Image: Art, Design and Architecture Museum at UCSB, New York
The Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara will present 'Jackie Amézquita: Gemidos de la Tierra' from August 26 through November 29, 2026. The exhibition is described by the museum as the inaugural museum presentation of Amézquita’s socially engaged project on the lost lives of migrants in immigration detention, and the website notes that the museum is currently closed for installation ahead of the reopening date.
According to the museum’s exhibition page, the show brings together work by Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Jackie Amézquita, who was born in Guatemala in 1985. The presentation is rooted in land-based methodologies and ancestral material knowledge, and it examines migration, collective memory and the relationship between human and more-than-human systems across time. The project centers on 'Gemidos de la Tierra (Wailings of the Land/Soil)' (2020–ongoing), in which Amézquita casts, in soil sourced throughout the United States, the names of individuals who have died while in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody between 2003 and the present.
The museum says that the work will be publicly updated on November 1 as part of Día de Muertos celebrations, with new names added for those who have died in recent years. Each name is hand-cast using soil from the state where the person died, combined with masa, salt and rainwater. The exhibition text frames this process as both devotional and political, and says the work is intended to call the body back into presence while refusing erasure. The museum also describes the project as a form of collective witnessing for the memory of people whose lives have been reduced to statistics.
'Gemidos de la Tierra' is organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara and curated by Ana Briz, the museum’s assistant director and curator of exhibitions. The exhibition is supported by the AD&A Museum Council. The museum identifies the project as part of its Summer/Fall 2026 exhibition program, alongside 'Bonnie Ora Sherk: Life Frames since 1970,' which it describes as the first major survey exhibition of the late artist, environmental educator and landscape planner.
Amézquita’s residency at UCSB is also part of the exhibition context. The museum says she is the 2026 Artist in Residence of Ecological Practice at the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration in partnership with the AD&A Museum. During the residency, she will conduct fieldwork on campus and at the Santa Cruz Island Reserve to learn about native ecosystems, plant pollination and soil remediation, research that will inform a newly commissioned work in the museum presentation.
The exhibition page gives a concise biographical note on Amézquita, who lives and works in Los Angeles. It says her practice includes installations, public performances, sculptures and paintings, and that her work has been shown at venues including LACMA, the Hammer Museum, LACE, LAND, 18th Street Arts Center, Armory Center for the Arts, Vincent Price Art Museum, Annenberg Space for Photography, Human Resources, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. The museum also lists honors including the Mohn Public Recognition Award and Mohn Land Award in 2023. An exhibition walk-through led by Briz is scheduled for August 28, following a Campus Lagoon Tour, and a public activation of 'Gemidos de la Tierra' is listed for November 1.
