Context Library Series

This Spring 2025, the University Library in partnership with CuratorLove is proud to exhibit Migratory Land Knowledges. The exhibition features the artwork of Isidro Pérez García and was curated by Erika Hirugami, MA. MAAB. MPhil. The collection is located on the library's third floor gallery space, and can also be viewed virtually through our online gallery. 

Curatorial Statement: 

Migratory Land Knowledges

Isidro Pérez García 

Excavating knowledges within anthropological biocultural archives becomes the materiality that Isidro Pérez García utilizes to forge relationships to the land, surpassing the boundaries of the settler colonialist concept of legal citizenship. Pérez García, a member of the undoc+¹  community, is deeply aware of what an immigrant leaves behind upon migrating -- this body of work contests human relations to the land beyond contemporary border formations. 

The material of the artworks found within this exhibition is directly sourced in Southern California, utilizing ancestral techniques from a time before the contemporary borders of Mexico and the United States, which are what we know today. In Pérez García's own words, "Maguey plants from my neighborhood [Santa Ana], Tule from Newport and Cochinilla from Riverside," all-natural elements that can be found on both sides of the border despite neoliberal geopolitics, and beyond the confines of citizenship's social construct of belonging to a demarcated nation project. 

Many immigrants carry within them inherent knowledge that is obfuscated upon arrival to the host nation as they become integral and are absorbed by new economies. Isidro Pérez García's work serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness of land beyond passports, citizenship, bureaucracy, settler colonialism, and the taxing economies that distance immigrants away from their ancestral knowledge. Migratory Land Knowledges is a visual invitation to connect to land and nature beyond political or geographical boundaries. 

"I am interested in what we leave  

behind when we cross borders." 

 - Isidro Pérez García