Artist LaRissa Rogers will join artist and scholar Ayasha Guerin in conversation, moderated by curator Cat Yang. Guerin is Assistant Professor of Intersectionality and Practice-Based Research and Media Making at UCLA and is presenting their first book project, Black Ecologies of Zone A (Duke University Press, forthcoming), which examines the historical production of New York City’s coastal flood zones as sites where ecological transformation and racial capitalism are fundamentally intertwined. The conversation will situate subterranean convergence in broader discourses about extractive economies and explore the artists’ attention to oysters and material adaptations as tools for Black liberation.

ABOUT THE PROJECT
subterranean convergence, by artist LaRissa Rogers, is a sculptural installation and score for performance at Los Angeles State Historic Park that draws on the geographies of the transcontinental railroad between the American South and West to investigate the ways liberation has been conceptualized—and where it might still be. Over 50 community members and institutions between Los Angeles and New Orleans were invited to contribute objects of personal or historical significance. Within a simulated railroad, chinoiserie-style tracks hold tabby-cast reproductions of these objects on the former site of the Southern Pacific River Station. This project explores collective memory and memorial by archiving the movements of people and goods across generations and geographies.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Dr. Ayasha C. Guerin is Assistant Professor of Intersectionality and Practice-Based Research and Media Making in the Department of World Arts & Cultures/Dance at UCLA. An interdisciplinary artist and scholar, Guerin’s work centers socio-ecological histories, connecting human and animal experience through questions of care, companionship and relational reciprocity across Black diasporic contexts and anti-colonial struggles. Their first book project, Black Ecologies of Zone A, forthcoming with Duke University Press, examines the historical production of New York City’s coastal flood zones as sites where ecological transformation and racial capitalism are fundamentally intertwined. Centering “Zone A,” the city’s highest-risk floodplain, it traces how colonial capitalism reshaped wetlands and shorelines into environments of extraction, enclosure, and vulnerability. Dr. Guerin holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University.

LaRissa Rogers (b. 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates how personal and shared memory and history impact the perpetual evolution of cultural identity formation and placemaking. She has exhibited at Documenta 15 (Germany); Weserburg Museum (Germany); Lilley Museum (NV); the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (CA); the California Museum of Photography (CA); the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (VA); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (CA); California State University, Fullerton; The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MA); Torrance Art Museum (CA); and the Fuller Craft Museum (MA). She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2023–2024). Rogers has also held residencies at the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art (2022), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), and MASS MoCA (2025). Rogers is a tenure-track assistant professor and sculpture area head at the University of Virginia. She is currently represented by Super Dakota.

CREDITS
subterranean convergence by LaRissa Rogers was commissioned by Clockshop and curated by Cat Yang, Director of Artist Projects, and Isabel Yi Jimenez, Artist Projects Manager. Clockshop’s projects at Los Angeles State Historic Park are supported through our long-standing partnership with California State Parks.

The production of this work was generously supported by the Hearthland Foundation, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, Anonymous Was A Woman, University of Virginia Karsh Institute and Department of Art, Accelerated Resilience Los Angeles, Betsy Greenberg, and Clockshop’s generous community of supporters.