The Making Home Saturday Series is a quarterly program that pairs special guests with participants from Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial. The program’s two-part sessions include conversations on exhibition-related themes, including systems, belonging, memory, care, and building, as well as the contemporary concepts of home related to race, class, migration, climate, and technology.

For Session 1, Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, known for their research-based practices, will discuss their commission for the Triennial, Unruly Subjects, which examines the Smithsonian Institution as a home for Puerto Rican cultural heritage. In 2022, as Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows, they gained access to the Teodoro Vidal Collection of Puerto Rican History at the National Museum of American History, and to Indigenous objects from Puerto Rico collected by Jesse Walter Fewkes at the National Museum of Natural History. Fewkes was a Smithsonian anthropologist sent to Puerto Rico as the Spanish–American War (1898) ended to collect Indigenous objects from the US’s new “possession.” Vidal was a Puerto Rican government official and self-taught historian whose gift of more than 3,000 works from the archipelago constituted one of the largest donations in Smithsonian history.

The artists is joined by Puerto Rican archeologist Reniel Rodríguez to discuss systems of institutional ownership, collecting, and exchange and their work uncovering the materials and design strategies used to protect and house Smithsonian objects.