Date and Time:
Exhibition: June 11 - July 17
Gallery Hours: Fridays 12 - 3pm, Saturdays and Sundays 11am - 3pm
Location: Mighty Tieton Warehouse
Details: The Hostile Terrain project is a participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project, a non-profit research-art-education-media collective, directed by anthropologist Jason De León. The exhibition is composed of over 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. This installation will simultaneously take place at a large number of institutions, both nationally and globally in 2021 throughout 2022. Visitors to the show many choose to fill in toe tag information and add it to the exhibit based on collected data.
We invited artists to submit 2D, 3D, collage, and poetry related to migration and new life in the theme of the monarch butterfly to accompany the Hostile Terrain project. The show is curated and installed by artists Israel James Hunter and Rosie Saldana who curated submissions with an emphasis on life and memory.
The Hostile Terrain exhibit will also feature the works of Yesenia Navarrete Hunter, PhD who recently earned her doctoral degree in History. Dr. Hunter studies American history with a special focus on immigration, Indigenous peoples, and the West.
Dr. Hunter was born in Mexico and came to the U.S. as a child. She is the daughter of Guadalupe Marquez and Alberto Marquez, now of Wapato, Washington, where she grew up as a migrant farm worker. Her current artistic work, called “Hunter Gatherings” is an exploration of time, space, and energy. This work stems from her studies of braided and entangled histories of immigrants and Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. Hunter Gatherings evokes the gatherings of music, life, and convivencia in the Hunter home. By looking at movement, migration, and material practices, Dr Hunter’s work evoke the landscapes of place and memory.