Desai Matta Gallery
Talavera ballóN: La caravana migrante
through july 9, 2021
Talavera-Ballón’s stunning paintings, a portrait series titled La Caravana Migrante, are paired with Hostile Terrain 94, an installation of hand-written toe tags documenting each of the more than 3200 deaths on the Arizona border with Mexico. Talavera Ballón’s beautifully rendered portraits remind us that each of the toe tags represents a life lived, someone with children, parents, siblings, loved ones, and dreams.
STORIES of MIGRATION:
La Patrona Mariela
Las Cruces en el Desierto
also in the DESAI MATTA GALLERY:
HOSTILE TERRAIN 94
THROUGH JULY 9, 2021
Read more about the exhibition here.
The Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94) exhibition was created by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a non-profit research and arts-education collective, to hold migration as an urgent issue in our collective consciousness. This impactful, poignant installation includes a hand-written toe-tag for each of the 3200 migrants who have died along the Arizona border with Mexico from 1994 to today as a consequence of an intentional US policy to shepherd migrants away from urban crossings to hostile terrain in the Sonoran desert.
How do we describe the combination of pleasure and anxiety we feel in donning summer clothes in the middle of winter? Or basking in the exquisite spectacle of a sunset made vivid by wildfires? Inspired by such moments when they found themselves at a loss for words to describe emotions or ideas, Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott created The Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a participatory art project to develop neologisms for our rapidly changing world. Rather than cede the power to create that language to “experts,” the Bureau creates spaces for conversation about the collective grief of living with climate change by setting up their field station in various sites—nationally and internationally—to invite us all to the table, creating new language that Quante and Escott understand to be connective anchors to advance dialogue and culture.
Third Floor Hall
Bucolica: Paz de la Calzada
THROUGH JULY 15, 2021
A participatory mural project conceived by artist Paz de la Calzada, Bucolica invited CIIS students to participate in the creation of a mural celebrating the California native grassland ecosystem.
Bucolica, inspired by the Renaissance Bucolic genre, is a multidisciplinary and ongoing project that recovers the romantic idea that the landscape embodies a certain state of emotive consciousness, meant to inspire awe and reflection, calling our attention to the compromised relationship we currently have with the natural world. More here