A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects

n Marcus Zúñiga’s artworks, forms, knowledge traditions, and histories converge in space and across time. His mutualism imager (2024) sculptural installation and altar-like ritual artifact points to other geographies and cosmologies. Drawing from symbiotic relationships found in nature; ancestral wisdom and genealogies; and the spatial relations of human, spiritual, and cosmic bodies, the installation manifests his ongoing practice of “relearning the cosmos through a cultural consciousness.”

Mutualism, a biological term that identifies a mutually beneficial relationship between two different species, is a central concept in Zúñiga’s work. Here, he references the symbiotic bond between the yucca plant, a low-lying, sharp-leaved species native to Mexico and the Southwest United States, and the yucca moth. The moth is the yucca’s only pollinator, and the insect’s larvae rely exclusively on the plant’s seeds for food. The dried and seedless yucca pods incorporated into mutualism imager not only point to mutualism’s significance but also serve to ground the sculpture in the landscape of the Southwest.

mutualism imager was originally installed as a ceremonial earthwork, the locus for a ritual offering to the ecology and the artist’s deep family roots in the Gila region. The work was initially situated in a clearing surrounded by juniper trees in the mountains just outside of Reserve, New Mexico, an area that has been home to Zúñiga’s family for generations and is characterized by abundant yucca plants. The sculptural elements of mutualism imager include obsidian mirrors, black acrylic, pine, and yucca pods. The form tilts toward the sun as it appeared in the sky on the day it was installed. It acts as a nexus point, bound to the earth by a single line of cornmeal, a traditional Mesoamerican ingredi- ent, that extends out on the ground toward an obsidian marker some distance away. Together, the elements form a quincunx, an arrangement of four objects in the corners of a square, representing the four directions, with a fifth object at its center. In the curanderismo tradition common throughout Latin America, the quincunx symbolizes the coordinates of space and time in the cosmos.

In the sculpture, an array of obsidian discs also forms a quincunx. These black “smoking mirrors” were used by Aztec cultures in ritual and when evoking Tezcatlipoca, the deity associated with the jaguar nahual, obsidian, and the night sky. The arrangement of discs is also a direct reference to the Cosmic Background Imager telescope that operated in the Chilean Atacama desert from 1999 to 2008. Zúñiga applies the visual language of contemporary scientific inquiry to a cosmic spiritualism informed by his cultural heritage.

mutualism imager is a beacon for the interconnectedness of natural and spiritual forces; a reminder of the phenomenological interactions between the work’s materials and the New Mexico site; and a portal transporting cultural and familial histories to the present moment.

In installations and public artworks, iris yirei hu uses painting, dyeing, weaving, and writing to share her journeys in cultivating relations with all living beings. Her teachers are the natural world—the sun, soil, plants, and water—and she views her organic materials as embodiments of the matter that binds land and people, whom she sees as inseparably linked.

The artist has studied the ancestral traditions and processes of Indigenous communities in California, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Southwest China, and Taiwan. Her explorations have led to relationships with many knowledge bearers, including tribal elders, keepers of ancestral traditions, land and water protectors, scientists, historians, and artists—including Navajo textile artist Melissa Cody and the late Tongva elder Julia Bogany.

Bogany taught hu how art could be used to foster love and resistance. Their collaborative process explored opportunities for intercultural care for the land and each other in Southern California—a place of tangled Indigenous and immigrant histories. Their joint efforts inform hu’s philosophy of “collaborative optimism,” which is rooted in the potential of trauma to be a source of heal- ing, solidarity, and creativity for co-creating liberating futures for Indigenous, Black, and people of color.

In 2023, hu studied the ceramics of the Ripanu community in the Sapara terri- tory of the Ecuadorian Amazon. She observed the role of their craft traditions in preserving local Indigenous knowledge, which is threatened by the exploitative extraction of natural resources in the Amazon. Grounded in the politics of land rights, hu’s work creates space for worlds of story, love, and magic—making perceptible the humanity within these struggles. Her curiosity about the Sapara’s practice of lucid dreaming as a way of communicating with the forest, which they see as their kin and ancestors, initially led her to their community.

The blur between the states of dreaming and wakefulness is a subject in hu’s paintings of Blue CHiLD. In her work, this recurring indigo entity comes from an ancient allegorical clan of Blue People whose craft of storytelling grew into a technology for healing across time and place. Their descendants cannot help but continue to tell stories and create as ways to understand themselves and connect with kin around the world. Blue CHiLD. is characterized by an attuned, embodied way of living, a profound relationship to the Earth, and a rejection of the need to be legible. Blue CHiLD. exists not only in hu’s works but also within the artist herself.