Conversations on Sound and Power: Cog•nate Collective
Sonic Insurgency Research Group
March 2022
Cog•nate Collective develops research projects, public interventions, and experimental pedagogical programs in collaboration with communities across the US/Mexico border region. Since beginning their collaboration in 2010, their work has interrogated the evolution of the border as it is simultaneously erased by neoliberal economic policies and bolstered through increased militarization through tracing the fallout of this incongruence for migrant communities on either side of the border. As a result, their interdisciplinary projects often address issues of citizenship, migration, informal economies, and popular culture while arguing for understanding the border as a region that expands and contracts with the movement of people and objects.
Cog•nate Collective have exhibited work locally and internationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), The Getty Center and Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Arte Actual FLACSO in Quito, Ecuador, and OKK – Organ Kritischer Kunst in Berlin, Germany. Regionalia, a monograph of their work was published by X Artists’ Books in 2020. Cog•nate is a collaboration between Misael Diaz, Assistant Professor of Art, Media, and Design at California State University, San Marcos and Amy Sanchez Arteaga, Lecturer of Art History at San Diego State University in the School of Art and Design. Their practice is currently based in National City, CA, and they work between Tijuana, BC and Los Angeles, CA.
Land Acknowledgement
We began our conversation with Cog•nate Collective by recognizing the Indigenous peoples and lands of our respective homes. We have edited that portion of the dialogue into the following statement: Our conversation took place across Massachusett, Potawatomi, and Kumeyaay lands. Sonic Insurgency Research Group and Cog•nate Collective are grateful to the human and more-than-human kin who have cared for these lands and each other since time immemorial. Our shared gratitude extends to the lands, waters, and spirits who have cared for us and our communities in turn. This network of indigenous mutuality and care exceeds settlement, and refuses to be confined by borders (real and imagined). We are honored to share these lands and to continue to work towards our collective freedom by remembering and recommitting ourselves to practices of care and mutuality.
Cog•nate Cruiser at Dialogue in Transit: Evolution of a Line, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.
Sonic Insurgency Research Group: We thought we would begin with an introduction. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and the subjects and themes your collective work engages in general and in relationship to sound?
Cog•nate Collective: Yes, our names are Amy Sanchez Arteaga and Misael Diaz. When our powers combine we are Cog•nate Collective. Our collaboration really started in 2010, although we have worked together in one form or another since around 2006. It’s interesting we had such a long preamble thinking about context and place. Part of what incited this collaboration was the shared context of having grown up in the borderlands between the Californias and having a shared interest in the embodied ways the border shows up for people with this experience of transnational and binational crossing in their upbringing. Even when we were in really incredibly diverse and wonderful Latinx spaces in Los Angeles where we met, we weren’t encountering that voice necessarily or recognition of that experience from other people. It was beautiful to find that in each other, and that’s how the collaboration began.
SIRG: The border can be a very constituting experience for those who have a lot of contact with it, especially the US-Mexico border.
CC: Part of that means thinking about macro-perspectives and macro-forms of subjectivity we talk about in deep abstraction in the academy. But what does that look like in a body? What does that look like in the everyday? What does that feel like in your ear? I think the context of that specificity immediately dispels so many meta-narratives. It’s like holding a mirror up to an abstraction that then sees itself in all of its limbs and hairiness.
On a personal level, my [Misael] family grew up not just crossing the border between Tijuana and San Diego but also moving a lot between L.A. and Tijuana. In the process of waiting in line to cross, in the process of getting from one side to the other, there’s a lot of time in the car. One of the things that you do is listen to music, listen to the radio. The experience of moving through a territory and inhabiting that territory in different ways always had a soundtrack. So, radio and the opportunity to have a conversation with someone in the car became an interesting medium for us and also as an opportunity to think about how at the Port of Entry you have these huge gatherings of folks very close together but not really engaging as a public. They are sharing this experience of border-crossing but not really engaging critically about what it means and has meant and will mean in the future.
When you’re waiting in line to cross, you don’t really engage with others. There are vendors there, but you don’t really talk to them if you can help it, unless you are trying to buy something. There’s coaching around that as a child. If you’re waiting in line to cross, it’s like: don’t look at the alcancías [plaster coin banks that take the shape of different pop-culture icons] too much because the vendor is going to follow the car for like twenty minutes and try to talk your parents into purchasing this thing. Your parents don’t want to go through this rude exchange because maybe you can’t necessarily afford this thing, this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle alcancía or whatever it was. So, there are also these protocols of disengagement that are part of the alienation of what it is to wait in line at the border. We are thinking through how to reengage those publics.
When we first started trying to do some of this work in early recordings it was so funny. Often, we would approach people, specifically the pedestrians who were waiting to cross. And, you know, they have a two hour wait in front of them, and we’d say, we’re students, we’re doing this project, would you mind if we recorded you? Often the response was: no. I’m busy because I’m waiting. There is this conception of the waiting as the objective or the thing that you’re there to do. Then there is this idea that disengaging from that convention of alienation would somehow make this process even more annoying or more of a burden. We had to take on these really tangential approaches for talking to people and for approaching folks who were in line in our initial projects.
I [Amy] wanted to add that it’s not just radio that happens in the car. I have a very chatty family that loves storytelling. Another thing that filters into our work are the family mythologies and gossip as I crossed the border from Mexicali to the Imperial Valley. Whether it was like, oh, over there in that part of the border wall there was this family and they had this hole in the fence that they owned and so people who needed to cross would just pay them a couple of grand and then they would walk through. I heard that story every time we crossed the border. So, this practice of storytelling and these conventions and practices of listening are important to us.
Our practice is not seeking to reinvent anything necessarily. It’s continuing an inherited practice of the sonic and also showing what has already been a generational practice of resilience for our families. I think if anything, it’s maybe just honing that, hearing the critical space facilitated through sound and radio. This happens through the sharing of stories: oral histories of folks who work at the crossing, for example, or recording testimonies of folks who have crossed the border through the Sonoran Desert and then broadcasting them at the crossing. In this way, we’re facilitating a critical reflection around the action that collectively is being undertaken, which is a transgression of the desired enactment of the border as something that separates through the act of moving across it. I think it’s also showing how that gesture is already critical as a practice that’s being enacted.
SIRG: That’s an important distinction. We should recognize the way that people already live their lives critically, whether or not it’s legible in the academic realm or in dominant society. Your Dialogue in Transit: Evolution of a Line project engages so many ideas we’re interested in, including fugitivity and border politics, which resonate with ongoing conversations we’re having about how sound refuses to be bordered or contained. We are wondering if you could give a summarization of the project and how it used hyper-local clandestine radio. One thing that we are thinking about a lot is the way in which you created a conversational space that mono-directional state radio doesn’t normally allow for but maybe hyper-localized radio does.
CC: Dialogue in Transit: Evolution of a Line was a mobile conference we organized in 2014 to mark the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Specifically, it grew out of a desire to reflect on how the implementation of this macro-economic policy and the changes that it brought about had been experienced at the scale of the nation in Mexico, at the scale of the city in Tijuana, and at the scale of the neighborhood in Colonia Libertad in particular, which is adjacent to the San Ysidro Port of Entry.
This coincided with the Cog•nate Cruiser. In 2010, Misael’s dad bought this car from his brother-in-law, a 1987 Chevy Cavalier. It had a really weird paint job. It wasn’t paint meant for a car. Long story short, there was this Canadian collective, En Masse, who were doing a short-term residency at the Mercado de Artesanías de la Línea, a series of market stalls at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, as part of a satellite project that Dare-Dare was facilitating in 2013, and we became one of the partners. We collaborated with En Masse to orchestrate what we called a mural-in-transit and painted this car as we waited in line to cross the border. Misael drove the car and Amy was the docent who made sure that nobody was run over and explained to the cars around us what was going on. Then Peru Dyer Jalea, Eric Wixon, and members of the HEM (Hecho en Mexico) crew from Tijuana painted the car as we crossed.
There was all this intentionality around the use of the car – to hold conversations in this car and record them. In 2014, we invited some of our favorite border theorists into the car. Norma Iglesias-Prieto, Victor Clark Alfaro, and Omar Pimienta spoke about the legacy of the border and about NAFTA at these different scales: of the nation, the city, and the neighborhood. They were in the Cog•nate Cruiser and we rigged a radio transmitter to broadcast the conversation to the rest of the Port of Entry, and we put out a call to the community to join us. There were four or five cars full of people, including Amy’s mother’s, which was one of the primary vehicles following and listening to the conversation we were broadcasting.
It took us about two hours in total from the time we got in line to the time we reached the inspection booth, and about halfway on that journey we stopped at the Mercado de Artesanías de la Línea so that people could get out, use the bathroom, and take a little break. Then there was a very awesome guerrilla performance on the rooftop of the market by Sonidero Travesura, friends of ours who call their music El Tigre Digital, or the digital tiger. They play a blend of jazz, norteño, and experimental electronic music. My favorite part of the performance was when Dardin says something like, “transmitiendo en vivo a través del radio más pirata de Tijuana (transmitting live from the most pirated radio in Tijuana).” Pirata in Spanish means pirated, but is also a makeshift, DIY, rasquache kind of aesthetic. It felt like a deep compliment. They played this show on the roof of the market and then afterwards we got back in our cars and crossed the border.
That entire conversation was recorded and turned into a research document and publication that led to a constellation of other works and engagements. I think it grew out of work we had started to do using radio to broadcast at the Port of Entry. We had been broadcasting from inside the Mercado de Artesanías de la Línea and we became curious as to whether we could essentially fit a radio station inside of a car. That is because, as we mentioned, when you cross there’s this notion of everyone crossing in their own bubble, and there’s very limited engagement. There was something interesting about making a conversation that is happening within one car something that could be experienced by cars around it. One of the ongoing challenges is how to rupture this notion of radio and listening as something passive. We have been interested in how to activate this site [the border crossing] as a site for dialogue, which means not just listening, but also speaking back, having a more conversational experience. All the cars that registered for the conference received a walkie-talkie so that we were able to communicate across the cars with the panelists.
SIRG: You broadcast the conference but also played it, I thought, from a loudspeaker on top of the car, so that folks could tune in or just hear it as well. Or you had a sign on the car to let people know where they could tune into the dialogue?
CC: With the first project we did at the Port of Entry, we just broadcast it over the radio and all the cars had their sound on but some of the vendors were like, wait, what’s happening? You’re playing something. We want to hear it, too. And we thought we missed an opportunity. A lot of the vendors have radios and those folks tuned in. But after that first crossing we started including a big perifoneo speaker on the top of the car so our vendor friends (and other folks) could listen to what was happening.
There have been really cool moments when people are like, hey, pass me the mic, I want to do a shout-out. And you realize, they might not really care about NAFTA, but there is still this desire to engage. I also really appreciate the disruption that sound creates. Even these kinds of intrusions are valuable given how that space and the crossing is structured to keep you focused. The other thing that was so cool was using the walkie-talkies. Walkie-talkies are fun. I think there’s also this delight in play that happens to people when you give them a walkie-talkie. Some of these things we didn’t record, like people wanting to give the different cars code names. There was this play and joy that was activated across the cars while we were talking about this deep context of neocolonial and historical oppression. The fact that this kind of space can open up is just incredibly valuable.
I appreciated in reading the introduction that you all sent us that joy was an important part of thinking about the role sound played in the summer protests of 2020 and this multiplicitous notion of sonic space. The notion of intervention or disruption can be multiplicitous in the sense of eliciting and being fueled by rage and anger and frustration but also being an outlet for joy and creativity and celebration. Sound has a really great capacity to facilitate that sort of collective experience and collectivizing that experience. That’s something that we’ve tried to harness by inviting other folks to ride in the car with us and take part in other iterations of Dialogue in Transit, some of which are more focused on sound – or more focused on music, I should say – others are more conversation-based, some are more poetic, some are more speculative and experimental, like the work with students. All of that is trying to tap into these different ways of activating the space and what that might elicit from folks.
You all should jump in the car with us when our breath doesn’t pose a threat to each other. We should do a South Texas crossing.
SIRG: Oh my gosh! [lots of laughter and excitement]
CC: We would have to ship the car because I don’t think it would make it.
SIRG: I mean, it’s a dream! The interesting thing about the difference between an urban crossing point like San Ysidro and Tijuana and more rural areas is that there are about eight or nine different “sister cities,” cities that are bifurcated by the border, that have different names but are essentially the same city along the Texas-Mexico border. They can be more like villages. That’s quite a different experience and infrastructure, sonically and embodied. There’s a way in which the relationality and the kinship in the middle of this site of conflict is a form of transgression. Can you reflect on the sonic qualities of the border in general? What kind of provocations does that bring out for you to think about the sound of the border and border-adjacent sites like checkpoints, markets, the lines of cars? What do you think about when you think about the social sonic life of the border?
CC: The first thing that came to mind in a really natural way is that years ago while we were working at the crossing in 2016, I [Amy] remember writing a list of sounds that made me think of the border – like when you cross the turnstile, the clink-clink-clink of each person crossing. In Mexicali, where I grew up, there is the sound of pharmacy vendors because there’s a tunnel that you go through, and in the tunnel there are pharmacies. People go to buy medical supplies. There are people doing advertisements for jewelry and the exchange rate is being shouted. I think in Tijuana about the screeching of brakes. You know, people who need new brakes, the e-e-e-e-e-e [mimics the sound of brakes]. Being in the car is more than just your voice and the chatter of the radio. I like thinking about the difference between those two, the foot crossing and the car crossing.
Your question transported me to a really visceral place. When we started working at the Port of Entry, there was a moratorium on a lot of the vending practices because the entry was being redeveloped. All the sidewalks were boarded over. Whether it was going to the PedWest or going the other way, there were all these board floors and there was this phenomenon of bouncing when you crossed. I think about the different timbres and rhythms of crossing that we’ve experienced. Sound becomes a metaphor of rhythms and flows of movement.
The other thing that comes to mind are languages that are being spoken. I [Misael] think of the tamal vendor when we first started working there who commissioned a new jingle for his business. And that song on loop – ¡los tamales llegaron ya! (The tamales have arrived!) – over and over and over, was exhausting, but also taking up space and fixing this sound as a permanent element in this site of deep political contestation.
The other thing that comes to mind is also what you don’t hear. That is one of the things that we became interested in, specifically in terms of documenting or trying to facilitate opportunities for voices and experiences that have been silenced at the crossing. Thinking in terms of economic opportunities, we started working with a group of Mixtec women. Indigenous informal vendors are a fixture at the Port of Entry, but there is very minimal sound one would associate with Indigenous peoples there. That speaks to a deeper erasure and silencing of Indigenous peoples not just at the border but both in the US and in Mexico. We became interested in facilitating a work at the crossing about Indigenous language, specifically Mixteco, and facilitating language exchanges about these silences that are important to reflect upon. We worked on that with Mujeres Mixtecas, which is an embroidery and textile collective.
In terms of sonics that I think of in relation to the border, there is a lot that we just weren’t aware we deeply associated with the border until we had been working in other contexts. One of them is listening to the radio to hear the reports of how many cars are waiting at the crossing and the wait time, the reporte de garitas that you hear on the radio. It’s something that’s a constant fixture, not just at the border but in the surrounding border cities. Once you start to move further and further out, that falls away. The absence of that was jarring. When we moved to Los Angeles that’s an observation we made. Where are the reportes de garitas? Then you also have the presence of border blasters, which is another important category we’re interested in. This is part of our interest in South Texas because some of the first border blasters were set up just on the other side of the Texas border. They used incredibly high-powered radio towers in Mexico, primarily broadcasting to the US. Border-blaster stations today have to abide by Mexican broadcasting regulations, so there are all of these Mexican government PSAs on the radio in the US and the borderlands. They have to be transmitted not just in Spanish but also in English, and they are really bizarre translations. Even in Spanish they’re kind of weird, but in English it is like a Google translation of the script. They’re the most wonderful, terrible, bizarre radio dramas. The sonics of mistranslation are just part of the landscape.
Another example is the Mexican national anthem being broadcast at midnight on like 95% of the radio stations that you hear in San Diego. This expansion of the Mexican nation-state into the US through radio is something that has always been interesting to us. It’s something we associate with the border, this slippage and the ways in which radio and sound create publics that defy the divide that the border seeks to impose. This slippage is like a spilling over of identities and cultures beyond borders. It is something that you can hear sonically by turning on the radio.
SIRG: One thing that we haven’t quite gotten to but feels like part of the soundscape of the border is the secondary checkpoint, which can be an interruption into an otherwise quiet landscape. This phenomenon occurs in places like South Texas and especially in Southwest Texas. Because the jurisdiction of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is a hundred miles from the actual border, there are secondary checkpoints. You think you’ve crossed and you go back to chatting or listening to the radio, and then all of a sudden in the middle of the desert there’s another checkpoint. That interruption of sociality that you are talking about by the state produces anxiety, but it also produces a sonic vacuum. At those secondary checkpoints there’s really an absence of sociality because it’s just the guard, it’s just the ICE agent, and they’re just there to check you, check your card, and ask you questions. I always found something quite ominous about that lack of sound. You’re enjoying the beautiful desert landscape and then all of a sudden, you’re met by the state again. That silence conditions a heightened awareness of the sound that you do or don’t produce.
Something we think about is how in the state’s presence silence becomes proof of suspicion, in the same way that being overly chatty is also proof of suspicion. There’s this double bind of producing too much noise or not producing enough. Ultimately, there are certain sonic expectations on the part of the state around what is an appropriate accent, what is an appropriate voice, what is an appropriate amount of activity to occur in the car. You have written about the ways that the border travels with you and I think you are speaking to that, the way the border extends into the imagination and the effects that it produces, many of which can be sonic. The border conditions the way we listen, the way we are heard, how much sonic space we take up, and so on. Can you talk a little bit about the sonic imaginary that your practice conjures up?
CC: One of the metaphors that we use to describe our practice is that it’s like herding clouds; thinking about that which is numinous, maybe it doesn’t have a lot of body, but it’s definitely floating and creating atmosphere. Here in San Diego/Tijuana, to drive to get to my [Amy] family’s home in the Imperial Valley, which is just east of San Diego, you cross a border checkpoint in the mountains and then there’s also one going north toward Orange County and Los Angeles. For us to be able to create this network of sound work traversing those kinds of checkpoints is just part of reality. In our work we are thinking about the long shadow that the border casts and the way that people and communities cope and make life livable and find ways to carve out humanity in spite of that. The practice is clearly thinking about life as it cites and responds to this whole necropolitical context. We’re here and we’re communities that are alive and living. So how do you orient a critique and a sonics that speaks of life and persistence in spite of practices of silencing?
When we think of the long shadow that the border casts and the kind of oppressiveness of the border being expanded, not just in terms of the actual sites of crossing but also increasingly through ICE and immigration enforcement, the border is always looming and the threat of being sent back across it is always looming for some folks. The form of resistance we’re interested in is the ways communities build a sense of belonging and refuge in spite of that, which has also led us to think about questions of home and building home. In preparation for this conversation I [Misael] was thinking about sound, and when I think back to being a kid, the two senses that come up the most are smells of home and also sounds, like waking up in the morning and hearing my mom blasting Rocío Dúrcal or my dad blasting Los Bukis. It’s like waking up to the sense of feeling safe and a sense of place and belonging. It’s been interesting to realize how sound and the different qualities of sound contribute to space, and how people utilize sound and music to build community, to build belonging in spite of these forms of oppression and dehumanization. Essentially, what we’re speaking about in a very roundabout way is how sound creates connections and bridges in defiance of borders.
More recently, we’re also interested in the ways that radio and sound not only establish links and connections across space but also across time, thinking about the deep histories of locations and also more speculative visions of the future. We did a project in the Little Tokyo neighborhood near downtown L.A. titled Future Echoes (2019) that was looking at the deep history of this small plot of land on First Street North, a city block basically, where we were broadcasting this radio sound installation. The broadcast was looking at the deep history of the site and also inviting poets and writers to speculate about its future. For us, the way in which sound can facilitate these acts of connection across space and time makes it a really great medium and an opportunity to think critically about connection, about belonging, and how it is that ultimately we can make life more livable in the now and into the future.
What was interesting about Future Echoes is that the city was hoping to redevelop this block. It was one of the only blocks in all of downtown Los Angeles that had not been redeveloped. One of the suggested plans was to build a Target or other corporate development projects. The Little Tokyo neighborhood was trying to organize. LTSC (Little Tokyo Service Center), which is a nonprofit community-driven development organization, really wanted to put the space in community hands to build sustainable housing and housing for veterans, especially because the Go for Broke Monument [commemorating Japanese Americans who served in the United States Army during World War II] is there. This development plan was thinking deeply not just about the needs of the neighborhood and this block but also the legacies and histories of people who have lived in Little Tokyo, including the history of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans. All of these things were very much in play, and I couldn’t help but feel that what ended up happening in the project was a form of sonic presencing. It felt like giving a voice to ghosts. The spectral quality of part of the soundwork was talking to Tina and Jessa Calderon, who are Tongva organizers in Los Angeles, and folks who live and work in Skid Row, and those adjacent to the block like Sir Oliver – talking and having conversations around that which is deeply present but not necessarily visible and activating a different kind of sense memory. That also felt like a form of magical metaphor, a form of magic. That feels good, not just in an intellectual way, but it also feels good to do that kind of collective conjuring work through sound.
SIRG: This is perfect because we are thinking a lot about Alex Chavéz’s writing on huapango arribeño [a musical style found in the mountainous regions of north central Mexico] and the way we carry sonic memory. It creates community or a sense of belonging within the community. Do you have more reflections on the way you think about sonic memory and song? Because I know you’ve also worked with song formats and musicians within some of your broadcasting.
CC: There’s a really important, wonderful collective in Los Angeles called LAPD, Los Angeles Poverty Department. LAPD has a somatic exercise that they do. They ask people to think of a movement that makes them feel good and then to do that movement until they do. We often think about that with sound. What is a sonic context that feels good? How does that actually lead to a theoretical idea? What sound affords us the ability to theorize with our bodies and to theorize with our ears? To theorize through feeling and to decolonize this relationship to knowledge and knowledge production?
It’s funny because this notion of sonic memory also brought up something that was a fixture in my [Misael] childhood, the mobility of playing sounds, specifically the mobility of radios and radio technology. I’m thinking in particular about growing up moving back and forth between L.A. and Tijuana. The radio, cassettes, and eventually CDs were these important things that would allow you to make the journey. They were something important that you prepared for this journey. My dad placed great value on his ability to play music inside of the car because we would spend so much time there. All of this translated to him really wanting to protect his car stereo. He would carry it around with him. Whenever he’d park anywhere, he would take it out because it was one of those radios you could bust out of the car. He had a little case for it and everything.
There’s something there in terms of valuing that but also associating specific forms of music to the experience of growing up at the border, specifically the types of music that my dad would play out of his archive of records and tapes. I think that has made its way into our work in different ways, thinking about specific forms of music – for example, looking at specific moments in time, like the 1960s when bands in Tijuana were listening to rock and roll and doing covers in Spanish. One of the main border-blaster radio stations that was broadcasting rock and roll in California was actually based south of Tijuana near Rosarito, Baja California, so you could easily pick up the station in Tijuana where my dad grew up. There are these ways that radio and specific forms of music have created regionalisms in different ways and have created shared publics that are also adapting and responding to local experiences in different ways. That has also been something that we’ve thought about in our work: shared solidarity by people of color in general in Southern California.
Regarding these radio stations, there is something important about oldies in this context, especially covers of oldies in Spanish, which are a form that for us articulates counter-narratives through popular culture. All of this has been deeply influential and it’s rooted in the fact that we listened to some songs first in Spanish because we were little border kids. There is a way that these songs have opened up a less hierarchical ordering of culture. There is also a desire that it creates, the way that you desire sound, and which sounds are given primacy. Sound becomes less overdetermined by hegemonic offerings. We are grateful and feel fortunate and privileged in a lot of ways to have lived in this context of crossing.
SIRG: Thank you so much for sharing your practice with us. We are very grateful. It was amazing to learn so much about the kind of experiences and histories that shape your work.
Sonic Insurgency Research Group (SIRG) is Josh Rios, Anthony Romero and Matt Joynt. SIRG’s research-based performance and exhibition practice examines normalized associations between criminality and sound, silencing as a form of social control, and voicing as a form of social resistance. SIRG’s group work has been exhibited and featured in M:ST 9 Biennial (Calgary, Canada), Counterpublic 2019 at The Luminary (St. Louis, MO), Acoustic Resonance at Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA (Portland, ME), State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, MO), and Work for the People (Or Forget about Fred Hampton) at Co-Prosperity (Chicago, IL). Upcoming work includes solo and group exhibitions at Locust Projects (Miami) and The Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles). Writing has been featured in ON Journal’s Rules and The Design Studio for Social Intervention’s Spatial Justice.