About
Deanna Ledezma, Josh Rios, and Anthony Romero are the founding members of the Place as Practice Research Collective. Born and raised in South Central Texas, each collective member holds familial ties and ancestral connections to this region and Northern Mexico. The artists refer to themselves as Tejanx, a shared term of identification with a regional specificity that encapsulates their bicultural positionalities. As a collective, their research-based practice encompasses photography, sculpture, installation, moving image, and creative writing. Their artworks and publications articulate the complexities of Tejanx, Mexican, and Mexican American identities while addressing the ongoing effects of Spanish colonialism, settler colonialism, and migration. The collective analyzes how these legacies shape the everyday experiences of their families and their relationships to place, land, and labor. Together, they examine how diasporic practices register at quotidian scales and trace the transmission of intergenerational knowledge across kinship networks. These research interests and themes are at the forefront of their recent exhibitions and catalogs, The place where the creek goes underground at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (September 16–December 14, 2024) and Not So Much in Words: Kinship Citations at the Black Family Visual Arts Center, Dartmouth College (January 6–April 26, 2026).
The exhibition newsprint takeaway and booklet for The place where the creek goes underground are available to download as PDFs. The forthcoming exhibition catalog for Not So Much in Words: Kinship Citations will be available in April 2026.
Writing
Informed by the Latinx/e life writing practices of autobioethnography, testimonio, and autohistoria-teoría, we examine the entanglements of personal experiences and social relationships, familial and collective histories, territory, and emplacement.
The place where the creek goes underground featured two publications produced by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute: a broadsheet-style exhibition takeaway and a book containing nonfiction essays and artwork by Ledezma, Rios, and Romero.
The forthcoming exhibition catalog, Not So Much in Words: Kinship Citations, includes an introductory essay by the collective and a series of nonfiction vignettes individually authored by Ledezma, Rios, and Romero.
Our book manuscript, Green Pecans and Other Inheritances: A Collective Memoir, takes the form of a multigenre collection of essays, featuring newly produced photographs and images. Building upon the theories of Chicana art historian Laura E. Pérez and artist Amalia Mesa-Bains, our political and creative framework of the altar album references both the practice of ofrenda making and the social materiality of the family photo album. We conceptualize our book as an altar album that documents and commemorates inheritances in tangible and affective forms, ancestral knowledge systems, and resists settler colonial constructions of place, expanding notions of family beyond the biological or juridical.
Art and exhibition making
Through our research, we find ourselves returning to the places where our interests in object- and image-making originated. Immersed in academia and contemporary art, we have sought to make our intellectual and creative lives known to our families and to create critical space for them to make their lives known to us. Kinship research bridges these falsely compartmentalized spheres: the privileged world of higher education and the places we come from. The formation of the Place as Practice Research Collective provides a new language for previous iterations of our creative practices and scholarly inquiries. Through the framework of critical and creative kinship research, we work collaboratively with each other and our relatives to produce video, performance, photography, sound, and nonfiction writing.
ArchivAL RESEARCH
Critical family history, as theorized by Christine Sleeter, guides our archival engagements and interventions. The Place as Practice Research Collective traverses the civic record, institutional collections, antique malls, hallway closets, and the land and its transformed surfaces. We know it matters where memories are kept and by whom, and that archives take many forms. An archive may be an instrument of exclusion, where the record is written and maintained by dominant classes and in the service of settler colonialism. Our research makes such power dynamics visible and contestable. Seeking counternarratives, we emphasize the everyday experiences and places that tell history from the other side. We foreground the affective and sensorial dimensions of archival study, whether it involves a state record, a family photo album, a digital database, or a story told while driving through familiar terrain.
ONGOING CollaborationS
The establishment of the Place as Practice Research Collective (2023–present) is a continuation of our intersecting collaborations. Through our parallel trajectories in higher education, we have known each other and supported one another’s creative lives since our undergraduate studies at Texas State University. Each of us moved to Chicago, where we earned graduate degrees in the arts and learned from the array of dialogues, exchanges, and creative spaces cultivated within and beyond the city.
More formalized collaborations include our contributions to Reworking Labor, a three-part curatorial research project featuring an international symposium (2018), a group exhibition (2019), and an edited volume of essays (2023), organized, curated, and edited by Daniel Eisenberg and Ellen Rothenberg. Ledezma, Rios, and Romero produced the installation Ballad of the Uprooted for the exhibition component. For the Reworking Labor book, Ledezma and Rios co-authored a research-based chapter with a series of photographs about the United Farm Workers Instagram account.
In 2018, Rios, Romero, and Matt Joynt co-founded Sonic Insurgency Research Group (SIRG), a performance and exhibition practice that examines normalized associations between criminality and sound, silencing as a form of social control, and voicing as a form of social resistance.