Lewis Honors College Welcomes Award-Winning Author Jason De Léon and his interactive art exhibit
Faculty at the University of Kentucky Lewis Honors College, the College of Arts & Sciences, and the W. S. Webb Museum of Anthropology are hosting an interactive art installation, Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94), on Tuesday, Feb. 11, and Thursday, Feb. 13.
Hostile Terrain 94 is an exhibition memorializing over 4,000 migrants who died largely from dehydration and hyperthermia in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert between the mid-1990s and 2024. HT94 is sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a nonprofit research-arts-education collective, directed by anthropologist Dr. Jason De León.
The completed exhibit will display a map of 3,992 toe tag cards, which will include the name, age, sex, cause of death, condition of body and location of recovery for each person. Members of the community can participate by handwriting a toe tag card from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 11 and Thursday, Feb. 13, in the Lewis Honors College lobby. The tags will be placed on the map to reflect where each individual perished.
De León will speak on Thursday, March 6, about his recent long-term ethnographic study of human smugglers and transnational gangs in Central America. The talk will take place at 4 p.m. in the Lewis Honors College lobby.
Both the exhibit and lecture are being coordinated by Lewis Honors College Senior Lecturer and anthropologist Dr. Zada Komara.
De León is currently director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, Loyd E. Cotsen Endowed Chair of Archaeology, and Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was a 2017 MacArthur Fellow.
He is the author of two award-winning books: “The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail” and “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling.” Soldiers and Kings won the 2024 National Book Award for Nonfiction.