November 7, 2026-February 6, 2027di Rosa SF
Invaders is an exhibition pairing Interrupted Passage, an ongoing food-based project by Julio César Morales and Max Rivière-Hedrick, with significant works from the di Rosa permanent collection. Together, these works use food as a way of investigating alternative histories and the relationships between migration, labor, memory and power, transforming food from something we consume into a medium through which histories are transmitted, contested, and remembered.
Interrupted Passage is a project that considers the meal as a site of political negotiation and cultural exchange. The project takes inspiration from a feast hosted in 1846 by Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a Mexican general and rancher who played a complicated role during California’s transition from Mexican to American rule. After being taken prisoner by American soldiers, Vallejo invited his captors into his home and chose to negotiate through hospitality rather than armed resistance. The resulting meal placed Vallejo in an extraordinary position: both host and hostage, negotiating the future of California from his own dining room.
César Morales and Rivière-Hedrick reimagined this historical encounter through a series of eight-hour meals performed for audiences in locations across California and Mexico. By recreating the feast as a contemporary social and sensory experience, Interrupted Passage asks how food can become a form of diplomacy, resistance, accommodation, and survival—and how seemingly intimate acts of hospitality can participate in much larger political transformations. This exhibition presents the most expansive view to-date of this two-decade project, bringing together video, sculpture, photography, ephemera, and live food activations, alongside a new series of photographs and a new video and sound installation.
In preparation for the exhibition, Morales also undertook sustained engagement with di Rosa’s permanent collection, selecting works to enter into a visual and conceptual call- and-response with his own practice. In conversation with Interrupted Passage, works by Joan Brown, Carlos Villa and Enrique Chagoya, among others, open a broader conversation around Vallejo’s story and the enduring questions it raises about migration, belonging, hospitality, power, and cultural exchange.
Invaders considers California not as a fixed place or singular history, but as a place continually remade through movement, encounter, negotiation, and exchange. Through food and the rituals surrounding it, the exhibition asks how histories of invasion and migration settle into the body—how they linger—in taste and memory, in the hands that prepare a meal, in the stories passed from one generation to another, and in the strangers who become guests at our table. Here, the table becomes both archive and stage: a place where the past is served, contested, remembered, and imagined anew.
About the artists
Morales and La Rivière-Hedrick’s collaborative projects have been exhibited and commissioned by institutions including the California Biennale at the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach), LAXART (Los Angeles), Gallery Wendi Norris (San Francisco), Blaffer Art Museum (Houston), the Smart Museum of Art (Chicago), Museo Rufino Tamayo (Mexico City), the Andy Warhol Foundation (New York), Headlands Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and Current LA Triennial, among others.
Morales’ own artwork has been shown at Lyon Biennale; (Lyon, France), Istanbul Biennale; (Turkey), Los Angeles County Art Museum (Los Angeles); Singapore Biennale; (Singapore), Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt, Germany); Prospect 3 (New Orleans, Louisiana) SFMOMA (San Francisco); MEWO Kunsthalle (Germany); Perez Art Museum (Miami, Florida), and Manetti Shrem Museum (Davis).
Public Programs
Opening Reception
November 7, 5-7pm
RSVP
Interactive Artist Talk
December 5, 5-7pm
Julio César Morales discussed his food-based projects and collaborations around radical hospitality, and the broader intersections of food, art, migration and cultural exchange that inform his practice. Following the conversation, join the artist for homemade food and continue the exchange around the table.
Caesar’s Salad Workshop with Julio César Morales
January 12, 1-3pm
Artist Julio César Morales leads a participatory workshop exploring the surprising cultural history of the Caesar’s Salad. As participants prepare and share the iconic dish, Morales traces its origins in 1920s Tijuana and the cross-border exchange that shaped its creation and enduring popularity. The workshop also considers the history of border art and activism in Tijuana and San Diego, using a familiar meal to explore migration, cultural hybridity, and the movement of people and ideas between Mexico and California. Participants will make-and eat-Ceasar’s Salad while considering how food carries histories of place, identity, and encounter.
Invaders at the Table
February 6, 7pm
Ticket Price: $175
This multi-course experimental dinner considers the table as a site for encountering California’s histories of invasion, settlement, migration, and cultural exchange through food. Each course traces a different chapter in California’s history: from Indigenous footways and Spanish colonization through Mexican California, U.S. annexation, and subsequent migrations. Ingredients, recipes, and culinary traditions become a living archive of conquest, displacement, adaptation, and cultural resistance. Taking Interrupted Passage as a point of departure, the evening brings artists, historians, and food practitioners together around a shared meal to consider how California came to taste the way it does – and how its identity continues to be made and remade through movement, conflict, survival, and exchange.