A towering new artwork made of hundreds of hand-painted ceramic pieces has landed at UC San Diego, where the Mexico City-based duo RojoNegro recently unveiled a permanent outdoor installation titled La Asamblea del Barro. The piece anchors the university's new main entrance at Triton Center and marks a striking addition to campus public art.
According to Hyperallergic, the work comprises 260 unique hand-painted ceramic tiles mounted on four tree-like panels. UC San Diego's own accounts describe the piece somewhat differently: one university article calls it 260 ceramic signs affixed to towering structures, while another says it features 260 ceramic figures, each nearly two feet tall, arrayed on a towering steel frame evoking a dense jungle. The discrepancies suggest the work's physical form is being described in varying ways across sources, though all agree on the count of 260 individual ceramic elements.
Whatever the precise construction, the four trees referenced in the piece carry deep symbolic weight. The installation includes four cosmic trees that, in Mesoamerican thought, are understood to sustain the universe. Hyperallergic reports that the work probes the transmission of cultural memory across generations by drawing on the relationship between Mesoamerican and Western knowledge, a relationship the outlet notes is inextricably connected through colonialism.
Artists With Roots in Michoacán and the Huasteca
RojoNegro is the collaborative name for artists and life partners María Sosa and Noé Martínez, who hail from Michoacán and are based in Mexico City, per the same Hyperallergic account. Sosa has Purépecha roots, while Martínez's family origins trace back to Mexico's Huasteca region, the outlet reports.
The duo has said the installation bears witness to a cultural and ideological resistance that reveals the profound relationship between the body, its surroundings, and the forces of nature. Their broader practice uses a multidisciplinary approach to bring Indigenous ways of being to the foreground, invoking ancestral knowledge in materials and practices that have endured four centuries of violent erasure.
First Latinx Commission for the Stuart Collection
La Asamblea del Barro holds a notable distinction within UC San Diego's public art program. The Stuart Collection describes it as the first commission by Latinx artists and the 23rd artwork to join the 45-year-old collection, according to UC San Diego Today. The same university account states that Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla specifically requested the artwork for the new main entrance to campus at Triton Center, and that the piece was scheduled to open on November 2, 2026.
UC San Diego's practice centers on the lived experience of Indigenous communities and artistic interpretations of communal histories, the university notes. A separate project listing from BuildSD confirms the commission, describing it as a new work from the Mexico City-based artist collective entitled La Asamblea del Barro.
A Duo Already on the World Stage
The San Diego unveiling arrives as RojoNegro is simultaneously representing Mexico at the 61st Venice Biennale, Hyperallergic notes. The duo's Biennale presentation, titled Invisible Acts to Sustain the Universe, combines video, paintings made with natural dyes, a series of ceramics, a clay-and-salt sculpture built in situ, and a sound work commissioned from artist Alberto Rubí, according to ArtReview.
ArtReview reports that the works crystallize more than ten years of artistic research as a duo, and that RojoNegro views the Biennale platform as an opportunity to make visible knowledge and ways of feeling, thinking and relating from Indigenous peoples within a Western and hegemonic setting. The duo's collaborative history stretches back years; in 2017, Martínez and Sosa presented an installation titled Volví a ver animales en la noche. Los extrañé 500 años, as documented by Frieze.
Together, the two projects place RojoNegro's work in front of audiences on two continents this season, from the new entrance of a California research university to the canals of Venice, both carrying the same thread of ancestral memory the artists have spent over a decade developing.
