The place where the creek goes underground
Curated by Meg Rotzel and Caitlin Julia Rubin
Featuring the work of Place as Practice Research Collective (Deanna Ledezma, Josh Rios, and Anthony Romero)
Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts
September 16 - December 14, 2024
The place where the creek goes underground presents a series of newly commissioned works that form an archive of place-knowing, belonging, and kin-making. The project began with a series of conversations Anthony Romero held with brown and Indigenous artists, activists, and theorists on subjects of decolonial methodologies, gentrification, displacement, and food sovereignty. This exhibition offers an opportunity for Romero and his collaborators Deanna Ledezma and Josh Rios to create a body of work emerging from intergenerational kin-based research situated within South-Central Texas and Northern Mexico—the region the artists and their relatives call home. Through multimedia installation and life writing, they consider how familial networks maintain practices of care and transmit intimate knowledge of place shaped by the conditions of labor, immigration, marginalization, agrotourism, overdevelopment, prolonged droughts, and diminishing natural resources. This exhibition invites audiences to consider how family histories are produced and circulated within specific and interwoven sociopolitical contexts.
