Tanya Aguiñiga
Andrés Lhima
Haydee Alonso
Los Dos de Los
Guillermo Bert
Pablo López Luz
Elvira Bessudo
Hector Dio Mendoza
Margarita Cabrera
Delilah Montoya
Cristina Celis
Julio César Morales
Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman
,
Elizabeth Rustrian Ortega
Gaspar Enríquez
Viviana Paredes
Adrian Esparza
G.T. Pellizzi & Ray Smith
Pilar Agüero-Esparza
Postcommodity
Carlota Espinoza
Daisy Quezada Ureña
Jorge Diego Etienne
Marcos Ramírez ERRE
Andres Fonseca
Augustine Romero
Guillermo Galindo
Betsabeé Romero
Rupert García
Zinna Rudman
Douglas Kent Hall
Mauricio Sáenz
Bob Haozous
Eduardo Sarabia
Alejandra Antón Honorato
Agnes Seebass
Luis Jiménez
Elizabeth Sisco
La Metropolitana
Studio Rael San Fratello
Jami Porter Lara
Curiot Tlalpazotl
Lorena Lazard
Van Deren Coke
Francisco Lefebre
Consuelo Jimenez Underwood
Two-part exhibition at 516 ARTS & Albuquerque Museum Curated by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims & Ana Elena Mallet
THE US-MEXICO BORDER: PLACE, IMAGINATION, AND POSSIBILITY By Lowery Stokes Sims
The exhibition The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility engages the idea that the border is as much a subject as it is a place, a nexus for identity as it is an arena for life and survival. It examines contemporary production and creative interventions along the US-Mexico border in a geographical area that includes the four U.S. (California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas) and six Mexican states (Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas) that directly abut the border. Artists and designers based in Mexico City, such as the design firm La Metropolitana and designer Alejandra Antón Honorato, are also represented by work that speaks to the subject matter of the exhibition. That the border has been the site of long-established patterns of exchange between the United States and Mexico is patently evident as individuals commute daily and seasonally between the two countries at checkpoints such as Tijuana and San Diego or El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Since the 1980s, this ebb and flow between the two countries has become increasingly multinational with the influx of Central Americans escaping social and political upheaval in their own countries. Consequently, the US-Mexico border has become a place of intense cultural intersection, where peoples, places, events, and situations merge politically, economically, and socially, and where identity and nationality are in constant flux. It also is a
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place where it is possible to rethink citizenship beyond spatial realities and political realities. Antonio Prieto has noted that the “cultural production of the Mexico-US borderlands “has been very diverse and prolific throughout history” and has also “navigated the limits of high and popular culture.”1 That diversity of life on the border is particularly captured in work of artists that have been added to the Albuquerque venue of this exhibition at 516 ARTS and the related installation at the Albuquerque Museum as in the addition of the photography of IMAGES: Front Cover: Guillermo Bert, La Bestia/The Beast, 2016 1 Hector Dios Mendoza, Migra, 2015 2 Tanya Aguiñiga, Tierra 3 Pilar Agüero-Esparza, Flippers, 2010
F. Van Deren Coke and Doug Kent Hall, who, as long-time residents in New Mexico, found some of their subjects in the life on the border. Likewise Gaspar Enríquez celebrates the richness of Mexican American life and subject matter through his soulful portraits of friends, neighborhoods and prominent figures in the community. Isolated against a white or color background, his figures achieve a heraldic quality and presence that is comparable to those created by Kehinde Wiley.
4 Luis Jiménez, El Buen Pastor, 1999
A key issue that emerged from the original planning of this exhibition is the border as a place
5 Daisy Quezada Ureña, Untitled, 2016
fraught with urban and environmental concerns. Architects and planners Teddy Cruz and
6 Postcommodity, Repellent Fence, 2015
Fonna Forman consider how urban areas are increasingly hubs for creativity and forces that
7 Studio Rael San Fratello, Bad Ombres, v.2, 2017
serve as catalysts for change and development.2 While the photographs of Pablo López Luz
8 Bob Haozous, Border Crossing, 1994 9 Eduardo Sarabia, A Thin Line Between Good and Hate, 2008-2014 10 Rupert García, Cesen Deportación, 2011 11 Delilah Montoya, Migrant Campsite, Ironwood, Arizona, 2004
capture the characteristics and vastness of the terrain on the border they also reveal patterns of habitation. The collaborative paintings by G.T. Pellizzi and painter Ray Smith—created from soil collected on the border—reinforce the idea of the border as place more literally. Delilah Montoya imbues the border landscape with human presences in her photographs of migrants’ camps and water stations set up by concerned citizens. Tanya Aguiñiga’s woven floor piece Tierra, “a rug made of white nylon and vinyl tubes stuffed with soil from the Tijuana – San
Ysidro border” also personalizes the border experience by attaching leather strips to the tubes stamped with phrases referencing the significance of places where soil was collected in her own life.3 Environmental concerns can be seen in the re-purposing and upcycling of recycled handcrafted Patron tequila bottles by Viviana Paredes for her glass structures. Betsabeé Romero’s installations of carved and painted tires reflect the ingenuity of the inhabitants of so-called “informal settlements” within the border region, speaking to creative improvisation with everyday materials. And the most unexpected aspect of the exhibition and its thematic approaches to the terrain, flora and fauna—as well as the geographical and political aspects 2
of the border—can be observed in the jewelry by Andrés Fonseca, Cristina Celis, Elizabeth Rustrian Ortega, Elvira Bessudo, Zinna Rudman and Agnes Seebass which was curated for the exhibition by Mexico-City based design expert Ana Elena Mallet. The interconnectedness of the US and Mexico is the subject of Marco Ramirez ERRE’s maquette for a Janus-headed Trojan horse looking toward both sides of the border, first installed as part of the 1997 InSite exhibition project in San Diego. Haydee Alonso asserts the interdependence between cities on both sides of the border in the design of her jewelry series Inter-Acting, which requires two people to achieve its effect. For Consuelo Underwood and Mauricio Saenz the concept of hybrid identities are expressed in her weavings of composites of the Mexican and US flags, and his interweaving of several identity cards that have been photo transferred onto fabric. The surface of Underwood’s work is festooned with safety pins
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to symbolize the tenuous relationships between the two countries, as is the mixture of barbed wire with woven cotton and silk in her Rebozo de la Frontera, despite its seemingly benign presence. The motifs of the flag and the rebozo come together in Carlota Espinoza’s screen print, We the People, in which the bust of a nude woman is set against a US flag whose colors are dripping. She wraps her hair/rebozo (which ends in a barbed texture) around her shoulder and holds a white dove of peace. The title—somewhat ironically—is the first three words of the US Constitution. Many of the artists in the exhibition have developed practices that celebrate labor in the context of migratory and itinerant experiences. They consider strategies for the survival of traditional skills into the future in the face of cultural disruption and dominance. Adrian Esparza’s abstract wall hangings—created by unraveling traditional woven Mexican serapes—are a vivid statement of this connection between the past and the present, the traditional and the new, while referencing the visual vocabulary of Minimalist art. The installation/performance by Pilar Agüero-Esparza and Hector Dio Mendoza involves the creating of huaraches in new and modern styles (under the entity of El Shop) that speak both to tradition and to today. Evoking the notion of a “Space In Between,” Margarita Cabrera collaborates with migrants
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in the El Paso area to create sculptural cacti of species native to the border area. Their stories of crossing the border are on the surface of the forms constructed from border officials’ uniforms. In another type of collaboration, Jorge Diego Etienne works with industrial artisans in Monterrey, Mexico to create pencil holders in the form of a gun barrel. The designer notes that this desk accessory is meant for us to reflect on the possibility of “positive change” as each one of us “[shoots] for good.”4 The Albuquerque Museum adds ceramic works by Jami Lara Porter and Studio Rael San Fratello. Porter’s black ceramics are created using ceramics techniques, long indigenous to the Chihuahuan desert,5 by examining various coupling and permutations of contemporary plastic bottles. Her black-fired forms inevitably call for a comparison to the work of the Martinez family of ceramics, but her perspective is closer to that of the London-based Venezuelan
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designer and ceramicist, Daniel Reynolds, who has similarly introduced details of ordinary
objects of life such as milk cartons, paper plates and hot water bottles to the vocabulary of porcelains. Revealing another aspect of their creativity the architectural team Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello present here a selection of ceramics The Bad Ombré series in which they explore the nature of creating a single object from two different clay bodies. The creation of this series was sparked by the mispronunciation of the word hombre (man] as ombré by President Trump in a polemic about the border wall early in 2017. In many ways, ombré—a gradual blend of one color to another—better characterizes the borderlands where languages, cuisine, landscapes, and culture are shared across the political boundary that defines the two countries.6 Stories of border crossings have been emblazoned in our consciousness. Guillermo Bert’s tapestry, executed with Zapoteca weavers in Los Angeles, features the infamous train, “La Bestia” that transports goods and migrants, whether sanctioned or not, towards the United States. The desperation and hardship of unofficial border crossing is palpable in Luis Jiménez’s 1989 cast fiberglass sculpture, Border Crossing, and its related drawing in the collection of the Albuquerque Museum, that depicts a man carrying a woman on
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his back. The ultimate destiny of many individuals crossing the border is poignantly evoked in Daisy Quezada Ureña’s sculpture at 516 ARTS of a single ceramic shirt seen hanging off a railing in some unspecified locale. The articles of clothes, discarded bottles and cans, shoes, etc. left by migrants in their journeys have also inspired musician and composer Guillermo Galindo. Collaborating with photographer Richard Misrach—he reconfigures this detritus into musical instruments and creates musical scores—a more redemptive conclusion for these stories of hardship and determination.
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Margarita Cabrera’s Backpack (blue) and Andrés Lhima’s portable chair, Fidencio Sillón (that can be expanded into use through improvised fillings from the immediate environment) are artifacts of more prepared crossings, where migrants would be outfitted with supplies for survival. On the distaff side Julio Cesar Morales’s series of watercolors, Undocumented Interventions, focuses on imaginative modes of transporting goods and persons across the border based on actual situations observed at border crossings. Similarly, Eduardo Sarabia’s ceramics, echoing blue and white Talavera pottery, allude to the deception of transport across the border with the boxes created for each piece featuring a label that disguises the true cargo. Notions of the border wall itself, as a barrier, have especially come to preoccupy our
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imaginations. Therefore, it was a revelation to come across the work of the architectural firm Rael San Fratello that proposed that we reconceive the wall as an urban architectural entity that could serve the municipalities through which it was built. The components include a number of functions, from the whimsical to the practical encouraging interchange across the border. Artists in the Albuquerque venue have also reconsidered the wall from special contemporary aesthetic concepts. For example, Postcommodity engages land art installation in their documentation of Repellent Fence, their temporary 2015 two-mile long installation intersecting the US-Mexico border, which was “comprised of 26 tethered “scare eye” balloons, ten feet in diameter, floating 50 feet above the desert landscape.”7 This is among many interventions that demonstrate the inherent porousness of the border wall, and “the interconnectedness of the Western Hemisphere by recognizing the land, indigenous peoples, history, relationships, movement and communication.”8 On another level, La Metropolitana’s serving trays in the shapes of the US and Mexico emphasize the delineations between the two countries through the use of two different
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types of wood in its fabrication. Alejandra Antón Honorato’s wicker chair in the contour of Mexico as a geographical entity suggests that when one sits in the chair they feel like they are in Mexico. And Bob Haozous’ painted steel sculpture is not so much about a particular border, but rather “figures, planes, and crosses along with bar shapes referencing the plinths of the border wall converge to comment on the philosophical, political, racial, religious, and personal borders that we create in our minds.”9 An important consideration in the planning of this exhibition was the acknowledgement of the contribution of the Chicano Art Movement of the 1970s and 80s in bringing the issue of the border into the purview of the art
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world. Rupert García was among a number of artists, working along with organizations such as SPARC, The Border Workshop, Self-Help Graphics and Galeria de la Raza, who created performances, installations and artworks that addressed “the social tensions the Mexican-American border creates, while asking us to imagine a world in which this international boundary has been erased.”10 García’s 1973 silkscreen image of an enlarged detail of barbed wire with the caption “Cesen Deportación” (Stop Deportation) was created under an initiative of Self Help Graphics’ atelier. In the 1988 serigraph by Los Dos de Los (Yreina Cervantez and Leo Limón) a figure in a central lozenge shape is entangled in barbed wire being pulled taut by hands on both sides while other figures run at the four corners of the suggesting tug-of-war between the US and Mexico over the issue of migrants. The propositions of the Chicano art movement would take a more ironic tone in the early 2000s in the posture of naco—a derogatory reference to class disdain and pretention—t-shirts and other apparel were customized with logos that reflected young Mexicans’ responses to their political and social situation. The pants in this exhibition modified by Hector Dios Mendoza are emblazoned with “Migra” (slang for immigration officers who would do sweeps of communities for undocumented individuals) and “No ICE” (a protest against the US “Immigration and Customs Enforcement) capture this defiant attitude. This work also reminds us how integral the labor of Mexicans working in maquiladoras in border towns are to the apparel industry of the United States. Today, as designers and artists migrate to the border to initiate projects, to forge collaborations, and to create objects, it has come to represent a negotiated space that houses a resistant aesthetic of adaptation and defiance. As border historian and chronicler Michael Dear notes in the catalogue of the exhibition: “When the world arrives, border art will not wither, instead its themes will warrant even more urgent attention.”11
Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, co-curator of The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility, recently named one of the Most Influential Curators by Artsy, is the retired Curator Emerita at the Museum of Arts and Design. She served as executive director then president of The Studio Museum in Harlem and was on the education and curatorial staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A specialist in modern and contemporary art, she is known for her particular expertise in the work of African, Latino, Native and Asian American artists. 1 Antonio Prieto, “Border Art as a Political Strategy,” accessed January 26, 2015, http://isla.igc.org/Features/Border/mex6.html. 2 See Antawan I. Byrd and Reid Shier, Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-Gardes. London: Phaidon Press, 2013. American Institute of Architects, Cities as a Lab: Designing the Innovation Economy, Local Leaders report (Washington, DC: AIA, 2013). 3 Anna Bitong, “U.S.-Mexico Border Inspires Artists to Tell Immigrants’ Stories, KCET, October 10, 2107. Accessed December 7, 2017. https://www.kcet.org/ shows/artbound/us-mexico-border-inspires-artists-to-tell-immigrants-stories. 4 Artist’s website, accessed March 14, 2016. http://www.jorgediegoetienne. com/choose-your-bullets. 5 The Chihuahuan desert is located mainly in Mexico in the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Nuevo Leon, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosi. In the United States it extends into the states of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.
6 Josie Lopez, email to Lowery Stokes Sims, December 6, 2017, 1:50 PM. 7 See https://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/content/postcommodity-repellentfence. Accessed December 7, 2017. 8 Ibid. 9 See http://socratessculpturepark.org/artist/bob-haozous/. Accessed December 7, 2017. 10 Antonio Prieto, “Border Art as a Political Strategy,” accessed January 26, 2015. http://isla.igc.org/Features/Border/mex6.html. 11 Michael Dear, “Place and Art in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” in The USMexico Border: Place, Imagination and Possibility, exh.cat. Los Angeles: Craft and Folk Art Museum with the assistance of the Getty Foundation, 2017, p. 30.
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516 ARTS and the Albuquerque Museum present The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility co-curated by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims and Ana Elena Mallet, with contributions by Josie Lopez at 516 ARTS and Titus O’Brien at the Albuquerque Museum. The group exhibition includes the work of 45 artists and designers working along the US-Mexico border who are engaging with the intersections of culture that have developed in the region while considering the welfare and wellbeing of individuals traversing or living in the area. This exhibition originated at the Craft & Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, where it was part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative and supported by major grants from the Getty Foundation. The main exhibition in Albuquerque is hosted by 516 ARTS, and has been expanded into a collaboration with an additional exhibition site at the Albuquerque Museum and includes accompanying interdisciplinary public programs around Albuquerque.
516 ARTS January 27 – April 14, 2018
Albuquerque Museum January 13 – April 15, 2018
516 Central Ave. SW, Albuquerque, 87102
2000 Mountain Rd. NW, Albuquerque, 87104
505-242-1445
505-243-7255
516arts.org
albuquerquemuseum.org
Hours: Tue – Sat, 12-5pm + First Fridays, 3/2 & 4/6, 5-8pm
Hours: Tue – Sun, 9am-5pm + Third Thursdays, 5-8:30pm
Free admission
Admission: $3 in-state / $4 out-of-state, seniors $2, children $1 Free First Wednesdays 9am-5pm, Third Thursdays 5-8:30pm & Sundays, 9am-1pm
This project is made possible by support to 516 ARTS from: an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, as part of the Our Town project “Feeding the Heart” for arts programs in the Downtown Albuquerque Arts & Cultural District; a grant from the New Mexico Humanities Council; grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the McCune Charitable Foundation, The FUNd at Albuquerque Community Foundation and The City of Albuquerque (special thanks to Councilor Isaac Benton, District 2); and with additional support from County Commissioners Debbie O’Malley & Maggie Hart-Stebbins, Center for Educational Initiatives, Nusenda Foundation, the J.B. Margaret Blaugrund Foundation and the Friends of 516 ARTS.
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts