TWO GARDENS TO REMEMBER HOME: HIBA SCHAHBAZ AND DIANA EUSEBIO AT MOCA
From the ancestral to the mythical, two parallel exhibitions explore how memory, identity, and nature shape the symbolic territories where migrant communities imagine —and reinvent— their roots.
At the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA), Diana Eusebio’s Field of Dreams and Hiba Schahbaz’s The Garden converge around a shared sensibility: understanding the garden as a space of origin and transformation. Through distinct artistic languages —Eusebio’s natural dyes and textiles and Schahbaz’s expansive pictorial worlds— both artists trace pathways where home, memory, and spirituality intertwine in landscapes that invite viewers to reflect on identity through newly rooted perspectives.
Diana Eusebio: Field of Dreams is the South Florida-based artist’s reimagining of what it means to build and preserve a sense of home. Drawing from her Afro-Dominican and Indigenous Quechua Peruvian heritage, Eusebio uses natural dyes and textiles to tell stories about memory, migration, and belonging.
This first solo museum exhibition features hand-dyed fabrics and digital works that pay tribute to those places the artist calls home: the Dominican Republic, Peru, and Miami, Florida. Field of Dreams reminds us of ancestral traditions and celebrates nature and wisdom passed down through generations.
This exhibition, curated by Kimari Jackson, transforms the gallery into an ethnobotanical garden of art, filled with suspended Spanish moss and soft muhly grass, family portraits communicatively representing layered memories. Visitors are invited to move through this living environment that celebrates heritage, community, and the enduring bond between people and the natural world.
Spanning over fifteen years, Hiba Schahbaz: The Garden is the first major retrospective of Pakistani-American artist Hiba Schahbaz. The exhibition brings together motifs that recur throughout Schahbaz’s visual lexicon: global allegory, a direct feminist gaze, and fantastical beings that traverse elemental realms of earth, fire, wind, sky, and sea, alongside human architectural interventions. Collectively, this selection of paintings forms an environment that invites viewers into the artist’s expansive, imagined worlds.
The exhibition is framed conceptually through the idea of the jannat, or “Paradise Garden”—an idyllic space referenced in Islamic tradition and Sufi poetry across the Middle East and South Asia. The curatorial layout draws inspiration from the Persian and Mughal char-bagh, a quadrilateral garden divided by water channels with a central fountain. These sixteenth- and seventeenth-century landscapes embodied harmony, spirituality, and transcendence. Within The Garden, this structure becomes a poetic framework, echoing Schahbaz’s language of multiplicity and transformation.
Beyond historical references, the exhibition also reflects the lush landscapes and gardening culture of South Florida. The devotion to cultivating flora and community in Miami—particularly within immigrant and diasporic communities of color—parallels traditions of care and collective tending that are prevalent across South Asia.
The Garden, curated by Jasmine Wahi, invites viewers into a living terrain where myth, history, and imagination intertwine, offering new visions of femme subjectivity taking root and flourishing.
Both exhibitions will be on display until March 16, 2026, at MOCA, Joan Lehman Building, 770 NE 125 Street, North Miami, Florida (United States).
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