USC Roski Art Gallery, LA Arts District

Curated by Tracy Fenix, USC MA & MUP

William Camargo, Alyssa Chandelle, Sandro Canovas, Jazmin Garcia, Camille & Melinda Hoffman, Joanna Keane Lopez, Carlos Jaramillo, Ozzie Juarez, Arlene Mejorado, Reyes Padilla, Ronald Rael, Daisy Quezada Ureña, Ernesto Yerena Montejano, Jose Villalobos, and Cougar Vigil.

A contemporary cohort of Indigenous, Latinx, and Immigrant artists and activists working in the southwestern United States are engaging with ancestral adobe structures and construction to resist artistic, cultural, and ecological assimilation. Predominant expressions of land-based art and environmental activism in the US have historically ignored Indigenous and Latinx contributions, and at the same time, acquiring critical reception or scholarly notice has been tied to the whitewashing of cultural signifiers. These artists and activists preserve ancestral adobe and ecological practices to keep its roots within Indigenous heritage while promoting its inclusion to canonical land-based artworks and also promoting its environmental sustainability in the deserts of the Southwest. Through the creation and care of adobe-based art and ecological infrastructure, they are staging interventions against displacement and a loss of cultural memory caused by settler colonialism and other oppressive regimes of power. Fenix's MA thesis exhibition narrates their ancestral native adopted frontera relationality alongside their family to chart how these artists use adobe to create physical and imagined homes of resistance, threading within it a subjective narrative through the ancestral lands of First Nation and Mexican people in the southwestern United States, to reorient future scholarship on land-based art and activism toward its ancestral, Indigenous coordinates--those of community belonging and ecological sustainability. It’s also one component of a larger “Mud Kin” ongoing project that will encompass an archive of interviews and photographs and other interventions that express Indigenous placekeeping, as well as an exhibition, a publication, and an ArchGIS mapping tool.