In Nadiah Rivera Fellah’s PICTURING THE BORDER (The Cleveland Museum of Art, $40), an aerial shot captures the border fence carving through a large mound in the Sonoran Desert, leaving dark shadows over the sand that look like giant tire tracks. The shot, taken from a 2019 film by Miguel Fernández de Castro, provides a glimpse of what the poet Wendy Trevino once called a “cruel fiction”: a man-made marker of colonization, an artificial boundary maintained by force.
Fellah, a curator at the Cleveland Museum of Art, is attuned to the shifting histories and realities of the frontier. As a teenager shuttling between El Paso’s towering freeways and the nightclubs of Ciudad Juárez, she experienced the border before the war on drugs, before the rise of militarization and surveillance. The boundary possesses a “metaphorical, imaginative and psychic power” that conditions regional life and culture.
Through the work of 17 artists dating to the 1960s, “Picturing the Border” shows Mixteco farmworkers as they travel from Oaxaca to California as well as the duality of Tijuana, an exotic destination for American honeymooners and the final point of departure for Mexican emigrants. Ricardo Valverde depicts lowriders in East Los Angeles embellishing American cars with flames, mariachi hats and Mexican flags. Louis Carlos Bernal and Graciela Iturbide reveal a new cross-border identity, one defined by cholos, matriarchs and the ubiquity of the Virgin of Guadalupe — “a synthesis,” the Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa once wrote, “of the old world and the new.”
United in their emphasis on their subjects’ humanity and dignity, these images offer a rich archive of the borderlands as seen through the eyes of some of its most incisive witnesses. Gang members are portrayed in a glorious mundanity, wrapped in towels while applying mascara and splayed out in bed like Titian’s “Venus of Urbino.” In one striking photograph, a young Latina mother, leaning against a lowrider in pristine Nike Air Force 1s, breastfeeds her child as she stares defiantly into the camera. In another, pink seesaws, installed along the border by the artists Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, convert the fence into a playground. Even amid the pain, separation and surveillance, the image suggests, life continues.
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