Terra Occasio (Land of Opportunity)
four-channel digital video & sound installation
ALT (Art, Light, & Technology) Festival
Mesa Arts Center, Mesa Arizona
2026
In the year of America’s Semiquincentennial, Lauren Strohacker, selected by Mesa Arts Center to create a featured work for America 250, transforms the Mesa Arts Center’s Brown Sculpture Courtyard into a multimedia homage to the coyote–an animal considered by Joseph Beuys to be the spirit of the country. Coyotes are the only carnivore to defy government eradication programs, hate campaigns, and human cruelty to expand their habitat over the last 250 years. Coyotes roam the entirety of the country; evidence shows there is a coyote living within a mile of every person in the continental United States. It is said that one coyote is killed every minute in America. Controversial and charismatic, the coyote continues to hallow the wild, rural, suburban, and urban ground as rebellion incarnate. Terra Occasio is a one-night encounter with with the coyote, our last ambassador from the Howling Wilderness.
