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Artist Bio

Tor Serrano uses they/them pronouns. Serrano received their Bachelors in Arts from the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the University of Southern California Irvine (UCI) with a minor in Digital Arts. They hope to give back to the community by offering equitable creative workshops and inclusive events. As the co-founder, CEO of NEPO+ Community, Art & Technology (CAT) and their personal goals as an artist is to increase environmental and social awareness while restoring economic growth and increasing quality of life for underserved California community members. Sovanarry Phy and Tor Serrano established the "creative collective" NEPO+ to help aid environmental awareness for the Salton Sea and collaborates with nonprofit organizations like EcoMedia Compass™ whose efforts support continued Salton Sea restoration.

Art Portfolio

Serrano's portfolio of art includes oil paintings, illustrations, sequential narration, digital art and animation. They believe representation in art is a key building block for better understanding and communication amongst community members.

Their early abstract paintings reference Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic theory. They utilize this visual language to negotiate the experience of intersectional spaces as a rejection of the organizational structure of the "root tree system" perpetuated by the american narrative that has historically left out the lived experiences of POC. Serrano's current oil paintings take structurally from Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican (Mēxihcah, Aztec, Mayan, and Toltec) civilizations interwoven with the spiritual traditions of the ofrenda to unpack identity, communal generational trauma, and grief.

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Serrano's Digital Art, Animation and Sequential Narration all tackle common constructed themes built by privileged systems. Similarly, their illustrative narratives, stylistically referential to tattoo culture; deconstruct the problematic images in both newspaper art and tabloid articles, by exploring how they re-enforced the foundation for the prejudice that is experienced by BIPOC daily.

Current Projects

• SOS Salton Sea Biennial

• Graphic Novel – Genre Horror

• Portraits Series – "Familia No Sabo"

• Canvas Mural - "Taft Memorial Park"

Co-Founding NEPO+

NEPO+ Community, Art & Technology 's 2022 SOS project with EcoMedia Compass™, a 501C3 Non-profit worked towards bringing awareness to the environmental devastation within the Salton Sea Desert Shores community. The creative collective fundraised for EcoMedia Compass' annual Earth Day pop-up event which took place on April 23, 2022. ​ NEPO+ aims to be a safe, supportive, and empowering organization that works with local artists and small businesses to cultivate a more mutually beneficial community. Through the development of pop-up events and educational workshops the goal of the participating artist is to use art and technology as a catalyst to engage with the community and bring awareness towards an opportunity to empower change.