Jen de los Reyes is an artist, educator, writer, and community arts organizer. With roots in the Riot Grrrl and DIY music scene, her practice incorporates pedagogical, ecological, and organizational methodologies. She founded and directed Open Engagement, an international conference on socially engaged art that was active from 2007–2019. She worked within Portland State University from 2008 to 2014 to establish the Art and Social Practice MFA program with a curriculum focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. Following that, Reyes was the Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught in the departments of Art and Museum and Exhibition Studies.

Her collaborative work and practice have been situated at institutions including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Queens Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, MCA Chicago, and the Portland Museum of Art.

She speaks widely and has presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, UCSB, UMass, NYU, Textile Museum of Canada, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Concordia University, Carnegie Mellon University, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Milwaukee Art Museum, UC Berkeley, Alfred University, The Power Plant, and Project Row Houses amongst many others.

She is the author of several books, most recently Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire. She divides her time between Chicago, where she founded Garbage Hill Farm, and Ithaca, NY where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Cornell University.

Oscar Rene Cornejo is a first-generation Salvadoran American originally from Houston, Texas. With a background in pedagogy and activism, Cornejo synthesizes histories of abstraction in the US and Latin America with personal experiences in construction, land use, dissonant family memory, and Cold War historical archives. Works include video, fresco, Japanese woodcut, drawing, and installation to address the detrimental effects of civil war on Salvadoran society and the environment. He earned an MFA from Yale School of Art, a BFA from the Cooper Union, and is a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in El Salvador. He co-founded the Latin American Community Art Project, where he directed artist residencies to promote intercultural awareness through art education. He is a founding member of Junte, an artist project based in Puerto Rico. Cornejo’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Radiator Gallery, The Queens Museum, Recess: Assembly, Princeton University, Diverseworks, and Brattleboro Museum among other venues. He participated at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency. He is an Assistant Professor for Art at Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and is a Fresco Instructor at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

LAND is a site of education, research, cultivation, care, and conservation founded by artists Oscar Rene Cornejo and Jen de los Reyes. Their shared values and approaches are rooted in their commitments to community and education informed by their work with Open Engagement and LACAP. The experiences they carry from these grassroots organizations infuse their collaboration anchored in stewardship, knowledge sharing, and creating a space for a community of artists that consider the physical landscape and its health as an integral part of their practice.

LAND emerges from a desire to reconcile the disconnection between people and their environment, both physically and psychology. The pedagogical framework of this project demystifies sustainable and holistic practices as it fosters mutual cultural exchanges by addressing concerns of the community and the immediate environment.

LAND uplifts partner plantings, micro-ecosystems, and food sovereignty using site responsive agriculture informed by global knowledge and traditions. The plant life on the grounds supports and upholds art making connected directly to the materials located there.