“Opening on October 15 and remaining on view through February 12, Constellations of Movement brings together five artists working across media - Sama Alshaibi, sheri crider, Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Francisco Donoso and Gloria Martínez-Granados - who each explore the history, materiality and the psychology of borders. Curated by Alana Hernandez, Senior Curator at the Arizona State University Art Museum, the exhibition treats migration not as a single act of crossing, but as a condition shaped by documentation, landscape, labor, memory and systems of control.
“Constellations of Movement traces a network of different, yet mutually reinforcing experiences. Sama Alshaibi's collage and video work renders Baghdad as a palimpsest, following how US intervention in Iraq continues to structure migration and memory long after the fact. Esteban Cabeza de Baca and sheri crider both turn to the landscape of the American Southwest with, while Francisco Donoso draws on his own archive of photographs, immigration documents, ID cards and poetry to navigate the emotional terrain of undocumented life. Gloria Martínez-Granados' installation The Uncertainty of Higher Education (2022) suspends a field of manipulated ID cards from the ceiling, their traces of institutional identity legible just as they seem ready to dissolve. For several of these artists, the subject is lived experience: both Donoso and Martínez-Granados are DACA recipients, and crider's practice is informed by more than a decade of lived experience with homelessness, addiction and incarceration.”
