work. I did a residency in the fall in Los Angeles with this nonprofit group located in mid-city. In my studio I had these two huge windows looking out on the street. I got really inspired by [watching everyone outside]. I've also been wanting to touch on more personal stories about my upbringing in Los Angeles. My father came from Mexico and he owned shoe stores in The Santee Alley in downtown. I created a large 70” painting, “Storefront”, and it touched on a lot of those memories. I found old photographs from the 90s that we still had from the stores and used those as inspiration.
And I incorporated my own imaginative elements and layers into the painting. That opened things up for this whole series I created for the show . This is a trajectory of where I'm going to continue my work because I'm not done with these ideas and the concepts that came out of that. It really struck a chord in me, and it really felt good to create this work, because prior to that, I was doing a little bit more with these imaginative kinds of characters.
I'm super excited that you're going to continue exploring this path because the scenes that you portray in your work reflect such an important part of L.A. culture and history that I feel like is often overlooked, but it's so rich and crucial to what makes L.A. so special, and the people that reside within the city, inhabited it, and built it up to what it is today.
I just thought, I have all this history myself. Why am I not tapping into that and creating more work about that? So I'm glad I’ve arrived there.
Whenever I look at your work, it feels very nostalgic in a way, and very like calming. I’m from the East Coast, and bodegas were something that I would see all the time or we’d stop in during trips into the city. Having those spaces of community reflected in art is so important. There might be little references for a particular city, but I think it transcends the actual geographical location. Having your exhibition in San Francisco is so important because it highlights the Latin American communities in Northern California and this rich cultural history.
Your paintings often depict commercial environments, corner stores, flora, tire shops, businesses as sacred or communal. When you’re creating your work, how do you choose which spaces to enter?
I was thinking during the process of it all, should I focus on one particular thing, for instance, a bodega or a shoe store? But I decided I want to kind of just be transient and give myself some more room for creativity. I wanted to pick different stories I saw driving around the city.
As you drove around and decided upon a location, were any of those places that you had been in before, whether it was recently or growing up?
Some of the streets I'm really familiar with from growing up but some stores I'd never been to, and I was intrigued by the signage that they had, or the color of the paint that they used for their walls. When that would happen, I would go in and take a bunch of reference photos of everything inside the store.
Your use of color and objects feels really thoughtful. How do you use things like signs, products, and colors to bring out a feeling of closeness or memory? How has growing up in L.A. shaped the way you see, move through, or capture the city?
A lot of the paintings are monochromatic. I'll start with a sense of what I'm trying to evoke with the work. I use a lot of yellows and oranges because trying to tap into this light that L.A. has. If I see signage or certain products, I'll try to really tap into that. Sometimes they're kind of hidden in the paintings. I'll try to kind of layer them in and have it be a part of the painting and the paintings then take on a life of their own.
I have a really quick sketch of what I want it to look like, and then during the process of it, they evolve. So oftentimes I'll create a visual collage. So different products or signage. I'll kind of mesh it all together from different reference photos. It’s like a layer of meditation on how I'm negotiating and working with the paintings.
How has growing up in LA influenced the way that you navigate or move through and document urban space?
With creating these artworks I think it was time and important for me to show these minority spaces that I grew up in and have the work be part of a white cube space. They’re parts that are often kind of forgotten, or not truly seen and or shown. I thought it was time for me to incorporate that into my work and wear it as a badge. There are a lot of parts of LA that a lot of people just kind of disregard, or they won't go to. I felt it was, it was time for me as an artist to really delve into that.
When you were talking about neighborhoods that people won’t visit or actively try to avoid, it makes me think about how much of a tourist destination L.A. is. People visit it all the time from all over the world, but they don't go to these neighborhoods or cities, and it just makes me question, have you actually been to L.A. if you haven’t ventured to these places? Or do you know anything about L.A. if you're not setting foot in these neighborhoods? Because you can go to those neighborhoods that are so commonly associated with L.A., but if you’re not venturing beyond those city lines, I don’t know if you’re getting a true sense of L.A. Or better phrased, you’re experiencing an idealized, narrow version of L.A.
In what ways do you see these immigrant run or minority run spaces as acts of resistance or preservation?
I got inspired by the French Marxist writer Henry Lefebvre, who wrote the book “Production of Space”, and talked about how these abstract spaces, particularly urban spaces, could be very sterile. And how it’s important for citizens to create these representational spaces. So then the question is, how can we still have an act of resistance and a presence in a space that has a kind of capitalistic stance, and how these spaces that we're moving through are not necessarily neutral.Who is deciding what goes where and where the streets are paved, etc. And so I got kind of inspired by that, and I saw the correlation with my work.
I was thinking of the imprint of how we could be in control of these actual public spaces. And they could also be digital spaces. I saw that as a way of how, when I walk around and get really inspired by these, minority or immigrant run shops and something that I was a part of growing up. How they have these individual, humanistic, creative, resistant qualities to them, like the signage. There's a lot of imprints of them crediting their culture and their heritage.
In a time of accelerated gentrification, how do you see your work contributing to conversations around cultural preservation?
By having these different spaces and occupying them as a type of resistance where we could have a future. It's like a force of liberation and connection to human flourishing. I know it can be really difficult, especially right now, for these immigrant run spaces. I just saw some videos taken in downtown L.A. and they're afraid to go to work or go to the store to buy necessities because of ICE raids. They’re having to think if they can financially survive this. I think it's important to record and keep an archive of these spaces that could disappear and potentially inspire other people to create new spaces.
How do you see your work as an act of archival labor, preserving what otherwise might be erased or forgotten, especially as we are witnessing, as you just said, families afraid to go out. They very easily could be erased from history. How do you see your work challenging that?
When I take the reference photographs, I take them on my phone, but I think what I want to do next is actually take like Polaroids or print out the photographs and create an actual archival reference of the photographs just for my practice in itself. I think that's a step that should be done. I feel like the work I'm doing isn’t necessarily trying to show archival labor. I'll try to add a little bit of playfulness, or these nuances that happen within the labor, and not necessarily connect immigrants to labor. I’ll show the moments of leisure within labor, and this idleness when they're speaking to each other or to customers. These nuances of connection are an integral part of these spaces.
There's a piece that I saw where there's a person in a store at the counter, and they're leaning against it with someone behind the counter and that reminds me of what you just said about moments of leisure. I feel like minority communities or individuals don't often have the privilege to do that. To take a moment of leisure. If we do, we’re categorized as lazy and ungrateful for the work we have. I feel like it's even more pronounced because there's this expectation that you migrated here and you came here to work and to build a better life for you and your family. How dare you take some time to relax and talk to someone. But I feel like your work is challenging that. We Have every right to do things beyond laboring for this country.
How do you navigate the politics of visibility in your work? For example, how do you choose what to show, what to withhold, and what to aestheticize without exploiting the people in your paintings?
I really like that question because prior to this a lot of my work had to do with the figure and the body, and this multifaceted identity. It's been really hard for me because a lot of it had to do with biracial ness and seeing the infinite possibilities within an identity. And that's why, oftentimes, my figures might be different colors or they’re contorted. I'm really trying to tap into this state of otherness that I have felt a lot and a lot of people have also.
It's important for me not to make it so loud and stereotypical, like signifiers like a Mexican flag. I want to still keep my bodies kind of free and contorted. I did start to make more brown pigmented bodies, but just a little bit abstract. I also wanted to make some of these moments in the painting seem a little bit more intimate, like ritual.
I think when people look at it, as I mentioned at the start of this conversation, like I can look at it and see myself and see my family reflected same as I'm sure, someone from like the Middle East, could also look at the work and think, “Oh, this reminds me of the stores that my family owns.” I feel like your work very much allows many people to see themselves, and it also connects these kinds of separate communities together, because there are so many similarities within these cultures. And I think your work does a really great job of reminding us of that.
How do you see your practice evolving? Are there any other kinds of spaces you want to explore? Are there any geographies or mediums that you're interested in exploring next?
This kind of interview helped spark the archive and photographs and how I should not just have them be digitally, but also create an actual physical archive of these places. I do want to also delve into more 3D sculptures. I love painting, but sometimes I get fatigued by it. I feel like there's a lot for me to delve into.
And then finally, what keeps you grounded in your artistic practice, like, what kind of rituals or people or influences do you seek out?
I’m inspired by writers. I get to turn to that when I'm feeling an artist block and kind of getting inspired by philosophies and ideas. Music is important, keeping my sketchbook practice, because that's where a lot of the ideas in my head end up. That's where I get them down to get them to start evolving. Getting inspired by what other artists are doing and seeing their work is really huge too. To inspire my work and jump off of it.
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