Salon Highlight: Lorena Cruz Santiago

Exhibition

Salon Highlight:

Lorena Cruz Santiago
August 9 — October 8, 2025

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Louis Buhl & Co. is pleased to present a new Salon Highlight with Detroit-based artist Lorena Cruz Santiago, opening August 9th, 2025. The presentation features new cyanotypes that explore themes of labor, memory, and freedom through the language of gardening.

Cruz Santiago’s practice is rooted in a critical engagement with photography—its tools, histories, and imperial legacies—reclaiming image-making through collaborative processes that center family, nurture, and land. With her work, Cruz Santiago departs from traditional camera-based processes by turning to cyanotype, a historic printing method that relies on light and direct contact rather than a lens. Frequently, Cruz Santiago engages her parents as active participants in developing her compositions, using FaceTime to co-create images of their California garden, later printed and incorporated into installations.

In her latest body of work, Cruz Santiago expands this practice by integrating plants she has cultivated herself. The cyanotypes, printed on fabric, bridge her own garden in Michigan, her parents’ in California, and her extended family’s in Mexico, using different types of plants and vegetation as material. Layered atop the cyanotypes are inkjet prints of iPhone photographs she has taken over the years—personal records that document the lush, evolving life of these organic spaces. One work, for instance, was made using petals from marigolds that the artist cultivated at home using seeds harvested from her uncle’s field in Oaxaca. “These prints record the tangled and spiraled forms of the plants, and I imagine the process of exposing the prints as having a similar alchemy to that of plants during photosynthesis,” she explains. The result is a visual lexicon shaped by intimacy and reciprocity.

The series stems from Cruz Santiago’s research into Indigenous Visual Sovereignty and a personal reckoning with how photography has shaped her family’s history. Her grandparents, both part of the Bracero guest worker program during WWII, are only visible to her through their ID cards—documents that serve as both rare keepsakes and evidence of systemic exploitation. Growing up in Oaxaca, Cruz Santiago’s family had no access to cameras; the few existing images of her parents’ youth are government-issued, intended to identify them as foreigners. In response, Cruz Santiago reclaims image-making as a tool for agency, initiating a living family archive that advances an intergenerational practice rooted in the resistance of imposed narratives.

Salon Highlight: Lorena Cruz Santiago is on view from August 9th through October 8th, 2025 at Louis Buhl & Co.