What if the place you’re supposed to call home is a place you’ve never truly known?  

Ambar Santiago makes her exhibition debut at CityArts’ SIDE Gallery with “Guatemala: My Place of Trees.” Through fluorescently powerful color and dense layers of overgrown plants, Santiago confronts the complicated experience of growing up in the United States while feeling separated from her Central American and Caribbean heritage.

Alstroemeria – a genus of roughly 120 species native to the highlands of Chile, Brazil, and Peru – has a long journey from Andean slopes at 3,500 meters above sea level to kitchen tables in Kansas City. It mirrors something bigger: the way nature, trade routes, and human curiosity weave together.