Daisy Quezada Ureña

Born 1990, USA 

Lives and works in Santa Fe (O’gah P’ogeh Owingeh), USA 

Somos Nosotros 2026 

porcelain, hardware, lighting installation 

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous assistance from The Henry Moore Foundation 

Courtesy of the artist, Pie Project Contemporary Art, Institute of American Indian Arts Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Phillip & Erika Gesue and Aspect Media Village in Santa Fe, NM, Elpidio Quezada and Road Runner Crane and Rigging, Max Holmes, Erin Bassett, Sabrina Griffith, Estevan Maestas, León de la Rosa-Carrio, Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Rosalina Quezada, Celia Calabaza (Jicarilla Apache and Santo Domingo Pueblo), Monika Guerra, Jesus Miguel Avena, Kaila Schuyler (Oneida Nation of the Thames), Sequoia Anderson (Diné/Ho-Chunk), Erica Lord (Athabaskan), Brisa Castilllo, Adan Acero and Family, Rigoberto Luna, and all the contributors of the stars residing along the Southwest Turtle Island, also known as Estados Fronterizos and American Southwest. 

In Somos Nosotros, New Mexico-based artist Daisy Quezada Ureña confronts the cultural, social, and economic exclusion embedded in the U.S. immigration system since its inception that has created conditions of displacement that disproportionately affect communities already navigating systemic inequities. Her ceramics materialise this condition through an intimate, community-centred archive— transforming donated garments into illuminated porcelain star forms that hold space for individual lives, family histories, and collective resilience shaped by displacement. 

Made through a process of layering porcelain slip onto garments that are then burnt away in the firing process, each piece within appears as much spectre as sculpture. A meditation on the symbolic, and actual, caging of immigrant communities in the U.S., Somos Nosotros retains both a haunting and memorial quality as if suspended between world, or borders, while honouring those who remain, resist, and remember on the other side.