Unsettled, Xavier Tavera at Cruise in Uptown

Banner Image: (Unsettled 6) 2026. Photographic Collage/Archival Print.

◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ ◼︎ 

The purpose of juxtapositions in any medium always is to make the viewer look twice. Whether collage or picture-in-picture, displaying multiple images together forces us to compare elements within an image to understand it better. Surreal photography is perhaps the best known practice—that of inserting other images within an existing one to create a dreamlike scene. When it comes to personal interpretations of natural landscapes together with documentary photography, a juxtaposition can be tricky; the totality of the composition has to win over the natural landscape to create the desired new context or disruption.

I came across the work of Minneapolis- based Mexican photographer, Xavier Tavera, once more. This time in the context of his new exhibition at Cruise, the new hybrid art space founded and directed by curator, Matthew Schum, in Uptown. Tavera is a well known artist of still photography and moving images who has dedicated his career to depict the Latin American diaspora in the United States. Tavera’s work varies from documentary style to conceptual to extremely fabricated. Memorial and moments of violence are always colliding themes in his work.

In Unsettled at Cruise, Tavera advances his documentarist style and creativity with mildly perplexing juxtapositions based on images of disrupted rural Minnesota landscapes, or in conversation with smaller snapshots of the current civil unrest that is shaking our cities in Minnesota as a result of the horrifying actions of ICE. 

 

Above image: (Unsettled 7) 2026. Photographic Collage/Archival Print. Below image: Detail of (Unsettled 7) with youth of color in matching yellow floral masks confronting a white supremacist at a protest in downtown Minneapolis. Courtesy of Xavier Tavera.

 

Unsettled seems to forge a chronistic and visual dichotomy between the two settings, yet arrives at the intended reflection: that of the contrast between a romanticized vision of the Midwest and the political and social turbulent ongoing reality.

The eight grand-scale Minnesota landscape photographs in the exhibit (images taken by Tavera in recent years) are supplemented by smaller snapshots manually cut and pasted on their lower corners. These smaller images are intrepid; one documents a smashed body cam laying on the asphalt, one, a group of protestors, one, folding knives on a table, and one, a white whistle  and its attached rope with the words ICE OUT on relief.

The difference in scale between the larger and smaller picture is so pronounced that the latter feels like a wandering thumbnail-sized cut-out. Tavera’s project is a photographic collage, and one could say, art intervention onto itself, intended to reveal a deeper meaning.

 

Image: (Unsettled 4) 2026. Photographic Collage/Archival Print. Courtesy of Xavier Tavera.

 

It is the dialogue between the two seemingly different images, also discreetly unified aesthetically, that creates the thematic narrative for the exhibit. “Taken together, urban and agrarian alike read as borderlands far from official crossings. Added to the high profile killings that followed, waves of repression rippled through Latin communities in the Twin Cities, including businesses and collaborators with whom Tavera has longstanding relationships as an artist, neighbor, and citizen” (Cruise).

The series of photographs in Unsettled are histories of photography, the land, and real-life events. Together they bring our consciousness and imagination to the tense social and political moment in which we are all living, not just in Minnesota, but also across the United States.

This is not the first time Xavier has depicted civil unrest in Minneapolis. In April of 2021, Tavera created a billboard for George Floyd Square alongside two others by Ojibwe artist Jim Denomie (1955-2022) and community organizer Seitu Jones. Two social justice billboards were added in September 2025 at George Floyd Square: THE CROSSING by Rigoberto A. González & LATIN INVISIBILITY by Xavier Tavera.

 

Above image: George Floyd Square billboard, 2021. Images courtesy of Minnesota Monthly. Below image: George Floyd Square billboard design, LATIN INVISIBILITY by Xavier Tavera.

 

His co-curatorial work and participation in the 2022 exhibition Mestizaje: Intermix-Remix at the Minnesota Museum of American Art brought to the foreground important reflections of what it means to claim a mixed-race identity consisting of both Indigenous and European descent.

Tavera says of his work, “I think there’s two extremes between documentary work and completely fabricated work, but I think life fluctuates that way between very specific and real and whatever we construct for us to live in. Regardless of the form, the work is always very poignant in its consideration of social, political, and identity wise” (qtd. in Latin Art in Minnesota - Conversations and What’s Next). Xavier Tavera’s Unsettled will be on view at Cruise until April 22. ◼︎ 

Xavier Tavera’s Unsettled will be on view at Cruise until April 22. Cruise is located on 3008b Hennepin Ave in Minneapolis. The gallery is open from 12pm to 5pm Wednesday through Saturday. Unsettled is free and open to the public. More information at www.cruisempls.com. Find Xavier's work at xaviertavera.com and follow him on Instagram @taveraxavier.