Maker-in-Residence featuring Jackie Amézquita
May 31, 2026 — October 25, 2026
ESPAÑOL (Más información sobre la exposición)
Jackie Amézquita (b. 1985, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala) lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages the ecological, ancestral, and cosmological dimensions of space, place, and temporality. For Amézquita, a site is a living constellation of human, elemental, and living systems—an evolving terrain where memory, matter, and energy circulate across deep time.
Her work choreographs biomaterials as cosmological agents that carry ancestral knowledge across genealogies, informed by oral traditions rooted in Latin American epistemologies. Earth, charcoal, rainwater, masa, and limestone act as vessels of memory and transformation, mediating exchanges between volcanic depth, terrestrial surface, and atmospheric movement. Activated through mixing, compression, burning, washing, and dispersal, these materials function as ritual technologies that awaken and set matter into relation.
As a Maker-in-Residence at Craft Contemporary, Amézquita invites visitors to act as curators – recreating the intimacy of studio visits and offering a first-hand experience of her artistic process. Using soil gathered from around the United States, she mixes the dirt with masa, cacao, spring water, and seals them with copal to form pebble-like sculptures coming from the palm of her hand. A new alchemy that combines natural materials, ancestral knowledge, and the physical imprint of humanity, Amézquita’s residency asks the audience to contribute to her project while displaying her method and materials. Her freezer and oven are key elements that help her freeze the soil until it’s ready to be used [stopping time] and then the oven bakes the soil to create the pebbles [activate it again through heat]. This process is inspired by the natural climate patterns and seasonal changes of Mother Earth that make life possible.
Jackie will be at Craft Contemporary during the following dates: June 5, 19, 26 | July 24, 31 | August 21, 28 | September 11, 18 | October 2, 23 | 11:30am – 4:30pm.
FREE FOR MEMBERS!
A national Call for Soil on social media, which is part of Amézquita’s project at Craft Contemporary, is made in collaboration with the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara and the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft.
About the Maker-in-Residence Program
The Maker-in-Residence (MiR) program at Craft Contemporary reimagines the traditional artist residency by inviting individuals, collectives, or nonprofit organizations to work on site at the museum while engaging visitors through informal conversation and live demonstrations as a free public program. The MiR program focuses on the craftspeople and their process, bridging the disconnect between the final result and the act of making. Working in Craft Contemporary’s space, the Makers introduce visitors to stories and experiences and give them first-hand knowledge of how and why something is made. The Maker-in-Residence program offers human-to-human connections between artists, viewers, and art, and creates a space for empathy, emotions, and inclusion.
The [Untold] Story of Craft
Beginning in June 2025, Craft Contemporary presents a series of exhibitions interpreting the varied interactions between craft and the natural elements: air, water, earth, and fire. The exhibitions highlight sustainability, accessibility, and connect visitors to the universal rhythms of the Earth. Significantly, these exhibitions tell a new story of Craft in a contemporary world as we work together to heal global wounds through creativity and making.
