OCT 22 - NOV 19
YOUR FRUIT TASTES SWEET, I TASTE SWEAT
CURATED BY PHILIP P. BUCKNOR
Featuring work by Tim "Menyelek" Coleman • Schessa Garbutt • Madelyn Inez • Astrid Kayembe • Jahneli Leslie • Francis Robateau • Rodney Wagner • Cheyann Washington
A group exhibition examining labor, migration, extraction, memory, land, and care through the movement of Belizean people, histories, and traditions into Los Angeles. Through sculpture, photography, textile, sound, moving image, archival material, and participatory work, the exhibition considers how histories carried across borders and generations become visible through the first-generation experience through family memory, food, labor, cultural adaptation, and the ongoing negotiation between where one comes from and where one is building a life.
Opening Reception
October 22nd, 2026 | 7 PM - 9 PM
This exhibit is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.
Tracing connections between Belize and the metropolitan landscape of Los Angeles, the exhibition considers how histories of agricultural labor, migration, colonial extraction, ecology, and cultural memory travel across borders and generations. Through sculpture, photography, textile, sound, moving image, archival material, and participatory work, the exhibition looks particularly at how these systems become visible through the first-generation experience—through inherited memory, family histories, food, labor, cultural adaptation, and the ongoing negotiation between where one comes from and where one is building a life.
The exhibition asks audiences to consider what is carried across generations, what is transformed through migration, and what histories remain hidden beneath the things we consume.
CURATOR’S NOTE
PHILIP P. BUCKNOR
Your Fruit Tastes Sweet, I Taste Sweat began with questions about inheritance. But before the exhibition had a title, it began with a story in my own family.
My grandmother’s grandfather worked as a logger in Belize. His labor was tied to the rivers and forests, in an industry that moved timber through the country which was eventually exported to Great Britain. While transporting logs along the Macal River, he fell into the water and drowned between two logs.
I keep returning to this story about a man I never knew, whose work happened generations before me, and whose life and death still somehow reached me and brought me here. I thought about the distance those logs traveled. Where they went after leaving Belize. What they became. Who benefited from them. And how easily the story and person whose hands made that journey possible could be forgotten..
That was where this research began.
My relationship to Belize and Los Angeles led me toward these questions, but I don't expect this exhibition to answer them. I wanted instead to make a space where we could sit with them together. A space where artists and community members could place different kinds of memory beside one another and uncover those answers through shared stories.
Fruit became another way into this story because it lets us begin with something familiar and ask what came before it. Before sweetness, there was land. There were hands that planted, cut, carried, cooked, cleaned, harvested, and transported. There were people who crossed rivers and borders. There were people who left home. There were people like my grandmother's grandfather whose labor became part of something much larger, even when their names did not.
So for me, Your Fruit Tastes Sweet, I Taste Sweat is also an act of remembering. It is an invitation to look at what our families have carried, what they had to leave behind, what has survived inside us, and what we might still recover if we take the time to ask.
This is me deciding to remember.
Philip P. Bucknor (Tru) is a Belizean-American multidisciplinary artist, composer, curator, and researcher working across sound, music, film, performance, installation, and public programming.
His practice explores sound as a carrier of memory, cultural history, migration, place, and collective experience, often moving between artistic production and research-led forms of gathering and exchange.
Recent work includes composition commissions for Paris Opera Ballet and English National Ballet, alongside sound design for Geffen Playhouse. His sound, performance, and research practice has also been presented and discussed within academic contexts including Dartmouth College.
Bucknor is the founder of projects including Issued Nights, a listening and research series bringing music history, printed matter, collective study, and public conversation into shared spaces. Across his work as an artist and curator, he is interested in creating environments where contemporary practice, cultural research, archival material, and lived histories can exist in conversation.