Gallery Hours
Fri 6–9pm
Sat & Sun 11am–2pm
or by appointment

Charissa Lucille presents dehydrate, a new body of mixed media and textile works revealing the forgotten histories of a closed boarding school in the Sonoran desert that she attended at age 15.

In dehydrate, Lucille grapples with the punitive ideologies that compel the existence of camps, borders, detention centers, boarding schools, and prisons. The long-standing forced assimilation practices that leaders use in Arizona-based boarding schools are demonstrated with sharp fencing, scissors, and blocks while the people impacted are represented by wrapped quilts.

Lucille’s artworks are based on her background attending a disciplinary labor-based boarding school, conversations with survivors and experts, and investigative research into similarly oppressive systems throughout Arizona.

Themes of surveillance, isolation, punishment, education, and labor extend into three-dimensional quilted scenes, incorporating muted Sonoran desert colors, barbed wire, saguaro skeletons, and ocotillo branches, suggesting survival fused with degradation. 

Lucille will stream her short film, “Becoming a Window,” at the closing reception on Saturday, January 30, 2027 at 6:30pm and again at 7:30pm

dehydrate invites viewers to sit down at a school desk and transport into Lucille’s experience suspended in time, where memories alone exist as truth. 

Artist Profile
Instagram
Website
Email