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The Los Angeles County Arts Commission selected me to make a site-specific civic artwork for a newly built public library in Pico Rivera in Los Angeles County, California. The two artworks I created consider the library’s role as a vehicle for exploration and discovery that lead to a journey into knowledge. Pico Rivera is a city of immigrants. As an immigrant myself, I am interested on issues of migration, of both, animals and humans—scientists, farm workers, presidents, artists—we all journey back and forth dozens of times in the course of their life, establishing a periodic migratory pattern not unlike that of many animals and birds. For the mural, I focused on migration, and specifically on bird migration, as a metaphor to represent the spirit of a wide open world available for all to explore and experience. I was inspired by Pico Rivera’s Rio Hondo Coastal Basin Spreading Grounds, which offer a resting spot for a diverse range of migratory birds passing through, returning season after season. In the middle of our metropole, tundra swans from the high arctic have been spotted in January, bald eagles in February, and so on; migrants who are free to come and go.

The mural depicts our planet’s biomes and is organized by latitude (from left to right)—90° North Pole to the 90° South Pole, locating Pico Rivera around 33°N. The images are photographs I have captured across the world in the last 25 years, including at the Rio Hondo Coastal Basin in Pico Rivera.

Titled CircumSolar, Migration 2, the artwork is dedicated to the voyage of the arctic tern, the world champion in long-distance migration. It is my intent for these artworks to inspire the Pico Rivera community to learn and to imagine through exploration and discovery; to see that the world of knowledge is infinite with no boundaries; to feel connected to this community and to the planet as a whole.






















CircumSolar, Migration 2, 2013; public art, fire retardant canvas and ink; 132 feet long x 25 feet high, ~1,250 square feet approximately. Installation view at the Pico Rivera Public Library.