On view October 10, 2026 through March 6, 2027

Conejo Negro: Tortilleria and Print Shop explores our personal connections through the culture of food.  Both sustenance and an act of care, food and the traditions of regional cuisines are quotidian parts of our lives. Yet they are also expansive in meaning, addressing political and societal conditions. Featuring a purpose-designed, mobile tortilleria, the exhibition space is transformed by Torolab into an evolving, experimental exploration of themes of community, resilience, and resistance.  

Conejo Negro: Tortilleria and Print Shop is accompanied by wall text using the phrase Ma ‘P Kuiil Tmamaa? (Have You Eaten?): a greeting that evokes concern and attention in the critically endangered language of the Kiliwa people (an indigenous nation in Northern Baja California, Mexico.) This greeting becomes a visual refrain throughout the exhibition: in a video installation regarding the cuisine and spoken word of the indigenous community; an installation comprising a mapping of Kiliwa words, ingredients, territory, seasons, and processes of transformation. The map offers clues to a way of understanding life, the environment, and shared experience embedded in language and everyday knowledge. It extends into a wall of images drawn from ArtCenter’s archives and the artists’ research, connecting Indigenous food, agriculture, gathering, and territory across different places and moments. 

ABOUT TOROLAB

Founded in 1995 by architect and artist Raúl Cárdenas-Osuna and based in Tijuana, Torolab is a design collective operating as a transdisciplinary collective, workshop, and laboratory of contextual studies. Working across art, architecture, design, research, and community practice, Torolab grounds its studies in the realm of lived realities in order to better grasp ideas surrounding quality of life. 

Through an open-ended process that “knows where it starts but not where it or its collaborators will end up,” Torolab has created adaptable tools, environments, and forms of social infrastructure in response to specific community needs, with the understanding that art and design constantly negotiate their own boundaries. Previous projects have addressed migration, housing, public health, food access, urban ecology, and cross-border mobility through architecture, mobile structures, clothing, gardens, mapping, workshops, and collective gatherings. 

TOROLAB's work has been presented at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and Galería OMR in Mexico City, among others.