This multimedio offers documentation of the exhibition State of Exception/Estado de Excepción created by anthropologist Jason De León with artist/photographer Richard Barnes and artist/curator Amanda Krugliak. The exhibition is a result of the “Undocumented Migration Project” created by De León, a long- term study of the clandestine border crossing at the Guatemala/ Mexico frontier and the Mexican/United States border that uses a combination of ethnographic, archaeological, and forensic approaches to the study of the migrant experience.

About the artists

Jason De León is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA and Director of the Undocumented Migration Project. His book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (featuring photos by Michael Wells) was published by the University of California Press in 2015.

Amanda Krugliak is an artist, curator, and arts administrator best known for performance and conceptual experiential installations, most notably at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities since 2007. Most recently she has been recognized nationally for co-creating “State of Exception.” This exhibition has been presented at MOCAD Detroit; ASU Museum/Combine Studios, Phoenix; Artprize, Grand Rapids; and Parsons New School Gallery, New York City. The project was featured in The New York Times in 2013, and on the front page of The New York Times’ Art Section in March 2017. Krugliak is also a curatorial consultant for NPR Michele Norris’s Race Card Project, University of Michigan, 2013; and collaborator for Object Lessons (2017). In 2018, she received the University of Michigan Impact Award.

Richard Barnes is a New York-based artist/photographer. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, and the University of Michigan Art Museum, among many other venues. His works can be found in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, etc. In 2012 he was awarded a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and the award-winning exhibition State of Exception / Estado de Excepción.