To Trace by Motion: Becoming Co-Researcher with Melissa Gamez Herrera’s Color Code: How It Feels

By JD Pluecker | @jdpluecker

I am transfixed by these clouds. To float in the blue around the fluffy white. To fly through the upper tips of the billowy cumulus. To swoop around these cotton balls and bolls. The slightest wisps of wetness hang in the ether. In the clouds, other images emerge like portals into a not-so-distant past. A dream of domestic interiors. I ask myself where am I, whose house is this, how did I get here. Let’s stay in the dream a moment.

Melissa Gamez Herrera, 2024, Looking Upward and Russell Lee’s 1939 photographs for the Farm Security Administration #5, Inkjet Print, Edition of 5

In this one cloud dream—entitled Looking Upward and Russell Lee’s 1939 Photographs for the Farm Security Administration—I spend time looking at the three close-ups. In the top left portal, a glass-fronted dish cupboard. Scalloped doilies hang off the shelves. Inside the cupboard, the pages of a newspaper are cut to form undulated, scalloped arches. Though they look like lace doilies, they are not, but rather cut paper. Maybe no money to buy a doily. Or no money to crochet one. No, but there were scissors though, and heart shapes and arches in newspaper. There were materials on hand. A rasquache love of the handmade.

Through the portal at the top right, there’s a stuffed bunny pinned to the wall. A flapper with a huge bonnet and a hole in the center of her chest. A drawing of five little white girls in tiny dresses playing with a phone, or is it a balloon? Through the portal to the right at the bottom, a Valentine is displayed on a tabletop with a fraying doily covering it. A girl stands atop a boy saying, “Now that I have you pinned down, will you be my Valentine?” Behind it, the top of a head in a family photo emerges. Underneath, a doily with its lacework coming undone on the edge. These displays in an unknown home. A connection to a previous time, previous domestic space.

In the clouds the whole time. The piece made me think of Cecilia Vicuña’s installation and book, Cloud-Net, from her show at DiverseWorks in Houston in 1999. The ways clouds connect and form a web for dreams. This idea of clouds as network or frame. I wanted to begin this essay in these clouds.

Photograph of Presa House Entryway by JD Pluecker

It’s taken me some time to find words for Melissa Gamez Herrera’s exhibition, Color Code: How it Feels. How to think and feel and write about a research-based show that spans so many dispersed points. A web. Initially, I’d only seen photos of the show at Presa House on-line, but there was no way to describe it without getting my body into the space and experiencing it in person.

To describe from the mid-13th century descriven, “interpret, explain” or from the late 14th century “form or trace by motion.”

I needed to move through it, see and feel its layout, understand how the artist decided to engage the rooms. To trace by my motion a pathway through the images and objects.

So I ride the bus from Houston to be able to walk through the city, the house on South Presa Street, the show.  A path traced by motion from once city to another, around city streets, into a house. Motion forms channels, connections, and this path from one city with an Anglo colonial name to another with a Spanish colonial one. Another rut in this route I’ve taken many times before between cities, families, friends.

San Antonio is a city formed by multiple layers of colonization and conflict, war and suppression. First, the Spanish as they established their missions and presidios and forced Indigenous people into farm labor and, in the process, attempted to Christianize them. Then, an Anglo and imperialist power structure that occupied the city and the region after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. These foundational moments of conquest layered one on top of the other. The neighborhood of Presa House has its own singular history. The house is located on the edge of the King William and Lavaca Historic Districts. These Districts first built by German merchants and tradespeople in the nineteenth century, then leased and sold to Mexican Americans when the Germans moved out to the newer close-in suburbs. Those Germans were my ancestors, so I am conscious that I am not outside of this history.

I go and place my body into the space of this exhibition by Gamez Herrera, an artist whose work I wrote about before in the show Soy de Tejas, specifically her powerful photographs from Piedras Negras on the Mexican side of the border near Eagle Pass. We’d first met in 2018 on a delegation trip to meet with independent labor and community organizers in Piedras Negras with Austin Tan Cerca de la Frontera. I was working as a Spanish interpreter, and Gamez Herrera was doing photographic documentation.

I walk in and see that the show begins in the entrance hallway with digitally-altered images of clouds with their portals into domestic scenes, people, children, homes, walls, wallpaper. For me, these cloud images are the dreamlike center of the show, both physically and conceptually.

But I can only process so much in the space on that first day. The cloud images in the central core. The other images of kids and women in the first room to the left with a corner altar, the walls covered with newspaper clippings. The back left room with images reproduced from a 1968 CBS News Report and a series of hefty texts on the table. The back right room features a projection of questions from a Civil Rights commission of the same year. A fideo box on the wall with audio broadcasting out of it. Small white plaster angels on a table and affixed to the wall. A plethora of words and images and sculpture. I find it all a bit overwhelming and diffuse. So often art that emerges out of deep research and connection to place ends up feeling this way. Like the artist has included all the layers and now what are we to do.

…when I see an artist like Gamez Herrera who comes out of a population marginalized in the grand narratives of Texas and US exceptionalism and colonialism doing research-based work like this, I get excited. I want to slow down. The work asserts that these places are regionalized and not regional…

In an Artforum essay entitled “Information Overload” analyzing research-based artistic practice, Claire Bishop has talked about this sense of overwhelm as “an excess of information that [is] difficult, if not impossible, to meaningfully grasp.” Bishop connects this research-based practice and its forms to the Internet as it produces “a line of thinking governed by drift rather than depth, creative inaccuracy rather than expertise, and accessibility rather than the ivory tower.”

Bishop describes the overload of information and the forms often found in exhibitions of research-based art: documents in a vitrine, shelves with books and leaflets, graphs, charts, photos, videos with talking heads, a slide projector, a monotone voice-over, a tabletop with papers, long informational captions, and always a pamphlet to take home. She writes, “Whenever I encounter one of these installations, I start to experience a feeling of mild panic: How much time is it going to take to wade through this?”

There are clear connections between Gamez Herrera’s exhibition and the trends Bishop mentions: the analog projector in one room features one woman’s answers to the questions of the 1968 Civil Rights Commission’s visit to San Antonio. Bishop speaks of this as “micro-narrative.” The table in another room features huge tomes. Bishop remarks on this profusion of text, saying “When large amounts of text are deployed in an installation, it is more likely to be experienced as a continuation of data overload rather than as a sensuous respite.” Bishop talks about how the undoing of authorship was experienced in the 90s as subversive, but now, after decades of Internet-surfing and overabundance of information, she argues that “renouncing the authorial rudder is no longer subversive but experienced as frustrating, burdensome, and opaque.”

And yet, I do not see this exhibition as “frustrating, burdensome, [or] opaque.” I want to think about why this is. In national and international art talk, these lands of so-called Texas are so often maligned as backwards or retrograde, bastions of conservatism, ignoring the lived experiences of so many people who—both historically and in the present day—have carved out spaces to survive and thrive here.

Melissa Gamez Herrera, 2024, Looking Upward and Russell Lee’s 1939 photographs for the Farm Security Administration #3, Inkjet Print, Edition of 5

So when I see an artist like Gamez Herrera who comes out of a population marginalized in the grand narratives of Texas and US exceptionalism and colonialism doing research-based work like this, I get excited. I want to slow down. The work asserts that these places are regionalized and not regional, that, for example, Mexican Americans in San Antonio are marginalized but not marginal, minoritized but not minority. I want to pay attention to the work, to do the labor of tracing my motion through it, to become “co-researcher.” 

As I grapple with Gamez Herrera’s art, I see her embodied research into the archive and into present-day landscapes. I can feel the flow of the San Antonio River over the land, the Payaya village of Yanaguana living on. I can feel the textures of the long-gone interior installations in the homes of Mexican Americans on the Westside in the 1930s. They survive in homes all across the city and in the space of the gallery thanks to Gamez Herrera. All of these layers are processed through the artist’s decisions, and now my own as writer and co-researcher. The work weaves a cloud-net.

Maybe this is all too idealistic or pie-in-the-sky, but I think the titles of these cloud-portal pieces—Looking Upward—references that utopian thinking. How to look up and through the clouds, to dwell both in the past and in the present and to eye other futures than the ones proffered by the ever-oppressive overlords.

I’d need some time to sit with it all.

A house as gallery as house. Gamez Herrera is thinking and re-thinking all of these images. All of these materialities. The documentation of them. The recreation of display strategies of sacralization as repeated ritual. The home re-made. Cycles repeat.

I wake up on the morning following my visit to the gallery and sit with a coffee and zoom in and out on the photos that I took the day before. Walking through the exhibition gave me a sense of the path through, my own orientation in the space. Revisiting the digital images on my computer allows me to zoom in, to look closely. To see the little installations from people’s homes emerging through the portals in the clouds.

Detail of Melissa Gamez Herrera, 2024, Looking Upward and Russell Lee’s 1939 photographs for the Farm Security Administration #3, Inkjet Print, Edition of 5

On my laptop, I open one of the photographs in the series: Looking Upward and Russell Lee’s 1939 Photographs for the Farm Security Administration. This one numbered three.

A little boy in the upper left corner—pixelated when I zoom in—stands in the yard of a house. A metal washbasin. A rickety wooden fence. Sheets and white clothing hang from clotheslines above him, creating an archway, framing his questioning face. Little girls and an older woman behind him, washing? Playing with a doll? He has a little paddle in his hand. Playing. The photo of a girl in a dress with a baby in her arms, her hands clasped in almost prayerful serenity. I zoom in on the photo: something is in her hand, like a shell or a toy. The two figures with their faces obscured by the clouds.

Claire Bishop talks about how research-based projects ask viewers to become “co-researchers” in the work. I spend a morning investigating Russell Lee and his photos, which I find have been digitalized and are available on-line through the Library of Congress website. Russell Lee was a photographer from the Midwest who eventually settled in Austin; he spent much of 1939 taking photographs in San Antonio, documenting Mexican American life as part of the US government’s Farm Security Administration. Lee originally took these images as an Anglo outsider documenting living conditions and poverty in Mexican American communities in San Antonio, particularly on the Westside.

To San Antonio, 2024, Installation of found objects

Gamez Herrera returns to these images by an outsider now housed in an official, institutional archive to re-appropriate them, turning them into source material for dreamy fabulation. What changes when these images are taken up by a Mexican American woman and artist in San Antonio in the 2020s? I’d argue she’s elaborating a kind of “dreamy fabulation” in line with Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation,” an attempt to re-imagine these individuals, these domestic installations, and their communities. In many of her decisions, Gamez Herrera focuses in on the backgrounds, the home spaces and decorations, often leaving a fragment of a face or no face at all. To return to them an interiority stripped away by the documentary work of outsiders.

Through these portals in the clouds, I catch glimpses of walls papered with newspaper clippings or walls made of cardboard boxes or sign material. In the space of the exhibition, Gamez Herrera has recreated these spaces, papering an entire corner of a room with newspaper clippings and assembling a domestic installation with shoes, candles, a Virgen, a clay bowl, flowers. A recreation of the scenes and the rasquache aesthetic found in Russell Lee’s photos and in homes all across San Antonio. A house turned into a gallery turned back into a house. A house as gallery as house. Gamez Herrera is thinking and re-thinking all of these images. All of these materialities. The documentation of them. The recreation of display strategies of sacralization as repeated ritual. The home re-made. Cycles repeat.

What does redlining feel like? What is the feeling of racial discrimination and oppression? The feeling of the structures of marginalization and deprivation. The feeling of the weight weighing down, laying waste.

In the weeks following my visit, the show closes, and I am left still grappling with what I have seen. Trying to understand the multiple directions and reflections of the work.

What I come to: Melissa Gamez Herrera transmits the feeling behind the color code. The feeling under the map.

In Drinking from Faucet, we see the layout of the central part of San Antonio, the Yanaguana river running through the center, the division of the grid into the different color codes.

Superimposed at the center, two little girls open an outdoor tap to get water. The tap is wrapped with canvas or fabric, the way we wrap the uninsulated pipes when the weather gets near freezing in Texas. One girl helping the other. The little girls are centered within a square.

Melissa Gamez Herrera, Drinking from faucet, 2024, Archival Inkjet Print on French Speckletone Paper, Edition of 3

The feeling in the little legend that says, “White: Blank / Negro: BLACK / Mexican: RED.” Red like Indian. Red like the color of disappearance or marginalization. Red like blood. The aftermath of the violence needed to disappear and to marginalize.

What does redlining feel like? What is the feeling of racial discrimination and oppression? The feeling of the structures of marginalization and deprivation. The feeling of the weight weighing down, laying waste. Might feeling be transferable to someone else? What is empathy and what are its limits?

Bishop’s experience of information overload in the exhibitions of research-based artists is presented as a universal experience, but I think it is a historically-produced cosmopolitan response to this form of art when other historical relations and connections to place have been severed. I respond to this work as myself, a German Texan with seven generations of settler colonial ancestors in these lands. Someone who has spent decades in San Antonio as outsider and insider and visitor and occasional inhabitant.

Bishop says, “The richest possibilities for research-based installation emerge when preexisting information is not simply cut and pasted, aggregated, and dropped in a vitrine but metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world.” I’d argue that this metabolization can also be undertaken by an idiosyncratic participant-observer writer with “skin in the game.” Skin in the sense of actual skin. My skin means something because Gamez Herrera’s skin means something, because the skin of these individuals in the Russell Lee photographs means something within this game of art and capital and the game of art world pretensions and promotion. This is a game (and it is not a game), and then there is also skin.

Perhaps another way to say it is that I’d argue Bishop moves in another way than I move. And the way that I trace a path by motion from one city to another (from Anglo colonizer city to Spanish colonial saint settlement), through the streets of downtown, or through the assembled objects and images of Gamez Herrera is made different by who I am and a desire to engage in “caretaking relations, not American dreaming”, as Kim TallBear has written about it.

I’m trying to argue that this work by Gamez Herrera attains particular meanings through its own fabulations and dreamings in these clouds, by her insistence on including the huge tomes of the 1960s reports, by her commitment to keeping it all in. And then our own relationality.

How do we value our own relations in a frame that does not value them? Horizontal connections. The fragility of connection or friendship or relations. Their breakability.


Untitled (Cherubs), 2024, Wax, Cement, Found Wildflowers and Grasses

Let’s end by returning to the clouds. I see the woven strands of Vicuña’s clouds in these photographs. I see other clouds in literature and art.

What kind of clouds are these? I remember a poem by the Afro-Cuban writer Nicolás Guillén titled “Las Nubes” and translated by Aaron Coleman as “The Clouds.” In the poem, he creates a cloud sanctuary, a nubario, to hold a variety of different clouds. Guillén describes 84 different types of clouds in the sanctuary, and then he describes a certain motherly kind of cloud:

Detenidas,
de algodón seco y firme,
las matronales fijas del mediodía.

Translated by Coleman as:

Restrained,
made of dry and firm cotton,
the motherly, immovable, noonday ones.

These are the clouds in these photos. Detained. Stuck. Immovable. Set. Dry and firm, like South Texas chapparal dirt. Like the hard dirt of the roadside around a roadside memorial, a descanso. A place of rest and remembrance for a loved one who passed away there. A motherly attention to loss.


JD Pluecker (They or She) works with language, that is, a material thing, a thing of life and history. Her undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production.

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