La
dy Xok
Lady Xok music lives somewhere between Future-Folk and Indie-Rock mixing Indigenous instruments, rock kits, digital sounds, and experimental performance. Inspired by the original Maya queen, Lady Xok bleeding from the tongue, interdisciplinary artist Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra pulls from folk roots in Latin American Nueva Cancion and American Blues layered with distortion, minor tones, and storytelling. Lady Xok is currently recording a Future-Folk EP to be released this winter made possible, in part, by funds provided by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (MRAC) through a grant from The McKnight Foundation. For the Late Nite Series she will perform with Xilam Balam of Electric Machete Studios showing some work from her upcoming album. For more, check out Lady Xok’s YouTube channel.
Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra a.k.a. Lady Xok (enrolled Maya-Lenca Nation, Managuara/El Salvador) is a mixed Midwestern inter/antidisciplinary artist, musician, and culture bearer. Her interdisciplinary practice includes visual and public art, music, and theatre performance placing emphasis on Latinx/Indigenous art methods, the experimental, the political, and Liberation Theology. Her anti-disciplinary practice is firmly rooted in Maya-Lenca cosmovision pulling across seemingly distant disciplines of archaeology, epigraphy, ethnoastronomy, theology, and public art. She writes and performs bilingual music under the pseudonym Lady Xok and is currently recording a Future-Folk EP to be released this winter made possible, in part, by funds provided by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (MRAC) through a grant from The McKnight Foundation. Rebekah co-founded Electric Machete Studios, a Twin Cities Latinx Art + Music production house. Upcoming performances and projects include an October documentary screening of Our Space is Spoken For public art performances, revamping the play Star Girl Clan co-created during a Puppetlab fellowship which will be touring this spring in Guatemala and with New Native Theater, and the inaugural Artist-Takeover-the-M artist residency at the Minnesota Museum of American Art following their grand reopening in December 2018, and a Minnesota Center for Book Arts Jerome Mentorship to foster her ongoing public art project, The Mayan Calendar Project, an artistic and ethnoastronomy cultural revitalization project of Mayan epigraphy, astrology, and star maps. www.rebekahcrisanta.com @ladyxok
Xilam Balam (b. San Antonio, Texas) is an emerging interdisciplinary contemporary visual artist and music producer whose work is a fusion of Pre-Columbian Indigenous art forms and contemporary hip-hop and graphic arts. He is a 2018 Mcknight Ceramics Fellow. He works in a variety of mediums including music, ceramics, painting, screen-printing, stone carving, and epigraphy. Musically, Balam was part of the formative Headshots Crew of Rhymesters Entertainment and producer of Los Nativos, and continues to produce with Curandero, Lady Xok, and unreleased upcoming solo projects. His work has been highlighted in Chican@ Hip-Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje, The Source Magazine, and on TPT MN Original. He has performed across the country and in Mexico, producing, exhibiting, and teaching locally. Balam is a co-founder of Electric Machete Studios, a Latinx art & music production house. http://www.mnartists.org/xilam-balam @balamjaguar13