tierra at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles

tierra, the fourth edition of Craft Contemporary’s Clay Biennial, is on view at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles

May 31 – October 25, 2026

Craft Contemporary is pleased to present tierra, the fourth installment of its Clay Biennial. On view May 31 – October 25, 2026, tierra reconsiders the biennial’s scope by expanding its focus beyond ceramic and clay as a singular medium to encompass broader practices grounded in land and earth. The fourteen featured artists work with earth-based materials as something more than physical substances, treating them as carriers of history shaped by the people who have worked, lived on, and been displaced from the land. tierra asks what it means to truly know a place, and how that knowledge gets passed down through the things we make with our hands. tierra is organized by lead curator Andres Payan Estrada, with a curatorial committee formed by Frida Cano, Joel Garcia, Mercedes Dorame, and Cannupa Hanska Luger.

“There is a quiet weight to the word tierra. It settles slowly, like dust after movement, like clay in a riverbed,” said Andres Payan Estrada, lead curator of tierra. “The exhibition not only recognizes earth as material, but also how knowledge itself is carried, formed, and shared.”

“tierra is a natural expression of everything Craft Contemporary stands for,” said Frida Cano, Senior Curator at Craft Contemporary. “Our curatorial values urge us to look to the land, to ancestral knowledge, and to the people whose hands have shaped both. This exhibition brings all of that together in a way that feels especially pressing right now.”

tierra is part of The [Untold] Story of Craft, Craft Contemporary’s curatorial philosophy that prioritizes storytelling, accessibility, sustainability, and honors the natural world with a commitment to minimal waste. Rooted in lunar cycles and the Tongva calendar’s cyclical rhythms, the museum’s curatorial approach bridges past and present, linking ancestral wisdom with contemporary craft practices. The series is scheduled to feature two exhibitions annually, each dedicated to exploring a central theme tied to nature’s elements: Air, Water, Earth and Fire.

Craft Contemporary launched its clay biennial in 2018 under the title Melting Point, establishing a dedicated platform to reflect on two decades of explosive growth in ceramic art and the radical departure from functional pottery traditions toward experimental, expressive, and often deliberately imperfect sculptural forms. The series was founded on the premise that contemporary ceramics had evolved into a medium uniquely capable of recording the body’s physical gestures and the artist’s psychological state, prioritizing the raw, visceral, and the “unknowable” over technical precision. Together, the biennial editions—Melting Point (2018), The Body, The Object, The Other (2020), Wayfinding (2023), and now tierra (2026)—have shaped the event into a continuous exploration that treats “craft” as a verb.

Featured artists: Jackie Amézquita, Natalia Arbelaez, Syd Carpenter, Teresa Castro, Armando Guadalupe Cortés, rafa esparza, Miguel Fernández de Castro, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Karla García, Christine Howard Sandoval, Joanna Keane Lopez, Ruben Olguin, Iman Person, Jeri Redcorn

Exhibition Organization and Highlights

tierra engages the varied definitions of the Spanish word meaning earth, land, soil. Coinciding with the nation’s Semiquincentennial, tierra activates earth-based mediums to demonstrate that emotional memory is inseparable from environmental impact, that ancestral knowledge challenges colonial histories, and that care emerges alongside critique. The exhibition foregrounds the work of Latinx, Indigenous, and Black artists, including Jackie Amézquita, Natalia Arbelaez, Syd Carpenter, Teresa Castro, Armando Guadalupe Cortés, Miguel Fernández de Castro, rafa esparza, Karla Garcia, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Joanna Keane Lopez, Ruben Olguin, Iman Person, Jeri Redcorn, and Christine Howard Sandoval. The artists use clay, adobe, masa, rock, sand, dirt, and soil to create artworks that range from large-scale sculpture installation to performance to film.

tierra is organized thematically across three interconnected frameworks: emotional, familial, and cultural connections to land; geologic agents, extraction, and colonial critique; and restoration and reparation. These themes trace a continuous arc from inherited belonging to systemic harm to collective healing. The exhibition unfolds across multiple floors. The first floor is anchored by the Maker-in-Residence program, featuring Jackie Amézquita; the second floor centers lineage, ancestry, and matriarchal knowledge systems; and the third floor brings into dialogue works addressing extraction and environmental impact alongside practices of care and restoration, insisting on the entanglement between wound and repair. Specially commissioned textual contributions punctuate the galleries, operating as parallel forms of knowledge that expand tierra’s narrative devices into language, text, and storytelling. The exhibition invites viewers to move through these layers, recognizing land not only as ground beneath our bodies, but as a living record of everyone who has ever worked it, loved it, encountered it, or lost it.

The publication for tierra is conceived as a multi-part volume composed of individually printed sections that together form a single, assembled work. It includes introductions from Craft Contemporary and the Rubin Center in El Paso, TX—co-organizers of the exhibition—an essay by lead curator Andres Payan Estrada, and contributions from the curatorial committee. Additional sections present artist and contributor biographies with selected images, as well as installation images of the exhibition, capturing newly commissioned works. At the publication’s core are six commissioned text contributions, each produced as a discrete component and compiled within the larger volume. The publication’s colored edges form visible strata, evoking layers of soil and underscoring the project’s attention to accumulation, sedimentation, and the transmission of knowledge over time.

tierra coincides with Craft Contemporary’s Maker-in-Residence Jackie Amézquita (b. 1985, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala), Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the relationship between land, memory, and identity across genealogies. Her practice is channeled through the fuse of biomaterials such as earth, masa, charcoal, and rain, treating them as active carriers of ancestral knowledge.

Contact
info@craftcontemporary.org

Craft Contemporary
5814 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90036
United States