Artist Maps America's Detention System in Monumental New Work at The Huntington

A massive new artwork at The Huntington in San Marino puts America's detention infrastructure on full display -- and connects it to a much longer history of government-sanctioned cruelty.

Sandy Rodriguez's "Book 13" centers on a 20-foot-wide map that traces the network of detention centers, border enforcement zones, and sites of family separation across the United States. The installation doesn't just document where these facilities exist. It draws a direct line from today's ICE detention system back through centuries of Indigenous child removal and federal boarding schools.

The visual language is stark: Border Patrol vehicles along the U.S.-Mexico border, scenes of detention, militarized police in riot gear, and the whistles communities use to warn each other when immigration agents are nearby. Rodriguez layers these images to show that contemporary border enforcement isn't new -- it's the latest chapter in a story of displacement that goes back to the 17th century.

Rodriguez created the work using traditional Mesoamerican amate paper and hand-processed Indigenous pigments. That choice of materials is deliberate. She conducted research in The Huntington's own collections, working with historic U.S. boundary surveys to trace both geopolitical borders and the native plants that existed when those borders were first drawn. The message: borders are fluid, constructed, and have always served to separate families and erase Indigenous presence.

The installation includes more than just the map. Rodriguez presents Indigenous plant portraits, handmade books, and landscape paintings that together examine how boundaries shift and who gets hurt when they do.

"Book 13" is part of "Borderlands," an exhibition that launched in 2021 and recently expanded. The show examines how artists and objects reflect the impact of contested boundaries across the Americas. Rodriguez's work appears alongside installations by Laura Aguilar and Mercedes Dorame, creating a conversation about body politics, identity, and ancestral histories.

Aguilar, who died in 2018, used self-portraiture in Southern California and Western landscapes to explore how bodies -- especially queer, Chicana, fat bodies -- exist in relation to place. Her work "Artist Will Work for Axcess" shows her holding a cardboard sign, a pointed commentary on who gets access to gallery spaces and under what conditions.

Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame's "Deliquescence: Sites of Transformation" brings together archival imagery, ceramics, and sound to reflect on what land means when your people have been systematically removed from it.

The Huntington placed these contemporary works in dialogue with pieces from the colonial period through Reconstruction, including installations by Betye Saar, Kara Walker, and Todd Gray. Saar's "Drifting Toward Twilight" assembles found objects in a 17-foot wooden canoe, inviting viewers to think about memory, migration, and the enduring legacies of slavery.

The curatorial choice creates friction. You can't look at 18th-century American art the same way after walking through Rodriguez's map of detention centers. That's the point.

Rodriguez's research-based practice challenges the sanitized version of American history that institutions like The Huntington have historically presented. By using the museum's own archival materials to create work that indicts the systems those archives helped document, she turns the collection against itself.

The detention system Rodriguez maps isn't abstract. It's the same network that has separated thousands of families under policies that span multiple administrations. It's the same system that operates with minimal oversight, where deaths in custody go uninvestigated and conditions violate basic human rights standards.

"Book 13" makes visible what the government prefers to keep hidden: the geographic sprawl of detention infrastructure, the historical precedents that normalize it, and the communities that have resisted it across generations.

The "Borderlands" exhibition runs through September 7, 2026, though specific dates vary by installation. The Huntington is open Wednesdays through Mondays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Reservations are required on weekends, holidays, and during peak seasons.