Upcoming Exhibition: March 7, 2026 — April 18, 2026
These exhibitions bring together Marcus Xavier Chormicle and Raul Rodriguez, two artists who expand photography beyond documentation, using it to excavate memory across the borderlands of the Southwest. Rooted in personal archive and regional history, their practices examine how images carry the weight of family lineage, labor, migration, and inherited narratives. Moving between documentary impulse and material intervention, both artists position the photograph as more than a record; it becomes a site where private memory and public history converge.
Marcus Xavier Chormicle: Man Down
Marcus Xavier Chormicle (b. 1997) is a lens-based artist from Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a lineal descendant of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. Working across photography, collage, land-based installation, artist books, and performance, his practice centers on grief, generational cycles of systemic violence, and the layered histories of the Southwestern United States.
Chormicle frequently returns to the family archive as both subject and method. Drawing from his background in journalism, he treats photography as a temporal bridge, an access point through which personal memory intersects with broader histories of displacement, resistance, and survival. Expanding upon vernacular forms such as the scrapbook, the funerary photo montage, and the domestic portrait wall, he reframes intimate family narratives within the larger legacy of violence enacted against Indigenous peoples, Chicanos, and Nuevomexicanos in the region.
Chormicle is currently an MFA graduate student in the Photography, Video, and Imaging program at the University of Arizona. He is a recipient of the 2025 US Latinx Artist Fellowship. In 2020, he received his BA in Journalism and Mass Communication from the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University.
To learn more about Marcus visit www.chormicle.com
Raul Rodriguez: Roots in Our Memory
Raul Rodriguez (b. 1988) works with photography and multimedia processes to examine cultural memory, place, and human resilience. As a first-generation Mexican American raised in Texas, his research-driven practice constructs layered narratives that intertwine personal history with broader regional and political histories of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands.
In projects such as Tracing Bracero Legacies, Rodriguez revisits the overlooked histories of the Bracero Program (1942–1964), a labor agreement that contracted over four million Mexican nationals to work in the United States. Drawing from archival imagery and oral histories, he etches historical photographs onto fabric and situates them within contemporary landscapes, creating tactile and visual connections between past and present. By photographing living Braceros and the Rio Vista Farm processing center in El Paso, he positions memory against the West Texas terrain—highlighting both aspiration and endurance within systems of labor and migration.
Across his broader body of work, Rodriguez investigates what persists despite erasure. Through portraiture, landscape, gesture, and material intervention, he challenges colonial amnesia and the mythologies of Texas identity, blurring the boundaries between documentation and constructed narrative. Photography becomes not only a recording device, but a means of reimagining how memory, time, and identity circulate across generations.
Rodriguez is currently the Education Coordinator at the Latino Cultural Center in Dallas, TX. He received his BFA from the University of North Texas in 2014 and his MFA from Texas Christian University in 2020. Rodriguez is also the founder of Deep Red Press, which focuses on underrepresented and photo-based artists in Texas.
To learn more about Raul visit www.raulrodriguezphoto.com