Your Land / My Land
Independent Project
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Supported by Professor Lizzie Leopold
2025-2026
Collaborators
Peter T. Alter, Matt Bodett, ming joi, Carlos Salazar-Lermont, and Maya Ortiz Saucedo
Role
Project Lead & Editor
Funding & Awards
MAAH & MAHA Student Thesis Research and Travel Award
MAAAP Enrichment Fund Advisory Board Grant
Your Land / My Land is a written roundtable discussion inspired by Woody Guthrie's 1939 folk song “This Land Is Your Land.” While often remembered as a patriotic anthem, Guthrie's original intent was a critique of inequality: a call for shared access to America's resources and opportunities regardless of class or background.
As 2026 marks the United States’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the song's central question—is this land made for you and me?—feels especially urgent. I believe cultural workers are uniquely positioned to explore how art can resist exclusionary narratives and imagine more inclusive forms of national identity. In light of the current political climate, I seek to examine how artists, curators, and historians navigate and challenge these boundaries.
In 2025, I began contacting prominent arts and cultural leaders across Chicago to gather written or visual reflections on the current moment in our field, compiling the perspectives of 5 Chicago-born or Chicago-based arts and culture professionals in the following publication. Participants were asked to respond to three central questions:
Belonging + Representation
1
How can cultural institutions challenge exclusionary narratives of “Americanness” while fostering a sense of belonging for immigrant and marginalized communities?
Art as Resistance
2
In moments of political violence and heightened nationalism, what roles can artists and cultural workers play in reclaiming or reinterpreting symbols of national identity, like “This Land Is Your Land,” to resist dominant ideologies?
The Ethics of Storytelling
3
How do curators, educators, and historians navigate the tension between preservation and disruption when telling stories of the nation? What responsibilities do they hold in shaping collective memory?
Pop-Up Exhibition
Open Studio Night
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
SAIC Galleries
Role
Curator
Exhibition Dates
October 16-17th, 2026
Artists
Luisé Cisneros, Changeun Cheddar Cho, Gray Davidson, Callie Elms, Jada Harris, Maggie Martin, Francisca Jiménez Ortegate, Zach Robinson, and Nia Wilson
The project culminated in a pop-up exhibition during SAIC Open Studio Night, an annual two-night public celebration where graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago open their work spaces to visitors and collaborate on shows across campus. The multimedia exhibition brought together the work of 9 SAIC artists from varying graduate programs to consider the many meanings of land: as territory, environment, memory, ancestry, spirituality, and home.
Through sculpture, photography, textile, and drawing, land emerges not as a neutral plane, but something continually shaped by the political boundaries, personal histories, collective memories, and lived experiences of those who inhabit it. The artists consider how place-making can be formed, disrupted, and reclaimed, exploring notions of queer and migrant belonging, chosen family and ancestry, the loss of home, spirituality and folklore, environmental conditions, protest and resistance, and colonial histories of dispossession.
