Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

Yxta Maya Murray is a law professor, writer, filmmaker, painter, and social practice artist. The author of twelve books, her recent publications include the novels God Went Like That (Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press) and Art Is Everything (TriQuarterly Press, 2021). Her next novel, A History of Hazardous Objects, was published by New Oeste/University of Nevada Press in 2024. Her next work of nonfiction, “We Make Each Other Beautiful:” Art, Activism, and the Law, was published by Cornell University Press, also in 2024. Her documentary film about farmworkers and AI, “Fieldwork AI,” made with Paulina Sierra, has been screened at Cornell University and will be featured at New York’s Cuchifritos Art + Gallery Space in 2026. Her watercolors have been shown at The Happy Gallery in Santa Fe. She has won a Whiting Award, a Wyeth Foundation Publication Grant, a Barbara Deming/Money for Women grant, an Art Writers Grant, a 2021 New York City Arts Corps Grant (as a co-grantee), and the 2025 Blackwell Prize in Writing. She is a 2024-2025 Harvard Radcliffe fellow.

While at Headlands

I’ll be working on a book of connected short stories whose working title is Central Valley. The stories examine how immigration law, the carceral state, climate change, drought, other extreme weather like flooding, racism, and energy policy are today maintaining and intensifying inequality in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The work is based on oral histories that I’m engaging in the area, as well as archival, scientific, and legal research.