Los De Aqui

 In Los De Aquí, artist Henry Morales offers an intimate meditation on belonging, place, and familial resilience across diasporic geographies. The exhibition emerges from a deeply personal inquiry into the everyday lives of Morales’ extended Guatemalan family - currently spread across the United States in places such as California, Nevada, and Georgia - and expands into a broader reflection on what it means to live, thrive, and lay down roots in a country that often questions your right to do so.

The exhibition’s title reclaims and challenges the often repeated phrase, “Ni de aquí, ni de allá” - “neither from here, nor there” - a sentiment commonly shared across Latin American immigrant communities. For Morales, this expression always felt limiting, having almost a resigned acceptance of in-betweenness. Los De Aquí, instead, asserts presence. It declares: we are from here too. We exist, contribute, and shape the landscape around us, not as temporary visitors or uncertain outsiders, but as people making homes, families, and futures.

Through paintings that incorporate physical soil and roots collected from his family's respective home and land they inhabit across the U.S., Morales symbolically blends the literal ground his loved ones walk on with the emotional and cultural weight they carry. Alongside these materials, fragments of newspaper articles appear at the edges of works, reports of immigration policy, birthright citizenship debates, and immigrant profiling that have intensified in the time Morales began this project. These additions quietly register the climate surrounding his family’s stories.

These works document everyday moments - preparing a family meal, playing games on the phone, perfecting a skill, partying with friends, spending time with family - scenes often overlooked, yet profoundly rooted in agency and self-determination.

Los De Aquí is not a narrative about assimilation or arrival. Instead, it is a testament to what it looks like to live fully and unapologetically in whatever way that may be, outside of binaries, beyond imposed borders, and in defiance of narratives that diminish or distort. Morales underscores that everyday life itself can be a radical act of presence and resilience, where individuality, and culture, persist in the face of displacement.

By foregrounding the personal, Los De Aquí makes space for a broader understanding of what it means to belong - not through an antiquated sense of national identity or legal status, but through the ongoing act of claiming space and living in the now.