Alejandro T. Acierto’s Model Home examines Phoenix-area growth in Scottsdale

Alejandro T. Acierto’s Model Home is listed to run at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, Arizona, from September 26, 2026, through February 7, 2027. The installation uses the setting of a house to examine how development and population growth are changing the Phoenix-area desert. For visitors, it offers a way to consider those changes through photographs, moving images and objects gathered into room-like spaces.

Scottsdale Arts describes the exhibition as an expanded documentary project using architectural elements, video, audio, photography, surface scans and found objects. Its central question is about the meaning of home in a landscape often treated as open for settlement. The museum asks: ‘Who gets to keep home in the desert?’

What visitors will see inside Model Home

In her September 24 report for Axios Scottsdale, Gitanjali Poonia describes a large model-home structure with photographs hanging from exposed studs and sheathing. Visitors move through spaces arranged like rooms, including a living room with video playing on a television. Those details make the house itself part of the display, rather than simply a backdrop for individual works.

Axios also describes a ‘sales office’ in front of the structure, containing reference books, wallpaper and video. The arrangement draws on the presentation of new housing while giving visitors documentary material to examine. According to Axios, much of that material comes from Buckeye and the West Valley, areas central to the Phoenix region’s outward growth.

Why Buckeye and the West Valley matter to the exhibition

The focus on Buckeye places the work within a documented period of rapid regional growth. In a population update adopted in December 2025, the Maricopa Association of Governments estimated that Buckeye had 119,317 residents on July 1, 2025. That compares with 91,502 at the April 2020 census and an estimated 113,910 in July 2024.

The same regional update estimated 12,221 net new residential units in Buckeye between April 2020 and July 2025. Those figures give scale to the housing growth behind the exhibition’s questions. They do not establish how much land or habitat was affected at the locations represented in Acierto’s work, or what happened at any individual site.

A separate 2025 report commissioned by Greater Phoenix Leadership describes growth shifting toward the West Valley, especially Buckeye. The Peirce Report, written by William Fulton and Christopher Swope, identifies water availability, housing costs and traffic among pressures associated with expansion. It supplies regional context for Model Home’s subject; its findings predate the exhibition.

The museum’s question about desert land

Scottsdale Arts says the installation considers how settlements, urban expansion and climate change affect the land and its nonhuman inhabitants. It also asks how value is assigned to land seen as vacant or unoccupied. Those are the questions the exhibition sets out to explore; the museum’s description does not quantify ecological changes at specific Buckeye sites.

The museum organized Model Home and names Julie Ganas, its curator of engagement and digital initiatives, and Oliver Sayers, its coordinator, as curators. Their exhibition places documentary media within a structure visitors can walk through. The format connects the familiar experience of entering a model house with the less visible decisions and environmental questions surrounding new construction.

When to visit the Scottsdale exhibition

Scottsdale Arts lists the exhibition through February 7, 2027. Axios gives the museum address as 7374 E. Second St., Scottsdale, and reported general admission at $16, with free admission for visitors aged 18 and younger. Because admission details can change, visitors should check the museum’s current information before making plans.

The exhibition’s listed run gives Phoenix-area readers several months to see how Acierto presents this material. What visitors take from it remains open: the available accounts describe the installation and the questions it raises, but provide no attendance figures or documented visitor response. Its clearest proposition is to look at a new home alongside the desert landscape in which it is built.