Borders of Belonging, 2026

Disassembled American flag, cotton fabrics, acrylic paint, embroidery thread, Australian crystals 

(Commissioned by the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Special thanks to sponsor Reggie McLain for generously making our lobby exhibit, Borders of Belonging, possible.)

Borders of belonging exist on land and inside people. They serve the same end: dividing us against ourselves. The U.S.-Mexico border is a border of belonging. I spent 100 hours embroidering this border line into the center of this artwork during the month of June. I shifted into this hours-long daily sewing practice to contemplate the scale of active ecological and social fracturing happening with the U.S.-Mexico border.

The line that divides the center of this artwork–a circle, round like a world–comprises more than 16,000 stitches. Over the course of this season’s Cabrillo Festival, July 26th to August 9th, ICE will have targeted and detained an additional 16,000+ people in the U.S. under the pretense that they don’t belong because of their Latin American heritage. It’s a staggering number of adults and kids equal to about a quarter of our city’s population in Santa Cruz. (ICE arrests are now surging to 1,000-2,000 people per day.)

This summer, as the U.S. celebrates the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, whose preamble famously declares unalienable rights for all people, how do we orient ourselves toward the current chapter of racialized violence in America? 

Borders of Belonging is an appeal to orient toward wholeness amidst the fracture, laboring a paradigm of interdependence through the pain of presence. While we contend with social and ecological injustices of our past and present, is there wholeness in the justice we seek? Who and what do we exclude, and how does that impact our shared futures?

Festival attendees are invited to contribute to this piece. An invitation to play your part can be found in the lobby at the Civic Auditorium during open rehearsals and other free public events.

Quotes in the art:

“To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” -James Baldwin, 1962

“…[A] land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders–whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers–where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen, as the hideous crocodile seizes upon his prey!” -Fredrick Douglass, 1838