UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Living in Sanctuary
Cinthya Santos Briones
Location:
Exhibition Dates:
Artist:
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Living in Sanctuary
Cinthya Santos Briones
BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York announces Living in Sanctuary, a solo exhibition by BAXTER ST 2025 Mid Career Artist Initiative recipient Cinthya Santos Briones. On view from June 17, 2026 -August 12, 2026. The exhibition presents documentary photographs tracing the lives of undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees in the United States who have sought refuge within churches, temples, and faith communities.
Beginning in 2017, in response to the first Trump administration and the escalation of deportations and family separations, Briones began working closely with individuals across the country who resisted these policies by entering sanctuary—a condition sustained through community practices rather than a formal legal framework. Her photographs follow people of diverse ages and cultural backgrounds as they navigate lives shaped by legal precarity and prolonged confinement.
The images hold both the weight of that constraint and the persistence of daily life. Within these spaces, time does not stop. There are meals, chores, celebrations, and moments of rest. What emerges is not only a record of political circumstance, but a portrait of endurance structured through repetition, care, and community.
The environments themselves are central to the artwork. Churches and temples, reconfigured as living quarters, become sites where spiritual architecture meets the practical demands of habitation. Beds, personal objects, and improvised domestic arrangements sit alongside altars and pews, producing a layered space where the boundaries between public, private, and sacred are continually renegotiated.
Briones’s relationship to this subject is both professional and deeply personal. She is married to Lutheran Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz, co-founder of the New Sanctuary Movement in New York City, and has been closely connected to sanctuary networks for years.
At the intersection of faith and policy, Living in Sanctuary considers sanctuary not only as a form of protection, but as an ongoing act of resistance. The exhibition reflects on the conditions that make such spaces necessary, while attending to the lives sustained within them.
ABOUT CINTHYA SANTOS BRIONES
Cinthya Santos Briones is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator of Nahua Indigenous heritage based in New York. Her practice explores migration, memory, spirituality, and resistance through a decolonial feminist lens, integrating photography, archival research, text, and community-based textile practices. With a background in ethnohistory and anthropology, she worked for over a decade at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), where she conducted research on Indigenous migration, codices, textiles, and traditional medicine.
Cinthya holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Photography from Ithaca College, as well as a Certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center of Photography (ICP). She is currently a faculty member in the Studio Arts Practice MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and serves as Assistant Director at the Mexican Studies Institute at CUNY. She has also been a guest artist at Columbia University and Rutgers University.