Drawing on the intertwined histories of the transcontinental railroad, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, and the mythology of the American West, the project investigates how communities have imagined where liberation is—and where it may still be.
The installation takes the form of a fragmented railroad constructed from soil and tabby cast elements, with tracks that reference the chinoiserie motifs found in both Southern Greek Revival architecture and Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Embedded within the tracks are thirty cast domestic objects sourced from institutional archives and community participants, creating a collective archive of memory, migration, labor, and belonging.
At its core, the project is an exploration of civic friendship: the relationships, responsibilities, and forms of care that make collective life possible across difference. Through community workshops, oral histories, performance, and digital technologies including 3D scanning, photogrammetry, and an interactive online archive, participants become co-creators of the work. Bringing together personal testimony, material culture, and public history, Subterranean Convergence positions remembrance not as a means of preserving division, but as a practice of reflection, accountability, and shared understanding. By holding beauty and justice in conversation, the project asks how communities might move beyond inherited histories of fracture toward more generous forms of belonging, repair, and collective flourishing.
