HUGO CROSTHWAITE

Taking its name from an installation by artist Daniel Joseph Martinez (b. 1957, Los Angeles) re-creating Ted Kaczynski’s cabin—a hand-built, off-grid structure symbolizing the violence that isolation and exclusion can produce—The House America Built examines how artists challenge structures or notions of power that erase specific human stories. Spanning drawing, photography, video, sculpture, and mixed media, the works on view chart histories personal and universal, local and global, to reveal how different lived realities of marginalization are obscured by the systems, places, or processes that determine how power is constructed.

The exhibition, presented by the 2025–26 Orange County Young Curators cohort, invites audiences to consider what kind of society, world, or symbolic “house” we, as Americans, might be building for ourselves.

Featured artists: Lewis Baltz, Andrea Bowers, Hugo Crosthwaite, Sam Durant, Mona Hatoum, Alfredo Jaar, Kambui Olujimi, Pilar Quinteros, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, May Sun, and Hank Willis Thomas.

The House America Built is organized by Deepti Arasavel, Shivani Atluri, Kimberly (Kimy) Chavez, Lucia De La Cruz, Victor Do, Angelina Farias, Yagmur (Beyza) Gunaydin, Belen Gutierrez, Helen Han, Madeline (Maddie) Horwitz, Catherine Li, Nicholas (Nick) Lopez, Betsy Meza-Bibiano, Valeska Morales, Philip Park, Chloe Shellhammer, and Rachel Sung.

Orange County Young Curators is a ten-month program for high school juniors and seniors centered on curatorial practice. The program culminates in students organizing their own exhibition drawn from the collection of the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art.