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Cynthia Gutierrez-Krapp

Strangers in Our Own Land 

 

Project Space
February 19 - July 25, 2026

  

Memory can move through land, be held in materials, gestures, and acts of making. Strangers in Our Own Land presents new and recent works by Cynthia Gutierrez-Krapp, whose practice is grounded in processes of making shaped by place, lineage, and lived knowledge.

 

 

Working primarily through objects, the exhibition invites viewers into a field of relations where material carries memory and making traces the movement of bodies and knowledge across time. For over a decade, Gutierrez-Krapp has explored her Diné/Navajo, Mescalero Apache, and Yaqui heritage, histories largely unknown to her until midlife. The silence surrounding these identities within her maternal line has become a generative force. Through making, she confronts erasure and trauma, opening space for healing, visibility, and reverence without settling into fixed narratives. Questions of guidance, ancestry, and movement remain embedded in material processes, returning attention to the hand, the land, and the ways knowledge is carried forward.

Across the exhibition, acts of making become acts of tracing, movement, and returning. Objects hold evidence of paths taken, and paths still unfolding, situating her object-based practice as a way of navigating memory, place, and inherited knowledge. A practice shaped by intergenerational resilience, personal transformation, and the profound relationships between geographies and memory.

Curated by Senior Curator Andres Payan Estrada, this exhibition offers an intimate look at a practice shaped by intergenerational resilience, personal transformation, and the profound relationships between geographies and memory. 

Supported by a generous Mellon Foundation grant, Genius Loci looks at the ways in which our local context informs artists’ practices. For more information about the Genius Loci exhibition series and selection process, CLICK HERE.

 

 

public PROGRAMs

Artist and Curator Conversation: Wednesday, April 01

Artist Cynthia Gutierrez-Krapp and Senior Curator Andres Payan Estrada discussed the themes and processes behind the exhibition. Delved into Gutierrez-Krapp’s explorations in material storytelling, handmade objects, and repair, offering audiences deeper insight into the intimate, place-based narratives that shape the exhibition. 

 

Coyote Stories with Alex Mares: Saturday, February 21

Participants joined Diné storyteller and interpreter Alex Mares for an afternoon of storytelling rooted in winter traditions shared by Navajo, Pueblo, and Apache communities. Presented in connection with Cynthia Gutierrez-Krapp’s Strangers in Our Own Land, this program explored Coyote stories as carriers of humor, cultural memory, and intergenerational knowledge.