Tobacco Lands
About the work
Marisa J. Futernick’s Black Earth, Green Earth, Gold and Brown (2025) looks at the Connecticut “shade” tobacco industry and the profound but not widely known role it played in the region where the artist grew up. Using the video slideshow format, the work combines a voiceover narration and an original score with analog and digital photographs shot by the artist on location in rural, suburban, and urban places around what was once Connecticut’s “Tobacco Valley.” Set in the 1990s, when Futernick was a student at a high school where classmates were recruited to work tobacco during the summer, the video takes a poetic rather than a documentary approach, blending archival research with fictional storytelling to consider issues of labor, race, migration, land use, and historic preservation. The video is accompanied by a zine-style artist’s publication created especially for this presentation.
Cintia Segovia’s Building a Future Through Labor (2024) features the work of seasonal immigrants who come every year to rural Western Kentucky, investing their earnings in Mexico where they live for half of the year. The series of photographs, both digital and Van Dyke prints, shows the hard labor of these men. The video showcases three generations of tobacco workers and their lives in Mexico. For three years, Segovia has photographed and interviewed these men every summer. Her perspective sheds light on the unseen male labor crews, reclaiming their humanity, and highlighting the resilience that draws them back year after year. Her ongoing research centers around identity, immigration and language, while living in two different cultures; Mexican and American.
About the artists
Marisa J. Futernick is an artist and writer. 2025 presentations include solo exhibitions at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, and Murray State University, Kentucky; and a two-person exhibition at Southeast Missouri State University. Recent solo exhibitions include Dirty Dancing: Revisiting the Catskills at the Kniznick Gallery, Brandeis University, Boston (2023) and Popular Vote at The Art Gallery at Glendale Community College (2022). A major new work by the artist featured in the group exhibition Modern Desert Markings: An Homage to Las Vegas Area Land Art at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2023). Her work has been presented at numerous other venues, including Oxy Arts, Los Angeles; Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles; Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Harvard University; and Yale University; as well as British institutions including the Royal Academy of Arts, Whitechapel Gallery, ICA, Arnolfini, and The British Library. Futernick is a recipient of the prestigious Deutsche Bank Award and holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from the Royal Academy Schools. She has published numerous artist’s books, including 13 Presidents, which was shortlisted for the Bar Tur Photobook Award from The Photographers’ Gallery, London. Futernick was born in Detroit, Michigan and raised in Hartford, Connecticut. After many years in London, Futernick now lives and works in Los Angeles, where she is a core member of the activist group Artists 4 Democracy.
Cintia Segovia Figueroa was born and raised in Mexico City, where she worked in the entertainment industry. Learning English in the U.S. as an adult gave her a unique perspective on the nuances of the language. Her photography and socially engaged approach explore themes of immigration, displacement, and bilingualism. She earned a MA from CSU, Northridge, and an MFA from CSU, Long Beach. The Museum of Latin American Art and the National Immigration Law Center have collected her work, and private galleries and museums worldwide have exhibited it, including the Spartanburg Art Museum, the Torrance Art Museum, and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. It has also been shown at the Mexican Consulate, Shanghai University, and the Autonomous University of Mexico, among many other venues. Segovia Figueroa teaches photography and new media at Murray State University in Kentucky.