Jackie Amézquita, Gemidos de la Tierra (Wailings of the Land/Soil), 2023, photo documentation of public activation, March 25, 2023. Photo by Gina Clyne. Courtesy of the artist, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), and LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division).
Jackie Amézquita: Gemidos de la Tierra brings together the work of Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Jackie Amézquita (b. Guatemala, 1985). Rooted in land-based methodologies and ancestral material knowledge, the exhibition examines migration, collective memory, and the relationship between human and more-than-human systems across time. Central to the exhibition is the socially engaged work, Gemidos de la Tierra (Wailings of the Land/Soil) (2023–ongoing), where Amézquita casts in soil sourced throughout the United States the names of individuals who have lost their lives while in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody between 2003 and today.
On November 1 as part of Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations, Amézquita will publicly update the work with the names of those who have passed away in recent years. Each name is hand-cast using soil from the state where the person died, combined with masa, salt, and rainwater—materials that carry cultural, ancestral, and elemental resonance. This method of making is both devotional and political: a way of calling the body back into presence and refusing erasure. Gemidos de la Tierra (Wailings of the Land/Soil) honors the humanity of those whose lives have been reduced to statistics, offering a stark contrast to the cold, bureaucratic erasure that often accompanies death within carceral systems. In this light, the AD&A Museum shares this history for collective witnessing as caretakers of their memory.
Amézquita is 2026 Artist in Residence of Ecological Practice at the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration in partnership with the AD&A Museum at UC Santa Barbara. During her residency, Amézquita will conduct fieldwork on campus as well as at the Santa Cruz Island Reserve to learn about native ecosystems, plant pollination, and soil remediation. Amézquita’s research will inform a newly commissioned work as part of this exhibition presentation at the AD&A Museum.
Jackie Amézquita: Gemidos de la Tierra is organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara and is curated by Ana Briz, AD&A Museum Assistant Director and Curator of Exhibitions. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the generous support of the AD&A Museum Council.
About the Artist
Jackie Amézquita (b. Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 1985) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages the ecological, ancestral, and ontological dimensions of space, place, and across-time. For Amézquita, a site is not merely a location, but a living constellation of human and more-than-human relations; an unfolding terrain shaped by memory, transformation, and interdependence. Her work is rooted in the use of biomaterials, which act as conduits for ancestral wisdom carried across genealogies. Amézquita creates installations, public performances, sculptures, and paintings that explore the thresholds between presence and absence, movement and rootedness, decay and regeneration. Central to her practice is a reimagining of borders; not as rigid barriers, but as flowing currents of energy and exchange where identities, ecologies, and temporalities converge and transform.
Amézquita received her M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her B.F.A. from ArtCenter College of Design, Pasadena, following an Associate degree from Los Angeles Valley College. She has exhibited widely, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Hammer Museum; LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions); LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division); 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, New York. She is the recipient of the Mohn Public Recognition Award (2023), the Mohn Land Award (2023), and support from the National Performance Network (2022). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Mohn Art Collective, Los Angeles; the Denver Art Museum; and the Phoenix Art Museum. Her work has been featured in Art in America, Cultured, Flaunt, Whitewall, the Los Angeles Times, ARTnews, The Art Newspaper, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, and Walker Art Center Magazine.
