To celebrate the launch of Materiality of Memory, we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection. To view the full essays and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/materiality-of-memory The Inheritance of Diligencias ✍️ By Leslie Ureña Leslie Ureña’s research and museum work has focused on the history of photography, migration, and transnational art practices. Since 2023 she has been Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Prior to this role, she was Curator of Photographs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. 📖 In this essay, Leslie Ureña reflects on “Diligencia,” a large-scale installation by Lucia Hierro that renders a familiar Dominican American streetscape with vinyl and paint. Through grocery carts, storefronts, and remittance signs, Hierro memorializes immigrant memory and everyday labor. Ureña weaves personal reflection with art historical insight to explore how errands—diligencias—become intergenerational acts of care, recordkeeping, and cultural survival in the face of gentrification, aging, and forgetting. Image: Lucia Hierro, “Diligencia,” 2021, vinyl, paint on drywall, 14 ft. × 24 ft. 6 in. #LuciaHierro #LatinxArt #DominicanDiaspora #ImmigrantMemory #UrbanChange #LatinxVisualCulture #Diligencia (fb)

To celebrate the launch of Materiality of Memory, we are highlighting the authors who contributed essays to the collection. To view the full essays and access downloadable PDFs visit: https://uslaf.org/collection/materiality-of-memory Hilos and the Unraveling of Borders in the Work of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood ✍️ By Gilda Posada Gilda Posada is a Xicana artist, independent curator, and art historian from Southeast Los Angeles. She is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she is completing her dissertation “Reigniting the Sacred Fire: An Analysis of Xicana-Indigenous and Queer Chicanx Art.” 📖 In this essay, Gilda Posada explores the textile-based installations of Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, whose work reclaims Xicanx and Indigenous memory in the face of colonial borders. Through embroidered flags, woven wire nopales, and thread-based mappings, Jimenez Underwood reimagines the U.S.–Mexico border as both wound and possibility. Image: Consuelo Jimenez Underwood, “Border Flowers Flag,” stitched, embroidered, silk screened over dyed recycled cotton and silk fabrics, 2008. Courtesy of the Oakland Museum of California. #ConsueloJimenezUnderwood #XicanxArt #Borderlands #LatinxTextileArt #IndigenousFeminism #VisualSovereignty #LatinxArt (fb)