Sandy Rodriguez: Book 13

Peccaries and armadillos, animals that live along the US-Mexico border, roam a 20-foot map of the United States painted on amate, a hand-beaten fig-bark paper the Spanish outlawed in the 16th century. Look closer and there is a Border Patrol vehicle, police in riot gear, and the whistles people blow to warn that immigration agents are near.

You meet the map first: it hangs at the entrance to the reinstalled Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. Its state lines come from 19th-century maps in the Huntington's collection, and it sets federal Indian boarding schools beside today's child detention centers. The installation also has plant portraits, a landscape painting and Book 13, a codex shaped like the 16th-century Florentine Codex but filled with recent news of ICE incidents and resistance.

Rodriguez made some of the pigments from sources like the Huntington's gardens. Entry is included with general admission ($29 Monday to Thursday, $34 at weekends), reservations are required Friday to Sunday, and the Huntington is closed on Tuesdays.