SaveArtSpace x Murmurs is proud to present I’ve Gone to Look for America, a group public art exhibition on billboard ad space in Los Angeles, CA, opening February 20, 2026, curated by Morgan Elder & Allison Littrell.
The I’ve Gone to Look for America selected artists are Karla Ekaterine Canseco, Maria Maea, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, and Christian Vargas.
Our urban exhibition extends from questions posed in a 2023 show at Murmurs, I’ve Gone to Look for America, evolving its focus toward the current political climate of the United States in 2025— an America where belonging continues to be contested and where the promise of freedom collides with the reality of ICE raids sweeping in Los Angeles and across the country, censorship in media, and systematic defunding of arts and culture. This iteration interrogates the paradox at the heart of American identity: a nation that defines itself through the promise of liberty while sustaining systems of control that decide who is allowed to belong.
This exhibition centers artists of the diaspora— those who have immigrated, and those who are first-generation Americans— whose lives are shaped by the tension between rootedness and displacement. Through personal narratives, these artists navigate the complexities between identity and erasure, visibility and surveillance, the mythology of the “American Dream” and the lived experience of exclusion. Their works are acts of testimony telling the stories of migration, memory, and endurance.
I’ve Gone to Look for America is a submission-based exhibition that calls for work grounded in autobiographical and collective history. Together, these voices form a counter-narrative, one that resists disappearance, insists on complexity, and finds resilience through sculpture, painting, installation, video, and performance. These artists reimagine what “America” means.
I’ve Gone to Look for America, 2023 at Murmurs: www.murmurs.la/exhibitions/i-ve-gone-to-look-for-america
Opening February 20, 2026 SaveArtSpace will launch public art installations for the selected artwork on billboard ad spaces in Los Angeles, CA. The public art will be on view for at least four weeks.
Selected Artists
Location: W Olympic Blvd & Alandele Ave, Los Angeles, CA
Karla Ekaterine Canseco (b. 1995, San Fernando Valley, California) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Canseco’s practice explores care, love, and violence through different mediums, particularly clay and performance. Canseco is interested in materials that stem from below the earth’s surface such as clay, metal and petroleum due to the material’s inherent ability to carry information from the past into the present, collapsing conceptions of time whilst holding stories in its composition and impression. Canseco uses these foundational materials to unearth stories of diasporic memory that deal with care and violence. Canseco incorporates metal elements and hand-formulated metallic glazes into her hand-built and hand-mixed clay, pushing the boundaries of traditional ceramics. In making she invites her history within, daydreams, and poetics to materialize into sculptures forming her personal and shared mythologies. She is interested in how her inherited mythologies are dislocated from time allowing them to continuously unfold. She is currently conjuring a militia of canines, guards and guides of love.
Connect with Karla at @karlotta.ekat.
Location: Venice Blvd & Military Ave, Los Angeles, CA
Maria Maea (b. 1988, Long Beach, CA) utilizes assemblage and process-based figurative sculptures and installations to illuminate the relationship between land and the body, specifically focused on narratives around immigrant families and their labor in Los Angeles. Her research focuses on equitable futures and climate justice through food and water accessibility in marginalized communities. Through her use of materials such as concrete, rebar, found objects, fruiting plants, seeds, and woven palm fronds foraged across Los Angeles, Maea creates future ancestor sculptures that act as intimate portraits of family and community as well as abstract cartography of the LA urban landscape. Many of her works structurally contain seed pods that over time will crumble to dust, leaving only the viable seed behind. Through the act of propagation and stewardship the artworks become multi-generational. These works seek to expand and complicate our relationship to issues around justice, stewardship, contamination and preservation.
Connect with Maria at @maeamaria.
Location: Sawtelle Blvd & Ohio Ave, Los Angeles, CA
Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya (b. 1989 in Parral, MX) creates beings that are a fantastic becoming that center around anthologies and social issues concerning border culture, abjection, adaptation, and mestizaje aided by Speculative Fiction, Nahualismo, and the Labor of his family. His work hybridizes and creates parallels between land, the human, and the animal as a way to investigate the process in which violence eradicates, erases, and erodes communities of color. Guides that rest and shapeshift between different hybrid states of; the mundane, the terrible, and the sacred.
Connect with Ruben at @que.fresca.
Location: S Central Ave & E 12th St, Los Angeles, CA
Christian Vargas (b.1986 in Fresno, CA) creates structures and vessels reminiscent of ancient ruins unearthed from the landscape. Rooted in the present, Vargas explores his connection to California’s Central Valley through material, color and texture. His sculptures explore the tension between the sacred and the mundane, reimagining icons in materials like clay, plaster, cardboard and bronze. Often embellished with objects sourced from swap meets and estate sales, his works are layered with meaning and symbolism.
Connect with Christian at @cvtienda.
Curators
Morgan Elder is a Los Angeles–based contemporary art curator and cultural producer. A native of the city, she holds a BFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Visual Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2019, she co-founded Murmurs, a multidisciplinary exhibition platform dedicated to supporting emerging and underrepresented artists. Through establishing galleries in both Los Angeles and Chicago, she has curated over thirty exhibitions in the last decade that explore art’s role in social change, consistently advocating for marginalized voices and fostering critical engagement with contemporary art. Her curatorial work has been featured in publications such as Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.
Connect with Morgan at @morgane_elder.
Allison Littrell is a curator and writer living in Los Angeles. She is the co-founder Murmurs Gallery and studied Art History, literature and curatorial practices at Bard (BA) and USC Roski (MA). Before founding Murmurs, Littrell headed arts magazines ALL-IN and Third. As a curator, she is passionate about the intersection of art and education, and creating new models for art spaces that engage community.
Connect with Allison at @allisonlittrell.
Participating Organizations
Murmurs is an art space located in downtown Los Angeles focused on championing experimental and emerging art practices. Murmurs exists to challenge what is expected of an art gallery by providing a new model of a multifaceted platform for modalities of expression that have the power to transform reality. The name Murmurs was chosen for its meaning — the collective undercurrents running through a society that are not obviously apparent. Murmurs has, from its conception in 2019, been dedicated to honoring the truths of our community and championing creative voices that are not being heard by other institutions. Our programming focuses on art practices that prioritize engagement over commodification such as site-specific installations, sculptures, performances, events and pop-up shops.
Connect with Murmurs at @murmurs.la.
Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a message of social change that benefits the working class. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.