Atlanta Arts category interest

The Southern landscapes that serve as the backdrop for José Ibarra Rizo’s photographs — scrubby fields, railroad tracks, kudzu vines, massive oaks, intense light and deep shade — are familiar subjects in art. However, the presence of contemporary migrant communities within that landscape imbues such depictions with new energy and significance.

Ibarra Rizo’s latest exhibition, Cultivate, at Wolfgang Gallery through October 26, builds on the Atlanta-based artist’s ongoing exploration of the migrant experience in the American South. Ibarra Rizo himself was born in 1992 near Guanajuato, Mexico, but migrated with his family to Gainesville, Georgia, at the age of 7.

In Cultivate, Ibarra Rizo documents intimate moments of work and play, as well as the many distinctive ways migrant communities in the South use and occupy space and land. His work captures efforts to put down roots, showing the creativity and ingenuity people use to transform their environments, delineating their resilience and style in the face of hardship and marginalization.

His recent Working Artist Project show at MOCA-GA included images of political violence, with prints of security footage of the arrest of Virgilio Aguilar Mendez alongside his portraits, providing a stark commentary on the struggles faced by migrant communities. Cultivate seemingly offers a more introspective, more personal search through the same fraught fields.

The focus here is on everyday lives, moments of joy and sorrow and efforts to create a sense of home in a foreign land. Labor has often been Ibarra Rizo’s theme, befitting depictions of working-class subjects, and that’s certainly present here, but we tellingly also have more moments of leisure and repose: soccer games and skateboards, clothing, jewelry, activities and bearing that express personal style rather than the exigencies of work.

His subjects, often caught in moments of quiet reflection or everyday activity, exude a sense of presence that is both powerful and poignant, with an intense gaze usually directed straight at the lens, as in José, the 2024 portrait of a young man. Ibarra Rizo’s images are memorable for their sharp, crystalline immediacy. The viewer is struck by the subjects’ sense of outward grit, juxtaposed with a quietly haunting, existential sense of interiority, as in Rose Grower, his evocative and affecting portrait of a day laborer.

One of the most significant aspects of Cultivate is the recurring motif of corn, often planted in unexpected, interstitial places in Southern exurban settings. Its symbolic presence evokes ancient, mythic notions of sustenance and continuity. The story Ibarra Rizo tells in Cultivate is a troubled one, but it’s ultimately a story of survival, growth and success.

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Andrew Alexander is an Atlanta-based writer.