alejandro t. acierto: Model Home / Desert ArtLAB: What the Earth Keeps

Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art presents two new exhibitions that engage in a thought-provoking dialogue about differing relationships to the desert: one centered on expansion and displacement, the other on reciprocity and ecological knowledge. Model Home by alejandro t. acierto examines the impact of development and population growth, surveying how this expansion has altered the landscape and affected its human and nonhuman inhabitants, while asking who gets to keep home in the desert. What the Earth Keeps by Desert ArtLAB (April Bojorquez and Matt Garcia) imagines the land’s agency over human systems—consumption, domesticity, social hierarchy, colonial power—that attempt to control it, asking what happens if we listen to what the land already knows. Together, they generate tensions between extraction and reciprocity, ownership and belonging, and human control and land agency.

alejandro t. acierto: Model Home
September 26, 2026–February 7, 2027

Model Home investigates the development of the desert landscape across the Southwest, focusing on rapid urban expansion and population growth in the Phoenix metro area. The exhibition considers what it means to call the desert home, exploring how humans and wildlife build, occupy, and transform environments, often at one another's expense.

Serving as a backdrop for urban expansion in the Sonoran Desert, the architectural structure within the exhibition mimics the floor plan of new housing developments. It examines the impacts of growth and ecological disruption while challenging the perception of the desert as empty or unoccupied.

alejandro t. acierto approaches the archive in an expanded way, collecting and presenting artifacts from metro Phoenix developments. Looking to the land as a source of knowledge, content, and data, the work considers how its value shifts as humans transform natural habitat into agriculture and, ultimately, built environments. This progression reveals how land is often deemed valuable only when it produces economic value.

The exhibition highlights the lasting consequences of development, acknowledging that many landscapes cannot be returned to their original form. Model Home serves as a reminder of what once existed and asks: What was here before? Who inhabited these spaces? Where did they go? And where do we go from here?

Organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Julie Ganas, curator of engagement and digital initiatives, and Oliver Sayers, SMoCA coordinator.

Desert ArtLAB: What the Earth Keeps
September 19, 2026–January 13, 2027

Desert ArtLAB is an interdisciplinary environmental art collaborative co-directed by April Bojorquez and Matt Garcia, whose practice explores how relationships to land are shaped through histories of belonging, displacement, and cultural memory. Grounded in Indigenous and Chicanx perspectives, their work challenges dominant narratives of the desert, foregrounding the region as a living site of ecological knowledge and potential.

What the Earth Keeps is a site-specific installation, performance, and cyanotype-mapping project that explores reciprocity between land, ecology, and lived relationships to place. At its center is a formal dining table overtaken by several tons of desert soil. Projected at the back of the gallery is the durational performance the artists undertook to slowly bury the table before planting a living prickly pear cactus at its summit. The table symbolizes systems of order, consumption, and power inherited from colonial histories while the earth overtaking the structure imagines a return to ecological systems that endure beyond human frameworks. Rather than presenting this as an act of destruction, the installation imagines it as one of regeneration and renewal.

Throughout the space, cyanotype maps expand these ideas by upending how mapping has shaped understandings of land. Drawing upon the history of cartography while resisting its claims to objectivity, these layered maps function as records of relationship rather than ownership, tracing connections rather than boundaries.

Organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and curated by Keshia Turley, assistant curator.