The place where the creek goes underground
“In every city or town . . . there is a creek. In every creek there is a place where it goes underground. That place may still be accessible, or it may be paved over. It may be a parking lot, or a hospital, or a set of condos. Somewhere in that city or town, there is someone who remembers this place, the place where the creek goes underground.”
—Roberto Bedoya, cultural affairs manager, City of Oakland, as told to Anthony Romero
The place where the creek goes underground presents a series of newly commissioned works that form an archive of place-knowing, belonging, and kin-making. The project began with a series of conversations Anthony Romero held with brown and Indigenous artists, activists, and theorists on subjects of decolonial methodologies, gentrification, displacement, and food sovereignty. This exhibition offers an opportunity for Romero and his collaborators Deanna Ledezma and Josh Rios to create a body of work emerging from intergenerational kin-based research situated within South-Central Texas and Northern Mexico—the region the artists and their relatives call home. Through multimedia installation and life writing, they consider how familial networks maintain practices of care and transmit intimate knowledge of place shaped by the conditions of labor, immigration, marginalization, agrotourism, overdevelopment, prolonged droughts, and diminishing natural resources. This exhibition invites audiences to consider how family histories are produced and circulated within specific and interwoven sociopolitical contexts.
Harvard Radcliffe Institute gratefully acknowledges the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Endowment Fund for the Arts, which is supporting this exhibition.
Free and open to the public.
Anthony Romero is an artist, writer, and organizer committed to documenting and supporting Black, brown, and Indigenous communities. He is a founding member of the artistic research collective, Sonic Insurgency Research Group. Romero was the 2019–2020 David and Roberta Logie Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and is currently an associate professor of studio art at Dartmouth College.
Deanna Ledezma is the postdoctoral research associate of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research/University of Illinois Chicago Mellon Program. Her current book project “Unsettled Archives: Kinships and Diasporas in Latinx Photography” examines how Latines use photography to negotiate their cultural and diasporic identities, assert their presence amid the ongoing effects of settler colonialism, and commemorate kinship formations, including those disregarded or censured for exceeding conventional ideas of family.
Josh Rios is a founding member of Sonic Insurgency Research Group and a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches courses in social theory and research-based practice. As a media artist, writer, and educator his projects deal with the histories, presents, and futurities of Latine and Chicanx subjects and hemispheric resistance to globalization and neoliberalism, highlighting intercultural contact and co-belonging.
Join us online on September 16, 2024, at 4 PM for The place where the creek goes underground Opening Event.
Visit
Free and open to the public.
We encourage visitors to reserve a time for their visit to guarantee access.
To place a request for a group or class tour of the exhibition, submit this form at least two weeks before the desired date of your visit. Please understand that it can be difficult for us to accept short-notice requests. We will do our best to fulfill every request, but owing to scheduling or staffing constraints, some requests cannot be accommodated.
Request a Copy of the Exhibition Booklet
If you are interested in receiving a copy of the book that accompanies this exhibition, please complete this short online form. Note that, due to demand, we cannot guarantee that books will be available to everyone who requests one. We will notify you if a copy is being mailed to you.
