Fine Arts

Wordplay features artists who use text as an integral element of their creative practice in printmaking and print based media. The work in this exhibit illustrates the charged relationships between images, text, formats and their context. Pulling from popular forms of advertising and display, ordinary written notes, reinterpretations of existing texts, to forceful political statements, these artists play with the familiarity of text to unexpected ends.

Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94) is a participatory art exhibition created by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) and directed by UCLA anthropologist Jason De León. Occurring in more than 130 cities globally, the installation raises awareness about the realities of the U.S.-Mexico border, focusing on the deaths that have occurred since 1994 as a result of the Border Patrol policy known as “Prevention Through Deterrence” (PTD). HT94 is realized with the help of local volunteers who record names, age, sex, cause of death, condition of body, and location of recovery on toe tags for each person, which are then pinned on the map in the exact location where those remains were found.

This interactive exhibition is comprised of approximately 3,800 handwritten toe tags representing migrants who died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert in Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019.

This interactive exhibition is comprised of approximately 3,800 handwritten toe tags representing migrants who died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert in Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019.

This interactive exhibition is comprised of approximately 3,800 handwritten toe tags representing migrants who died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert in Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019.

This interactive exhibition is comprised of approximately 3,800 handwritten toe tags representing migrants who died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert in Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019.