FOCA is pleased to present, Tierra Sagrada: L.A. is an Altar and an Offering, an exhibition curated by Isabella Aguilar-Rosil and Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle. Isabella Aguilar-Rosil and Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle have been selected as one of FOCA Curator’s Lab recipients for 2025-2026. We are thrilled to be showing their curated show that features five LA-based artists: Susan Aparicio, Lizette Hernández, Star Montana, Libbi Ponce, and Claudia V. Solórzano. The exhibition opens on September 20 and will run through November 22, 2025 with an opening reception on Saturday, September 20 from 5-7pm. Tierra Sagrada: L.A. is an Altar and an Offering examines the relationship between placemaking and the sacred, focusing in particular on the landscape and iconographies of Los Angeles, and centering the city’s multiplicity of diasporic Latinx communities. Threading together the sprawl of Los Angeles is a visual language marked by a distinct urban lexicon and a delicate and enduring ecology, and held by layered histories of protest, survival, and solidarity. In dialogue with these contexts, artists Susan Aparicio, Lizette Hernández, Star Montana, Libbi Ponce, and Claudia V. Solórzano work across clay, metal, glass, and photography – uniquely rendering these materials as both altar and offering. In Susan Aparicio’s work, she brings together religious symbols and contemporary cultural and political references, reframing them to build a cosmology of her own. Star Montana’s tender depictions of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers engage with her family’s matrilineal ties to water, both honoring and grieving this sacred source of life. Transformation, renewal, and turning with intention to her surroundings are central tenets in Lizette Hernández’s practice, reminding us to look to each other and to the land as we envision alternative futures. Rendering wrought iron gates in delicate clay, Claudia V. Solórzano celebrates a quintessential architectural detail rapidly disappearing in the face of gentrification. Through the use of industrial and organic materials reflective of the city itself, Libbi Ponce produces futurist sculptural objects that are both familiar and otherworldly. Together, the artists in Tierra Sagrada: L.A. is an Altar and an Offering reflect and reimagine the urban and natural structures that formed them, and us.