Desert Distortion: An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Working against static representations of the Desert Southwest that have persisted throughout popular culture, Celina Osuna employs the term “desert distortion” as a productive way to use the desert’s agency in texts to unsettle old understandings and allow for experiencing the dynamic desert anew. This interdisciplinary panel conversation explores the desert’s dynamism and how we respond to it in art, literature and critical theory. 

About the speakers

Celina Osuna is a scholar and an artist. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, and her research, with an emphasis on Indigenous and Latinx environmentalisms, explores aesthetics of desert places in literature, art, and film and their impacts on cultural imagination and geopolitical relationships to land. Her first monograph, Desert Distortion, was published in 2025 with Texas Tech University Press and she is co-editor of Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands (Routledge 2024).

Daniel McCoy Jr. (Mvskoke-Citizen Potawatomi) is a painter originally from Bristow, Oklahoma that now resides in the Southwest. A majority of McCoy’s recent works consist of desert landscapes of Northern New Mexico. Daniel’s paintings draw from 60’s and 70’s counter culture illustrations, Oklahoma Native American fl at-style painting, Comics, Automotive pin striping and New Mexico landscape painters from the classic and contemporary eras.
Daniel received his formal art training at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. At the Institute, Daniel got the opportunity to work with the best in the Native Art fi eld. He has sustained a relationship with the College and Museum for over 30 years.
McCoy has worked in the arts in various areas such as, Commercial artist, Sign painter, Muralist, Art Handler, Museum Worker and as an Artist assistant over his career.
McCoy works in almost all Two-Dimensional media. Daniel’s works are primarily Oil painting, Ink, Enamels, and Lithography on most surfaces. The paintings vary in subject matter and narrative. In recent years the paintings have turned to recording the desert nearby. Daniel McCoy discovered Landscape painting, his paintings are inspired by the formations and skies of northern New Mexico. He currently works from his studio in La Mesilla, New Mexico.

Gloria Martinez-Granados is a Phoenix, Arizona based artist. Born in Guanajuato, Mexico and raised in South Phoenix. Gloria is an interdisciplinary artist creating with indigenous practices, adding a contemporary approach by including printmaking, assemblage, installation and performance to the more traditional arts of beadwork, weaving and cross-stitch. Through this process, she develops themes around identity, dreams, place, home and land. This merges with her experience growing up undocumented in the United States, creating a visual language. In 2019 she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Printmaking from Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. She has exhibited work at Apex Art in NYC. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Ontario, Canada. And currently at Phoenix Art Museum.

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