In April 2023, Michelle Hinojosa presented her thesis exhibition at the University of Michigan's Stamps Gallery. The exhibition, Lime Green Is the Taco Stand, was inaugurated with a poetry event, "Poetry by the Light of the Quilts," where Hinojosa read a series of poems on immigration and the collective feeling of loss that comes with this experience.

Hinojosa returns to Stamps a year later with a new creation, Logcabins. This time, we encounter her work outside the gallery as her log cabin quilts wrap the two columns of the gallery building.

The two colorful quilted columns help the gallery signal its existence amidst the dreary concrete landscape. Hinojosa’s striking quilts use color combinations that play with shades of yellow, green, pink, blue, and orange to create patterns of tesselations. Developed around the unit of a pink square, the blues and yellows of the respective quilts can be seen as stepped borders surrounding the squares to make a larger square motif. However, on closer inspection, a corner of the motif breaks away from this neat enclosure to connect it to the other blocks on the quilt, forming a sense of continuity unique to tessellated patterns.

Through her MFA at the University of Michigan, Hinojasa explored techniques of bead weaving, quilting, and ceramics to find mediums that could translate her own experiences of belonging to a Texan family with a history of migration. Similar to Logcabins, the quilted patterns displayed in Lime Green Is the Taco Stand are rhythmic. The repeated motifs create a sense of continuity. Yet, the monotony of the simple triangular shapes, as with the squares of the log cabin quilts, is broken by the use of bold colors that are juxtaposed with each other. By patching together different textures and using bold color combinations, Hinojosa work is an ode to the weaving and quilting traditions rooted in Mexican and Latinx culture. It carries forward the legacy of these living traditions while also inserting her "voice" in the long tradition of quilt making.

In Hinojosa’s work, the quilt becomes an intergenerational storytelling device that extends its history to include memories of migration and present experiences of children growing up in a foreign land. Logcabins remembers Hinjosa’s grandmother’s arduous journey of taking her children and quilts with her as she illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. To Hinjosa, the quilts are symbolic of safety and a sense of home, grounded in warmth and familiarity that they had to build for themselves as immigrants.

Made with UV-resistant polyester, Hinojosa’s quilts are specifically made for the outdoors rather than the "safe" space of the gallery. Wrapping the columns with quilts is an act of laying claim to public spaces that families of immigrants often can’t access. Through its display, the quilts also memorialize the continuity of cultural traditions despite long histories of migration that is not acknowledged enough in "official" archives. While conserving memories of the past, the two eye-catching quilted columns invite spectators to inhabit the in-between space of the inside and outside, partaking in the experience of being caught between two worlds, not knowing which to migrate to.

Rukmini Swaminathan is a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include postcolonial public housing in India from the perspective of aesthetics, material culture, and design history.

Michelle Hinojosa's “Logcabins” opened on June 21, 2024, and is up until May 8, 2025, at Stamps Gallery, 201 South Division Street, Ann Arbor. Visit stamps.umich.edu for more information.