“Tonia Calderon: Endless” unfolds as an open-ended meditation on learning, making and becoming. Presented in the Art in Focus gallery, the installation invites visitors to slow down and enter a space shaped by sustained attention, where looking, reading and reflecting are inseparable from creation itself.

For this project, Los Angeles–based artist Tonia Calderon brings elements of her studio into the museum, evoking the salon as a historical site for the exchange of ideas. “Endless” features a large-scale panel painting alongside a suite of newly created works on paper made in residence with the museum. Layered surfaces and dense textures define these works, reflecting Calderon’s interest in scale as it moves between the microscopic and the expansive. She combines natural and synthetic materials to create surfaces that feel organic yet manufactured. Flowers appear as both subject and material. Used to create pigments, they reference cycles of growth, decay and renewal. Her process embraces transformation, releasing fixed outcomes to remain responsive to change.

Central to the installation is Calderon’s personal library. Books function as active tools, with each work often beginning in language drawn from this collection: a poem, a phrase or a memory broken down and reassembled into abstract form. The library reflects learning as cumulative and unfinished, knowledge gathered over time and continually revisited. Which books do you recognize? Do any passages recall a specific memory? The studio here, like learning itself, remains in motion, inviting viewers to linger within an ongoing rhythm of attention and engagement.

“Tonia Calderon: Endless” is organized by ASU Art Museum Senior Curator Alana Hernandez and ASU Art Museum Latinx Curatorial Fellow Natalie Solis.