The 2024 Border Biennial at El Paso Museum of Art explores how regional artists experience and interact with the Borderlands, and also acts as a barometer for area contemporary art.
2024 Border Biennial/Bienal Fronteriza
December 15, 2023–April 14, 2024
El Paso Museum of Art
The El Paso Museum of Art could’ve been heavy-handed with its 2024 Border Biennial/Bienal Fronteriza. They could’ve mounted terse statements about border politics and packaged the exhibition as a fiery retort to present-day social and human rights concerns. Instead, the city-run museum, in partnership with the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, presents the work of more than fifty artists as an expression of life, identity, and creation in and about the Borderlands.
Consider how Tijuana’s architectural normalcies become eye candy in Hugo Crosthwaite’s Tía Juana Mi Amor (2021). The five-minute stop-motion animation illustrates the often-overlooked structural soul of Tijuana, where the artist spent his formative years, through detailed black-and-white drawings of bare streets and building façades.
As one might anticipate, themes entwined with border politics—cultural erasure, racial injustices, human-rights abuses—act like a steady mid-tempo bassline. But that bassline is presented at a quiet, contemplative volume. This holds true in Beili Liu’s large-scale, floor-to-ceiling Each and Every (El Paso) (2023), a grim and meditative piece that remarks on the recent migrant children crisis and family separation policies. The installation displays hundreds of articles of worn children’s clothing preserved in cement that are suspended inches off of the ground.
Honoring the disappeared—and annotation of cultural amnesia—continues in Reverencia: Arizona Migrant Death Mapping (2023). Three hanging silk scrolls from Arizona Borderlands artist Elizabeth Pineda contain, among dense computer code from Humane Borders and the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, countless names of the deceased. Likewise, the oil-on-canvas painting Passage (2022) by Los Angeles-based artist Antonio Vigil renders human figures—some fully illustrated, others faint and vanishing—walking in a desolate landscape. The fading figures seem to symbolize lost loved ones, whether they’re in detention, as ghosts, or the loss of cultural lifeways due to cultural assimilation.
Another thematic throughline of the exhibition, curated by EPMA assistant curator Claudia S. Preza alongside curatorial advisors Edgar Picazo Merino and Jazmín Ontiveros Harvey, is robust contemporary art. As simple as this may sound, the 2024 Border Biennial is an inspiring presentation of how some of the most thoughtful area artists are responding to the contemporary moment of border issues, but, thankfully, without all of the mainstream and manufactured static, noise, and subterfuge.
