La Cuna Center

La Cuna Center A 501(c)(3) arts and ecology nonprofit. Creative work for better living in the Texas Hill Country.

Lastly, I’ll embarrass him with a hero shot, but he has been that for us this past year. We hope Diego Miró-Rivera will...
09/23/2026

Lastly, I’ll embarrass him with a hero shot, but he has been that for us this past year. We hope Diego Miró-Rivera will be a forever Field Fellow. We continue to work with him this year and next on projects that feel like history in the making. He brings tons of energy and passion, notices everything, listens deeply, and has a heart of gold. Diego graduated from Yale with honors in Art and Cognitive Science. His work spans from immense scale land art works to ‘paintings’ made from cicadas to major urban public art commissions. He has studied under Andy Goldsworthy, been a resident at The Norfolk School of Art, done archaeological research on Ancient Maya in Belize through a Gurney Fellowship, and studied Japanese Gardens through a William Hotchkiss Fellowship. Because this is his home landscape, his work in the Hill Country carries a particular depth, and it has been exciting to join him in it.

Our third Field Fellowship for the coming year is with hannah spector, an Assistant Professor of Practice at UT Austin w...
09/22/2026

Our third Field Fellowship for the coming year is with hannah spector, an Assistant Professor of Practice at UT Austin whose work has been shown at Women and Their Work, Transformer Gallery, Stoveworks, The Katzen, The CAM Perennial, Dumbo Film Festival, Berlin Short Film Festival, and Bodega Film Festival. Hannah is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, poet, and curator of the deep listening project, MASS ambient. We had such a fun orientation and river hang this past weekend and we’re super excited to work together!

It was great to host Mark Menjívar this weekend at the onset of his field fellowship with La Cuna. Mark is a San Antonio...
09/22/2026

It was great to host Mark Menjívar this weekend at the onset of his field fellowship with La Cuna. Mark is a San Antonio-based artist and Associate Professor in the Interdisciplinary School for Engagement at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His art practice primarily consists of creating participatory projects while being rooted in photography, oral history, archives, and social action. Mark has engaged in projects at venues including the El Museo del Barrio, Rothko Chapel, Eastern State Penitentiary, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, FOTOFEST, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Puerto Rican Museum of Art and Culture, Sala Diaz, Contemporary at Blue Star and the Krannert Art Museum. (+ a real nice guy)

09/18/2026

We’re neither anti-technology nor particularly nostalgic, but throughout the design process with Riley Triggs, we’ve been looking at simple practices from camping, gardening, and farming that might be applied to permanent architecture.

This isn’t groundbreaking. It isn’t a “right” way of designing, and it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to accessibility and aging in place. It’s simply an exercise in discovering our own thresholds for comfort and effort. We looked for ways to incorporate things so basic they felt almost like a child building a fort, especially when they might make us more aware of the seasons, our water use, etc.

We studied simple, functional dwellings from around the world while also considering local practices and materials.

It is funny that we live in an era when something as mundane as shutting a barn door by hand before a storm can be considered a way of reconnecting with the environment. In most places and throughout most of history, that would be a silly notion. But after coming from a fast-paced, hyper-convenient city, those small required tasks add up. They make our daily life feel more attentive, physical, and grounded in the place where we live and so we wanted to lean into them. (and the garden beds are in progress!)

That attention to everyday rituals has shaped the first spaces at La Cuna. As we turn to the next studios and cabins, we’re exploring a different set of questions: how spaces can offer privacy, rest, and comfort without losing their connection to the landscape.

We welcome Jackson Ingraham as our newest Field Fellow. Jackson is an award-winning filmmaker and the founder of Tree Mo...
09/03/2026

We welcome Jackson Ingraham as our newest Field Fellow. Jackson is an award-winning filmmaker and the founder of Tree Monster, a production company specializing in vérité-style documentary. We have been working alongside Jackson to produce a new, short documentary film this summer and fall. We’ll be very excited to share details soon!

07/21/2026

All of this rain filled our wildlife-watering sculpture to the brim. The sculpture collects and stores 50 gallons of rainwater and sends it to a little basin with a float to water our furry friends. It’s the place to party at La Cuna. Art for animals!

Just checking in on La Luna 🌜…It’s amazing how much can change in a few months. Here’s a little rewind of La Luna - from...
07/02/2026

Just checking in on La Luna 🌜…

It’s amazing how much can change in a few months. Here’s a little rewind of La Luna - from May’s super bloom to the prescribed burn that helped make it possible. Land art that heals!

06/17/2026

If culture changes by attention and meaning first, then attachment and intention next, we think that perhaps design follows art in order of operations for each issue we explore. Wrestling with this as we build our nonprofit models. Excited to bring in many more talented people this coming year.

06/09/2026

From visual artists, to filmmakers, to musicians and poets, we love all those sensitive souls helping us feel and see the world around us. Work shown by

Our prairie restoration areas are going through their plant succession just as hoped and expected. Starting with severe ...
06/08/2026

Our prairie restoration areas are going through their plant succession just as hoped and expected. Starting with severe drought + overgrazing when we purchased the property we had almost no grasses - just dust and cactus. We began seeing healing the first year with annual forbs and opportunistic natives like lots of bitter sneeze w**d, prairie tea, lovegrass, some partridge pea, ragw**d, plenty of wildflowers and so forth. That first year was about letting these “w**dy plants” shade soil, fix nitrogen, and stop erosion. By year two many of our fields became dominated by first tier grasses like purple threeawn and we started seeing more grass and forb varieties in the shade. Year three was a sideoats grama explosion and we gained a bit more structural diversity (ground hugging runners, a low, and mid layer). This year I’m so proud of these shoulder tall stands of silver bluestem (pic #1) building our height layer alongside more little bluestem ( #2) and southern sea oats ( #3). All along we’ve been “cheating/helping” by trying to nurse in grasses from the final tier of a mature prairie: Indian grass, big bluestem, switchgrass, eastern gama grass ( #4). This year with the rains and our healing soils, those are finally taking and going to seed in several places. On the final slide you can see the succession clearly - the foreground shows an area disturbed by our septic install 8 months ago growing the first year w**dy cover and above the white line is the fourth year prairie. It has been super fun to learn to read the land and watch not only the return of the plant species, but also the insane variety of birds and pollinators. Walking on the soil has gone from rock hard compaction to now spongy loams that are holding so much water!

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PO Box 32
Art, TX
76820

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