Home Stead, a photobook by Sarah Sampedro - Book Launch Party

Home Stead engages contemporary expressions of whiteness and colonialism in the Midwest. Raised in a fifth-generation German-Irish immigrant farming family in southwestern Minnesota—on the traditional lands of the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ and Yankton Nations—I situate my practice within the layered histories of homesteading, land seizure, and U.S. expansionism. Using my familial history and homestead as a focal point, I examine ways American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and whiteness remain embedded in Midwestern cultural narratives.