Tierra Sagrada: L.A. is an Altar and an Offering
Exhibition dates: September 20 – November 22, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 20 | 5:00PM – 7:00PM
Tierra Sagrada: L.A. is an Altar and an Offering examines the relationship between placemaking and the sacred, focusing in particular on the landscape and iconographies of Los Angeles, and centering the city’s multiplicity of diasporic Latinx communities. Threading together the sprawl of Los Angeles is a visual language marked by a distinct urban lexicon and a delicate and enduring ecology, and held by layered histories of protest, survival, and solidarity. In dialogue with these contexts, artists Susan Aparicio, Lizette Hernández, Star Montana, Libbi Ponce, and Claudia V. Solórzano work across clay, metal, glass, and photography – uniquely rendering these materials as both altar and offering.
In Susan Aparicio’s work, she brings together religious symbols and contemporary cultural and political references, reframing them to build a cosmology of her own. Star Montana’s tender depictions of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers engage with her family’s matrilineal ties to water, both honoring and grieving this sacred source of life. Transformation, renewal, and turning with intention to her surroundings are central tenets in Lizette Hernández’s practice, reminding us to look to each other and to the land as we envision alternative futures. Rendering wrought iron gates in delicate clay, Claudia V. Solórzano celebrates a quintessential architectural detail rapidly disappearing in the face of gentrification. Through the use of industrial and organic materials reflective of the city itself, Libbi Ponce produces futurist sculptural objects that are both familiar and otherworldly.
Together, the artists in Tierra Sagrada: L.A. is an Altar and an Offering reflect and reimagine the urban and natural structures that formed them, and us.
Curator Bio
Isabella Aguilar-Rosil (she/them/ella) is a first-generation curator from Los Angeles whose work engages spirituality, archival practices, and placemaking within contemporary art. She has held curatorial roles at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Aguilar-Rosil earned a BA in Chicanx and Central American Studies from UCLA in 2020 and an MA in Museum Studies from New York University. She currently lives in Van Nuys with her two dogs.
Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle (she/her/ella) is a writer and curator whose interdisciplinary research centers on decolonial notions of selfhood and community. Her interests include image (un)making, language, poetics, and reimaginations of archival practice. Her writing can be found in Rewind Review Respond, The Dancer Citizen, and New Body (Wolfman Books), among other publications, and recent curatorial projects include As Yet and Still to Come (Tiger Strikes Asteroid LA, 2023). Shaffer-Del Valle received her BA from Columbia University and her MA in Visual & Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. She was born and raised in Los Angeles.
Contact
Isabella Aguilar-Rosil | isabellaaguilarrosil@gmail.com
Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle | emiliasdv@gmail.com