Migrant potter’s grave. Evergreen Cemetery, El Centro, CA.
Misael G. Diaz is a visual artist, researcher and educator whose interdisciplinary practice explores how culture mediates social, economic, and political relationships across borders. Rooted in the context of the U.S./Mexico borderlands, his work often mobilizes photography and sound to connect publics through time and space in transformative ways. Diaz is a co-founder and co-director of Cog•nate Collective, a binational collaborative based in the San Diego/Tijuana border region whose work was recognized with the San Diego Art Prize in 2022.
Their projects – which are site-specific and take on forms that are responsive to the places and communities they are engaging in collaboration – have included: creating photo-based mutual aid initiatives to generate donations for migrant shelters along the border, developing hyper-local radio stations that broadcast the history and contested futures of neighborhoods confronting gentrification, facilitating embroidery circles within immigrant communities that double as “know-your-rights” workshops, organizing pop-up artisan galleries and craft workshops within swap meets, and designing custom votive candles that conjure forms of individual and collective resistance against unjust immigration policies.
Their work has been exhibited and presented locally and internationally at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, LACE, Craft Contemporary, the Getty Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Arte Actual in Quito, Ecuador, and the Organ Kritischer Kunst in Berlin, Germany.