DRAFT - TITLE TBD
by Jessica Todd
I am consistently drawn to Crafts media for their warmth, familiarity, and intimacy. The veil of elitism that often accompanies “Art with a capital A” is lifted when we interact with materials, objects, and forms we encounter in our everyday lives. Craft’s approachability uniquely positions it to tackle difficult issues with the softness required to draw viewers in with their defenses lowered, primed to receive the message of the work with greater sensitivity.
Four artists working in Craft disciplines—Favianna Rodriguez (printmaking and collage), Tanya Aguiñiga (fibers and furniture), Juan Barroso (ceramics), and Cassandra Adame (jewelry)—wield Craft’s amiable qualities to tell stories of migration, transnationalism, border politics, cultural identity, and everyday life in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Each artist carries a personal and familial history that informs their work, which, in turn, speaks to the experiences of many. Their perspectives offer insight into a complex social and political narrative that is widely misunderstood, yet impacts everyone.
Favianna Rodriguez is a first generation American Latinx artist with Afro-Latinx roots who grew up in Oakland, California, where she continues to live and work as an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and entrepreneur. She is the President and co-founder of The Center for Cultural Power, an organization “igniting change at the intersection of art and social justice.” In her work, Rodriguez employs printmaking and collage techniques with commanding shapes and exuberant colors to create eye-catching compositions. Her work carries an influence of political resistance posters that she softens with curved lines and tactile textures. This intentional shift toward rounded instead of sharp mirrors her desire to reframe social justice as an effort of tenderness and joy rather than hostility and struggle.
Rodriguez often incorporates plants, animals, and natural landscapes to underline the inextricable intersection of social justice with environmental justice. Her pieces shed light on colonialism’s exploitation of people and natural resources, and the way marginalized communities bear the brunt of pollution and climate change. As anti-immigration rhetoric accuses undocumented residents of stealing resources, Rodriguez reminds us that our country’s wealth is derived from stolen resources, stolen land, and stolen people. Through her visual art and cultural organizing work, Rodriguez is at once uncompromising and caring, unapologetic and harmonious, powerful and gentle. Her work empowers us to envision a better future and believe we can arrive there.
Tanya Aguiñiga was born in San Diego, California and grew up in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico as a binational citizen who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border daily. She is an artist and designer working in Crafts media—particularly fibers—to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community art projects, often in collaboration with other artists, activists, and community members. In 2016, she created AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an “ongoing series of projects that provides a platform for binational artists.” Her work is highly collaborative and interactive, requiring viewers to become active participants rather than passive bystanders. In this way, she nudges her audience toward connection and dialogue.
Aguiñiga is inspired by objects and materials that carry intergenerational wisdom. By practicing historical techniques such as Mesoamerican weaving, she taps into a cultural lineage that precedes geopolitical borders and thrives on interpersonal connection. In her inaugural project for AMBOS, Aguiñiga invited thousands of people to share their stories as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border while making knots on a quipu (a pre-Columbian Andean fiber-based data collection system). The Border Quipu became an archive of life on the borderlands. Through this and other works, Aguiñiga recasts the border from an ominous region of sensationalized rumors to a safe space for observation, reflection, and kinship.
Juan Barroso was born in Oklahoma and spent his early childhood in San Miguel Octopan, Guanajuato, Mexico, before moving back the U.S. at age [?]. Until he was 22 years old, his parents lived in the U.S. as undocumented residents, living and working with the relentless necessity to pass unnoticed. Once his parents gained residency, Barroso finally felt free to express his identity and his family’s story through his artwork. A mug featuring a meticulous rendering of a wheelbarrow reminds him of a time he was with his father on a construction job site and casually told a stranger where he was from. Days later, the construction company lost the project due to hiring undocumented workers and the owner warned them that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would be coming soon. Barroso carried the burden of wondering if his naïve confession led to such monumental consequences, a glimpse of the weight shouldered by undocumented residents and their families every day.
Through his impeccable illustrations rendered in tedious pointillism, Barroso expresses his deep “respect and admiration for [his] people and their will to survive.” Works such as [Title? Mop Bucket piece] and [Title? Sewing Machine piece] are an homage to his mother, who cleaned houses and did clothing repairs to make ends meet. The labor-intensive processes involved in the production of these works are a kind of cathartic penance for the shame he felt in his teens about his mother’s profession. He seeks to redeem his gratitude for her sacrifices and to honor the dignity of the work she and many others perform to make a living. He now meets with other people who have migrated to the U.S.—living far from their families and performing hard labor to support them—to hear their stories and celebrate them through his beautiful work. His commitment to functional objects is a salute to the laborers. As he learned growing up building fences with his father, “Idle hands [mean] more time in the heat of the sun.”
Cassandra Adame lives in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and commutes daily to the craft school she founded in El Paso, Texas called Cantareras, where she teaches jewelry and ceramics to the community. She makes conceptual jewelry using traditional metal fabrication and casting processes while also incorporating non-traditional materials like cement and found objects. Adame’s work celebrates her neighborhood in Ciudad Juárez, highlighting moments of beauty in the urban landscape of a city notorious for violence, drug trafficking, and factories. Aesthetic forgotten buildings, ornate window bars, and peacefully sleeping street dogs make their way into her pieces. She reminds us that, as in any city, among its challenges and shortcomings, there are people simply living, working, loving, and dreaming.
Adame processes the challenges of everyday life in the borderlands through her work, from the inconvenience of heavy traffic and long commutes, to the ever-present vibration of tension at each crossing, to the heartache of not being able to share the U.S.-half of her life with her partner, who cannot cross with her. The silver tears in her piece [Title? Bed with tears] illustrate her heavy sadness and isolation in those moments. Her piece 02:47.05 records objects she finds on her frequent journeys between the U.S. and Mexico—everyday objects like a beer can, a cell phone and charger, a fork, headphones—that transform into amulets of migration. Adame’s work shows us how the abstract, human-invented division of a geopolitical border has very real impact on so many lives. And perhaps more importantly, she shows us how to continue living anyway.
We exist in yet another moment of U.S. history when our leaders are inciting xenophobic vitriol and violence, encasing with border walls the very land our founders stole through war and genocide and then told us we were entitled to guard as our own. These four artists, alongside many, many others, are doing the vitally important work of reminding us of the humanity that lies beneath the heft of politics and prejudice. Through the skilled work of their hands, they celebrate, honor, share, and thrive, illuminating a vision for a brighter future for all of us.