The place where the creek goes underground
An exhibition and publication by Anthony Romero with Deanna Ledezma and Josh Rios
Harvard Radcliffe Institute
September 16–December 14, 2024
Creek on the family property, Bandera, Texas, August 2024. Photograph by Deanna Ledezma (Place as Practice Research Collective).
“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. For more information about the exhibition, including how to request a copy of the booklet and the schedule of upcoming virtual and in-person events, please visit the Harvard Radcliffe Institute website.
Interview: Jameson Johnson, “On Kinship with Land and One Another: In Conversation with Deanna Ledezma, Josh Rios, and Anthony Romero,” Boston Art Review no. 13 (November 25, 2024).