As part of our fall 2020 programming the Guggenheim Gallery will host Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94), a participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a non-profit research-art-education-media collective, directed by anthropologist Jason De León. The exhibition is composed of ~3,200 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019. These tags are geolocated on a wall map of the desert showing the exact locations where remains were found. The installation will simultaneously take place at a large number of institutions, both nationally and globally in 2020.

During the month of September 2020 Students from several classes in the Wilkinson college (including the Wilkinson Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on Race FFC, Cultural Anthropology and Latinx studies) along with many volunteers from across the campus will participate in filling out the tags that comprise the installation. Due to physical distancing regulations in response to the COVID 19 virus this activity will take place remotely and participants will work form the safety of their homes. We will present the finished installation along with documentation of its creation as well as personal reflections by students in form of a virtual exhibition during the reception on October 1st.

On occasion of the project the Guggenheim Gallery will publish a conversation with Los Angeles based artist Raul Baltazar about his video works, some of which will be featured in the virtual exhibition. Working through aesthetic notions given in Mesoamerican and Western culture, Baltazar often mixes performance, video, photography, drawing, painting, murals, and community-based projects, to create new relations for the decolonial art object. His work is often driven by the struggle of Mestizo, Xicanx, POC and Mesoamerican Indigenous communities and their revolutionary vision for change in the context of Los Angeles. In addition, his work postulates responses to trauma and the body, examining the experience and rational abuse of power and authority by means of sanctioned or unsanctioned reiterations of violence in contemporary life. Baltazar challenges this by participating in the creation of contemporary cultural production rooted in an artistic research of ancient cultures. Where his work opens up a space for healing, communication and reflection; in order to engage publics and communicate the value of a self-reflexive identification with indigeneity.

Please join us and Jason de Leon, Gabe Canter, photographer Michael Wells from the undocumented Migration Project as well as artist Raul Baltazar for the reception on Zoom on October 1st, 2020 at 5:00PM.

https://chapman.zoom.us/j/2230148906