Mud Kin project: An ongoing curatorial land based mapping project DOCUMENTING NATIVE & LATINX/E BASED ARTISTS & PROJECTS

• ONGOING DIGITAL MAPPING TOOL SUPPORTING NATIVE & LATINX LAND-BASED ARTISTS & POLICIES

• PUBLICATION SERIES (available for purchase with GAUCHE collective)

• EXHIBITIONS, WORKSHOPS, & SITE-SPECIFIC PROGRAMS

• ADVISORY MAPPING COMMITTEE & COLLABORATORS (WIP)

exhibits/ curatorial interventions

A lightning score, santa fe art institute, june 2025,
second exhibit iteration

Second cohort curatorial intervention: June 13-15th, 2025

A Lightning Score was a short exhibit and performative intervention that honors the monsoon season. This gathering will showcase the powerful work of six artists rooted in Los Angeles and New Mexico, exploring light, sonic, and film interpretations and emotional overtures of ancestral lands. Participating artists include: Eva Aguila, Star Feliz, Margarita Paz-Pedro, Edson Reyes, Doza Mendoza,  and Marcus Zuniga.

An interactive performance by Eva Aguila & Star Feliz will happen on Friday at 6:30pm followed by Saturday day-long interventions including a Mud brick making workshop with Margarita Paz-Pedro, curator-led artist talk, and an evening forest group hike on Saturday, June 14th, show closed on Sunday, June 15th at 6pm.

First cohort exhibition: July 16- July 28, 2023

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

Ongoing project curated by Tracy Fenix
Exhibition assistants, Alice Zhao & Jordan Gonzales
Documentation by Arlene Mejorado

Mapping Indigenous & Latinx Projects from Southern California to West Texas, USC Roski, july 2023, first iteration

A contemporary cohort of Indigenous and Latinx 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 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 infrastructure, they are staging interventions against displacement and a loss of cultural memory caused by settler colonialism and other oppressive regimes of power. This thesis charts 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” 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 interactive mapping tool.

ONGOING MUD KIN PUBLICATION SERIES

First iteration available for purchase with GAUCHE collective or NYABF in Sept 2025

FREE digital resource copies for land stewards, cultural archivists, & Native & Latinx artists. Email Tracy at mudkinproject@gmail.com for a pdf resource.

Second iteration available in Early 2026