Los Angeles-based multi-media artist Guillermo Bert was born in Santiago, Chile in 1959. His bi-cultural experience provides him with a lived perspective from which his artistic expression is cultivated. Bert combines his decades-long practice of working with cultural symbols of urbanism, consumerism, and displacement – dating back to his 1990s iterations of street-level ‘bricolage’ that delved into the urban archaeology of street posters along Los Angeles’s skid row. From there, he modified his commodities work to incorporate electronic barcodes into laser cuts and paintings, until his first trip home to Chile in 2010. That trip marked a turning point in his work through his experience collaborating with the indigenous Mapuche community’s traditional weavers. He worked with the weavers to integrate functional QR codes into traditional textile designs. These “high tech” QR codes, when scanned with a smartphone, take the viewer into a film world of story, myth, and reflection by Mapuche elders, activists, and poets. Extending this idea, Bert continues to experiment with this multi-layered format, collaborating to date with Mapuche, Navajo, Maya, Mixtec, and Zapotec weavers. The result is a series of 40 embedded films that “decode” cultural messaging and create a bond between the distant viewer and the intimacy of the community of indigenous artists and storytellers.

The film and multimedia aspects of the project, while intrinsic to the textile project as a whole, also stand alone as visual media testimony and glimpses into cultural life through documentary inquiry and observation. In his video production work of the last fifteen years, Bert has trained the camera on the urgency of the messages relayed and traveled through the artworks of Indigenous artists. The artists in these films speak for themselves, often in the voices of their indigenous languages. These 40 short films from more than 7 countries, approximately 10 minutes each, are woven together to form a “mini-series”. With hopes of expanding to India, the project continues to unfold including all manner of content and forms along the media spectra – from weavings to laser sculptures to photographs to film.

Bert’s work was featured in a major mid-career retrospective titled “The Journey” at the Nevada Museum of Art in autumn 2023, accompanied by a 200+ page catalog and a book. Included in this exhibition were his laser-cut wooden sculptures named “The Warriors”, which shortly after represented the museum with a host of other international museums invited to DIVERSEartLA at the Los Angeles Convention Center. His work was acquired by The Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery and was included in their 50th-anniversary exhibition “Crafting a New World” in May 2022. LACMA and the Rhode Island Museum of Art bought pieces for their permanent collections as well.

Bert has exhibited his work nationally and internationally at museums and galleries including Queens Museum in NY, Palm Springs Museum, Lille3000 in France, Anchorage Museum in Alaska, NevadaMuseum of Art, MoLAA (Museum of Latin American Art), Pasadena Museum of California Art, Museum of Art and Design in New York shows with L.A./L.A. Pacific Standard Time and the Folk and Craft Museum, and UCR (Riverside).

His work has been reviewed nationally and internationally by Smithsonian Magazine, ArtNews Magazine, LA Times, and LA Weekly. He was awarded a COLA individual artist grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and received the California Community Foundation Fellowship in 2015, the Center for Cultural Innovation Quick Grant for Education in 2015, and the 2010 Master Artist Grant from the National Association of Latino Arts.

Bert’s career as an artist and educator takes many forms including Art Director for the Los Angeles Times (1995-2000) and Professor of Mixed Media at the Art Center School of Design, Pasadena, California. During the pandemic, Bert participated in several online talks with museums including The Museum of Art and Design in NY, The George Washington University Museum in DC, and The Long Beach Museum of Latin American Art.