2026.2 Newsletter
HEY ART TRIPPERS! ☀️
We hope you’ve been enjoying the summer sun. The past few months have been busier than ever here at Art Trippin’! Read to find out what we’ve been up to and what lies ahead.
SIPS & STORIES OF PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE 🥂
Past…
You all SOLD OUT our first Art Trippin’ lecture series, Sips & Stories: Women in Mexican Art History! It was so fulfilling to see people come together to learn about art. We are building a beautiful art history community together. Thank you for being a part of it.
An extra thank you to everyone who bought tickets and to the Fullerton Museum Center for hosting us. The income from these paid events allows us to continue creating all of the free and accessible content we have available on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
Present…
Because of the success of the last Sips & Stories, we partnered with the Fullerton Museum Center once again to bring you another one!
Sips & Stories: Art and Architecture of Ancient Mexico explores the rich history of ancient Mexico, from Olmec mother culture, to classic Maya architecture, to the art of the Mexica Empire, and more. The best part? We still have a few single-evening tickets left!
Future…
We can finally announce that Art Trippin’ is partnering with the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Longbeach to bring you another round of Sips & Stories: Women in Mexican Art History!
If you missed the first Sips & Stories lecture series, you have another chance to learn about the incredible women artists of Mexico. Join us for a night of art, wine, charcuterie, and community.
INTRODUCING: ART TRIPPIN’ FIELD TRIPS 🚌
One of founder Dr. Megan Lorraine Debin's favorite parts of teaching art history is taking students beyond the classroom and into museums and galleries, where works of art can be experienced rather than simply studied.
“No screen can replace the feeling of standing in front of a work of art, taking in its scale, color, texture, and presence, or the conversations and emotional connections that emerge when we experience it together. Art has always been about connection: across cultures, across generations, and, most importantly, between people.” — Dr. Megan Lorraine Debin
And who says you have to be in school to go on a field trip? Art Trippin’ Field Trips will take you on guided tours of local museums, galleries, and art landmarks so that you can get up close and personal with the artwork while learning about the context and significance of each piece.
Our first Art Trippin’ Field Trip to the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art was an absolute blast! We looked at pieces like Frank Romero’s The Arrest of the Paleteros (1996) that reshapes European art styles to center working-class Chicano communities, and CiCi Segura González’s Soy Chicana (2013) that continues Mesoamerican visual traditions to create a world where multiple histories and identities exist simultaneously. After the tour, we had some impromptu fun salsa dancing!
Thank you to everyone who attended the first Art Trippin’ Field Trip for being a part of the memory making and for supporting Art Trippin’. If you didn’t make it out to this one, stay tuned in to our newsletters and follow us @arttrippinwithprofd on Instagram to find out when we plan the next Field Trip.
WE’RE OFF TO MEXICO 🇮🇹
We set off for an 11-day Art Trippin’ Tour of Mexico on July 21st—less than a month from now!
The tour of Mexico City and Oaxaca will explore ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, colonial architecture, world-class museums, revolutionary murals, Indigenous artistic traditions, and some of the most celebrated culinary experiences in the world.
We are especially excited to partner with Zapotec Travel by Lily, a woman- and Indigenous-owned company that gives back to the Indigenous communities in Oaxaca. Traditionally, artisans make money by showing tourists their creation process in the hopes that you will buy their art. But Zapotec Travel by Lily pays Indigenous artisans for their time, whether or not you buy anything. Ethical travel and benefiting locals with our tourism is extremely important to Art Trippin’, so we are happy to be partnering with a company that pays directly into the communities we will be visiting.
BALI 2027 🌺
This year’s trip to Bali was so amazing that we’ve decided to go again in 2027! An Art Trippin’ Tour of Bali in partnership with Evolved Embodiment offers a sensory-rich experience designed to rejuvenate your mind, body, and soul as you immerse yourself in the vibrant tapestry of Balinese art, culture, food, and healing. Dates to be announced.
ART TRIPPIN’ TALK
Moctezuma’s Headdress and a Digital Heist
Moctezuma’s headdress is an elaborate headdress made of natural elements like feathers, shells, gold, coral, and animal skin. The long, iridescent feathers that give the headdress its height are the tailfeathers of the quetzal, a bird native to modern day Guatemala and the current national bird of Guatemala. Quetzal feathers had to travel an incredibly far distance from modern-day Central America to get to Tenochtitlan, the ancient capital of the Mexica (Aztec) empire, making them extremely valuable. Each bird has only two of these beautiful tailfeathers, so it would have taken hundreds of them to create a single headdress. You can imagine how meaningful these headdresses were to the Indigenous people of Mexico.
These headdresses were not meant for display. They are ritual objects meant to be worn and activated through movement and music. The feathers would have danced with the movement of the ruler who wore them, shifting color from green to blue and back again in the light, in much the same way that they float through the air behind quetzals in flight.
Photo by Wang LiQiang on Shutterstock
For several hundred years, the location of Moctezuma’s headdress was unaccounted for, but it was eventually found in the inventory of a royal collection in Austria. It is now displayed at the Weltmuseum Wien (World Museum) in Vienna, Austria, while a replica is displayed at Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology) in Mexico City. Demands have been made for repatriation, but the Weltmuseum claims that the object is too fragile to return.
The question of the repatriation of art and artifacts stolen through the project of colonization are being responded to by contemporary artists, such as Sebastián Arrechedera and Yosu Arangüena. In January 2022, the two activists hacked the Vienna Museum’s audioguides to replace the recorded scripts with new audio that exposed the museum’s colonial narrative. The truth about the history of each object sounded into the ears of visitors as they made their way through the collection. This is only one example of the ways that things are changing in the museum world. Every day there is a louder cry for repatriation and more and more museums are working toward returning stolen objects.
Stay Trippy,
Art Trippin’
Written by: Dr. Megan Lorraine Debin, Natalie D’Allura (www.linkedin.com/in/nataliedallura)
