Jackie Amézquita works along a continuum of performance, craft, communal action, conceptual frameworks, and profound storytelling that reaches into her own life and out toward a broader diasporic embrace. First gaining wide attention with her remarkable 2018 work Huellas que Germinan (Footprints That Sprout), in which she walked the distance from the border at Tijuana to her home in Los Angeles as a gesture of investigative solidarity with the immigrants who've done the same, Amézquita’s practice has expanded to include further objects and embodied actions around soil, masa (corn), limestone, salt and copper—the elements of the earth. Her contribution to the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living biennial brings together her awareness of and engagement with the ground itself and its powers of memory and narrative.
The 9 x 13-foot grid El suelo que nos alimenta (The soil that feeds us), 2023, arranges 144 square slabs—each a richly textured and variegated soil sampled from 144 neighborhoods that make up the Los Angeles region, combined with masa, salt, rain, limestone, and copper, and etched with street scenes from the places—in a monumental, humble, expressive, and defiant acknowledgement of the centuries of indigeneity and migrations that this land has witnessed, and a call back to the kaleidoscope of places from whence these once and future Angelenos have hailed. In her specificity of chosen materials and her alchemy of tradition and transformation, Amézquita engages with interwoven histories of ancestral crafts, modern abstraction, architecture, the body, public ritual, political critique, shared grief, and displaced/amalgamated identity.

L.A. WEEKLY: When did you first know you were an artist? 

JACKIE AMEZQUITA: I have always known that I am an artist. As a child, at around 8 or 9, I would make small art objects out of  things I found at home or in the garden. I professionally started my artistic practice when I was 25.

 

What is your short answer to people who ask what your work is about? 

My practice is about regeneration. In my work I unpack my personal experience as a formerly  undocumented immigrant, placing it into conversation with societal memory and histories. I examine the complexities of displacement, social adaptation, and identity formation.

Did you go to art school? Why/Why not? 

Yes. I studied visual communications at Los Angeles Valley College, and received a BFA from ArtCenter College of Design, and an MFA from UCLA. I have always had a voice, but it was in school that I was able to figure out what that voice looked like.

 

Why do you live and work in L.A., and not elsewhere? 

L.A. has been my home for the last 20 years. I arrived to this place in 2003. It is here I have built a community of collaborators, friends, and family. When I left Guatemala, I did not expect to find it here. But I have.

When is/was your current/most recent show or project? 

Besides the current Made in L.A. 2023 at the Hammer, one of my most recent projects was Gemidos de la Tierra (Wailing of the Land/Soil), 2023, presented by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and Los Angeles Nomadic  Division (LAND). It was a public mobile procession, activated in Los Angeles County for two days as a three-truck caravan transporting 12 wooden panels inscribed with the names of people who perished in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) custody, over the span of 20 years  (2003-23).

 

Website and social media handles:  

jackieamezquita.com

IG: @jackieamezquita





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