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US Border Wall Construction Damages 1,000-Year-Old Indigenous Land Art in Arizona

Construction crews building a barrier between the United States and Mexico have damaged a 200-foot-long etching of a fish embedded in the land in Arizona, known as the Las Playas Intaglio, which is thought to be 1,000 years old. According to a report in the Washington Post, workers destroyed a 60-to-70-foot portion of the ancient Indigenous land art as part of President Donald Trump’s $46.5 billion border-wall project. Satellite imagery confirmed the destruction, showing bulldozer marks running through about a third of the fish formation. U.S. Customs and Border Protection acknowledged the incident, stating that a contractor inadvertently disturbed the cultural site on April 23, 2026, and that the remaining portion has been secured.

1,000-year-old archaeological site bulldozed during construction of Mexico-US border wall

On 24 April, a Department of Homeland Security contractor bulldozed a 1,000-year-old intaglio—a 280ft by 50ft etching in the desert sand—during construction of the US-Mexico border wall in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The site, sacred to local Indigenous communities including the Hia-Ced O’odham, was part of a UNESCO biosphere and contained over 3,000 petroglyphs. Despite warnings from tribal members and refuge staff, the contractor destroyed a 70ft stretch of the fish-shaped intaglio, which elders and archaeologists describe as an irreplaceable cultural and archaeological treasure.

Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is presenting "Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers," an exhibition of nine recent paintings and a large-scale sculpture by the Akimel O’odham/Diné artist (b. 1986, Santa Fe). The show runs from October 18, 2025, to February 8, 2026, and is organized by senior curator Adrienne Edwards and curatorial assistant Rose Pallone. Perkins’s densely layered works incorporate acrylic, spray paint, found materials, and textual fragments, drawing on petroglyphs, ancestral storytelling, and personal experience to explore themes of grief, love, and hope while resisting reductive representations of Indigenous identity.

Bulldozer Plows Across Thousand-Year-Old Indigenous Land Art During Border Wall Construction

Construction workers building the Trump administration's border wall between the US and Mexico accidentally damaged a two-hundred-foot-long Indigenous land art figure known as the Las Playas Intaglio, a colossal fish etched into the earth near Ajo, Arizona, that is thought to be over a thousand years old. Satellite imagery showed bulldozer tracks cutting a sixty-to-seventy-foot-wide path across the intaglio, and a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson confirmed the disturbance, stating the remaining portion had been secured and would be protected in place.