Artifacts from an Unborn Empire Rethinking Civilization at Brand Library Art Center
- Francis Robateau
- Aug 18
- 8 min read
What does an empire look like before it exists? Not after the monuments are built, not after the maps are drawn, not after the victors write the story, but before all of that. Before the borders harden. Before the symbols become official. Before power learns to call itself history.
That question sits at the center of Artifacts from an Unborn Empire, an exhibition opening at Brand Library Art Center in Glendale, California, on Saturday, September 26, 2026. On view through December 31, 2026, the exhibition brings together a wide group of artists who use natural and manufactured materials to examine how civilizations are imagined, constructed, inherited, and challenged.
Timed with the 250th anniversary of the United States, the exhibition does not treat history as a closed record. It treats it as a contested space. The works ask who gets to define civilization, whose myths become monuments, and what kinds of worlds might rise from the systems we live inside now.
An exhibition about civilizations before they become official
Artifacts from an Unborn Empire gathers work by Aprille Curtis, Ben Cuevas, Cheyann Washington, Elana Mann, Ellen Jong, Francis Robateau, Gina Herrera, Greg Day, Hugo Heredia Barrera, Jason Jenn, Jason Trucco, Jotham Hung, Kayla Tange, Kristine Schomaker, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Nancy Kay Turner, Reyah, Robert Patrick, Rosalyn Myles, Rubén Esparza, Tony Isaja, and Vojislav Radovanović.
Curated by Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanović, the exhibition uses the idea of the “artifact” as both evidence and fiction. An artifact often suggests something recovered from the past, a tool, vessel, fragment, relic, or remnant that helps explain a culture. Here, the word becomes more unstable. These are artifacts from an empire that has not yet arrived, or perhaps one already taking shape around us.
That tension gives the exhibition its force. It looks backward and forward at the same time.
Civilizations are often described through their achievements: buildings, laws, rituals, art, weapons, technology, and records. But every civilization also depends on selection. Some stories are preserved. Others are erased. Some objects become sacred. Others are treated as disposable. Some people are named as founders. Others are pushed to the margins, even when their labor, knowledge, and resistance shaped the world.
The exhibition begins from this wider question: civilization is not neutral. It is made through choices about value, memory, property, land, identity, and force.
At Brand Library Art Center, that question gains a particular resonance. Glendale sits within a region shaped by Indigenous histories, migration, development, entertainment, spiritual communities, military industries, freeways, archives, ecological strain, and cultural reinvention. The exhibition does not need to reduce those histories to a single story. Its strength lies in allowing many artists to approach the same pressure point through different materials, gestures, bodies, and symbols.
Event details
Detail | Information |
Exhibition | Artifacts from an Unborn Empire |
Dates | September 26 through December 31, 2026 |
Opening reception | Saturday, September 26, 2026, 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM |
Venue | Brand Library & Art Center |
Location | 1601 West Mountain Street, Glendale, CA 91201 |
Curators | Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanović |
The opening reception offers the first public opportunity to experience the exhibition as a whole. For an exhibition built around systems, symbols, and belonging, the reception matters. It turns the gallery into a temporary civic site, a place where viewers gather around objects that question the very idea of civic order.
Materials carry the weight of history
The exhibition’s use of natural and manufactured materials is central to its meaning. Material is never just surface. Clay, fiber, metal, plastic, paper, found objects, organic matter, industrial fragments, and bodily forms can all carry histories of extraction, labor, decay, repair, and transformation.
A natural material might point toward land, ritual, survival, or ecological time. A manufactured material might suggest commerce, waste, militarization, consumer culture, infrastructure, or everyday life. When artists place these materials together, they create friction. The gallery becomes a site where ancient memory and contemporary systems meet.
That friction is especially useful when thinking about empire. Empires do not operate only through armies or governments. They also operate through materials: mined minerals, harvested crops, textiles, weapons, shipping routes, currency, monuments, maps, museums, and architecture. The objects left behind often tell stories that official histories avoid.
An artwork made from humble or discarded material can challenge the grandeur usually attached to civilization. A fragile object can question the myth of permanence. A handmade form can resist industrial sameness. A hybrid object can show how cultures form through mixture, conflict, adaptation, and survival.
The word “artifact” also raises questions about museums themselves. Who collects? Who labels? Who interprets? Who owns? Who is studied? Who is allowed to speak?
By using materials in unexpected ways, the artists in this exhibition unsettle the viewer’s habits of recognition. An object may look ancient but refer to the future. It may feel ceremonial but critique authority. It may resemble evidence while refusing to explain itself fully.
That refusal matters. Not every culture, memory, or wound should be made easy for viewers. Some works ask for attention rather than quick understanding.
Myths, monuments, and the stories power tells about itself
Every empire needs a story. It needs origin myths, heroic figures, enemies, ceremonies, borders, and symbols that make power feel natural. Over time, those symbols can become so familiar that they seem inevitable.
Artifacts from an Unborn Empire pushes against that familiarity. It asks viewers to look at symbols as constructions, not as facts.
Flags, crowns, ruins, sacred objects, official portraits, military forms, maps, and archives all carry authority because people are taught how to read them. Artists can interrupt that reading. They can distort the symbol, rebuild it from unstable material, merge it with another tradition, or place it in a strange context where its authority begins to crack.
This is where imagination becomes critique. The exhibition is not only about condemning past empires. It is also about asking how new empires form through the present. They may not always look like the empires of old. They may appear through technology, surveillance, resource control, consumer desire, nationalism, environmental destruction, or cultural mythmaking.
That makes the exhibition’s timing important. The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the United States, a moment likely to be filled with public commemoration, patriotic imagery, and competing views of national identity. In that context, this exhibition asks a harder set of questions.
What do anniversaries celebrate? What do they simplify? What histories do they invite back into view? What histories do they still resist?
The best commemorations do not only praise the past. They allow people to examine it. A civic anniversary can become more meaningful when it includes disagreement, grief, accountability, humor, speculation, and repair.
The exhibition’s title suggests that the future is not empty. It is already being built through today’s choices. The unborn empire may be one of control, or it may be one of care. It may repeat colonial patterns, or it may expose and resist them. It may be made from the ruins of older systems, or it may begin by questioning the desire for empire at all.
The artists bring many routes into the same question
With more than twenty participating artists, Artifacts from an Unborn Empire does not speak in one voice. That range matters. An exhibition about civilization and power would feel false if it offered a single conclusion.
The participating artists include makers whose practices span performance, sculpture, installation, fiber, assemblage, photography, video, painting, social practice, and conceptual work. The exhibition’s premise gives them a shared frame, but the works can move in many directions.
Some may approach the theme through the body. The body is often where empire becomes personal, through migration, labor, race, gender, ritual, policing, beauty standards, memory, and inherited trauma. Others may work through objects and symbols, constructing relics for imagined societies or altering familiar signs of authority.
Some may turn toward ecology. Empires have always reshaped land, water, animals, and plant life. In the present, ecological crisis raises urgent questions about what kinds of civilizations can survive. A future artifact might not be a crown or weapon. It might be a seed, a piece of plastic, a bone, a water vessel, or a record of loss.
Others may engage with performance and ritual. Ritual is one of the ways communities make meaning together. It can reinforce authority, but it can also create resistance, healing, and belonging. An invented ritual can reveal how all rituals are made, repeated, and given power.
The curatorial approach by Jason Jenn and Vojislav Radovanović appears to leave room for contradiction. That is a wise choice for a subject this broad. “Empire” can refer to nations, but it can also describe systems of taste, knowledge, technology, wealth, and desire. “Civilization” can be a term of pride, but it has also been used to justify conquest and exclusion.
A strong exhibition does not flatten those tensions. It lets them remain visible.
Why the setting at Brand Library Art Center matters
Brand Library Art Center is not a neutral container for this exhibition. Its identity as a public arts space gives the project a civic dimension. Viewers are not encountering these works in a private collection or commercial booth. They are entering a cultural institution that serves a public audience.
That setting helps the exhibition’s questions land more directly. Public art spaces are places where communities negotiate meaning. They host memory, disagreement, education, and encounter. They can make room for artists to ask questions that are too complex for slogans.
The Brand Library site also carries its own architectural and historical presence. A building devoted to art and knowledge naturally raises questions about collection, preservation, and access. What gets housed in a library or art center? Who feels invited inside? What kinds of knowledge are honored there?
For an exhibition about artifacts and civilization, those questions become part of the experience.
There is also something compelling about seeing speculative objects in a library context. Libraries are built around the idea that knowledge can be gathered and shared. Yet every archive has limits. Every catalog reflects choices. Every collection reveals values. In that sense, the exhibition does not only fill the space. It speaks to the logic of the space.
What to look for when visiting
This is the kind of exhibition that rewards slow looking. Rather than asking only, “What does this object mean?” it may help to ask what kind of world the object seems to come from.
A few questions can open the work:
What materials appear old, new, natural, synthetic, sacred, or discarded?
Does the work seem to document a real culture, invent one, or blur the two?
What symbols of authority appear, and how are they changed?
Who seems to be included in the imagined civilization?
What has been preserved, and what seems missing?
Does the work feel like a warning, a proposal, a memorial, or a joke?
What future would produce this artifact?
Those questions keep the exhibition active. They shift the viewer from passive observer to interpreter.
They also make space for ambiguity. Some works may resist direct explanation. That resistance is part of the subject. Civilization itself often depends on confident labels. Art can slow that confidence down.
A timely exhibition for a country looking back and ahead
Artifacts from an Unborn Empire arrives at a moment when the United States will be looking back at 250 years of national history. That kind of anniversary can invite celebration, but it can also invite deeper reflection. The exhibition seems built for the second task.
Its artists ask what civilizations inherit, what they conceal, and what they produce without fully understanding the consequences. They treat artifacts as clues, but not only to the past. They use them to think about futures being shaped now.
That may be the most useful idea the exhibition offers. Empires are not only distant subjects in textbooks or ruins. They are patterns of power, memory, and belonging that continue to shape daily life. They live in objects, rituals, borders, myths, and institutions.
By gathering artists who challenge those patterns through material and imagination, Brand Library Art Center creates a space for viewers to ask what comes next. The unborn empire is not fixed. It is still forming. That means it can still be questioned. It can still be interrupted. It can still become something else.
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