Queer American Memorials at the ICA

Queer American Memorials at the ICA San José

Queer American Memorials reclaims public space, replacing stories of violence with stories of life and community. The project places interactive markers at the locations where queer people were murdered from 1999 to 2009, the decade Congress debated LGBTQ inclusion in federal hate crimes law. Each site receives a permanent ceramic brick, a nod to the first brick thrown at Stonewall. It also carries an interactive digital layer, viewable with any smartphone, where photographs and video testimonies from friends and family allow visitors to learn a fuller story of the person’s life. What a country refuses to remember, it repeats. We make these lives impossible to forget.

At the ICA San José, Queer American Memorials presents its first California memorial in progress, honoring Alina Marie Barragan (1980-2000), a Latinx trans youth and San José native. Installed in the museum’s reading room, the exhibition traces the arc of the project, from Sean Fader’s Insufficient Memory to the living memorial now being built with Alina’s community.

Visitors are met at the entrance by Fader’s photograph of the San José site where Alina lost her life, made during the 18-month, 25,000-mile journey that became Fader’s Insufficient Memory, and artwork now held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. At the center of the room, an interactive Google Earth station lets visitors travel the country through the project’s digital layer, moving site by site through the photographs and stories Fader documented of the people killed in the first years of this history. At the back of the room are the ceramic brick that, in partnership with the Billy de Frank Center and Alina’s family, will be permanently placed in San José for Alina, and a video interview in which co-creators Sean Fader and Maureen Towey introduce the work. Shelves of queer art and design books invite visitors to stay and read, and brick cards are free to take home.

This is a community memorial, and San José is invited to help build it. On Friday, October 2, 2026 two days before what would have been Alina’s birthday, the museum’s First Friday program welcomes community members to share stories for her memorial. On Sunday, October 4, The Billy DeFrank LGBTQ+ Community Center, where Alina volunteered, hosts a birthday celebration where friends, family, and community can contribute the stories, photos, and memorabilia that will become part of her permanent AR memorial.