OH Art Foundation Presents

Picnicking on Mars with Anni Albers on the Horizon

Solo Exhibition by Kira Dominguez Hultgren

August 15th, 2025 – September 14th, 2025

Exhibition Date: 8/15/2025 - 9/14/2025

Solo Exhibition by Kira Dominguez Hultgren

Opening Reception: 8/15/ 2025 @ 7-10 PM

OH Art Foundation is pleased to announce, Picnicking on Mars with Anni Albers on the Horizon

Welcome to Mars—a landscape of textiles, warped temporalities, and speculative materials at the frontier of DIY bioplastic. In this installation, a flag inspired by one of Anni Albers’ textile studies pierces the red, sandpaper-like terrain, anchored through a poncho once worn by Kira’s grandmother, which has now been repurposed as a picnic blanket. The installation raises an ongoing question: are these objects native to the Martian surface, or are they projections of the American West—artifacts shaped by nostalgia and myth?

In the U.S. context, woven rugs left exposed in outdoor settings carry a complex and often troubling cultural weight. These rugs evoke a blurred distinction between notions of savagery and untouched paradise, civilization and environmental degradation—tensions that resonate deeply within Kira’s own familial history.

At the memorial for Kira’s grandmother, Teresa Rodríguez Domínguez, Kira and her brother encountered two photographs from Teresa’s childhood in 1920s San Angelo, Texas. Teresa was born to Indigenous (tribal affiliation unknown) and Mexican parents, and much of her early life remains a mystery. What caught Kira’s and her brother’s attention in these images were the woven rugs beneath Teresa and her siblings—posed carefully in a dusty yard, with what appears to be a vertical loom or water well in the background.

Shortly after viewing the photos, Kira’s brother wrote:
“Check out the textile at :41 and :45… Some sort of ancestral heirloom textile or just another Amazon piece of shit?”

Kira and her brother, belonging to a generation often left to sift through the remnants of fragmented identities, piece together their cultural inheritance from materials and stories that have been diluted by colonization and blurred through migration. In this process, they reconstruct meaning from mismatched fragments, creating narratives that were never fully handed down.

This experience parallels the disorienting, chaotic act of picnicking on the surface of Mars—something Kira once did, figuratively, with her young children at the planetarium in Salt Lake City. It was an experience marked by disorder, yet oddly beautiful. In the end, like many encounters with the unknown, one thing remained clear: plastic made the mess easier to clean.

Selected Bibliography of Kira

Anni Albers, On Weaving, 1965
María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States, 2016
Adam Lowe and Bruno Latour, The migration of the aura or how to explore the original through its facsimiles, 2010
Phone and email conversations with Gabriel Dominguez, ongoing

Inquiries - info@ohartfoundation.org