page_title: Border art
section_title: History of border art specific to the Mexico-United States border
hierarchical_section_title: Border art / History of border art specific to the Mexico-United States border
caption_attribution_description: English: El muro Tijuana - San Diego
context_page_description: Border Art is a contemporary art practice rooted in the socio-political experience, such as of those on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, or frontera. Since its conception in the mid-80's, this artistic practice has assisted in the development of questions surrounding homeland, borders, surveillance, identity, race, ethnicity, and national origin.
  Border art as a conceptual artistic practice, however, opens up the possibility for artists to explore similar concerns of identity and national origin but whose location is not specific to the Mexico- United States border. A border can be a division, dividing groups of people and families. Borders can include but are not limited to language, culture, social and economic class, religion, and national identity. In addition to a division, a border can also conceive a borderland area that can create a cohesive community separate from the mainstream cultures and identities portrayed in the communities away from the borders, such as the Tijuana-San Francisco border between Mexico and the United States.
  Border art can be defined as an art that is created in reference to any number of physical or imagined boundaries.
context_section_description: Ila Nicole Sheren states, "Border Art didn't become a category until the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF). Starting in 1984, and continuing in several iterations through the early twenty-first century, the binational collective transformed San Diego-Tijuana into a highly charged site for conceptual performance art ...The BAW/TAF artists were to link performance, site-specificity, and the U.S.-Mexico Border, as well as the first to export "border art" to other geographic locations and situations." A proponent of Border Art is Guillermo Gómez-Peña, founder of The Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo.  The Border Arts Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo pioneered tackling the political tensions of the borderlands, at a time when the region was gaining increased attention from the media due to the NAFTA debates.  The contradiction of the border opening to the free flow of capital but simultaneously closing to the flow of immigrants provided the opportunity to address other long-existing conflicts within the region.
  Antonio Prieto argues that "As opposed to folk artists, the new generation belongs to the middle class, has formal training and self-consciously conceives itself as a producer of 'border art.' Moreover, their art is politically charged, and assumes a confrontational stance vis-à-vis both Mexican and U.S. government policies."
  In their introduction to the exhibition, La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience, Patricio Chávez and Madeleine Grynstejn state, “For the artists represented here, the border is not a physical boundary line separating two sovereign nations, but rather a place of its own, defined by a confluence of cultures that is not geographically bounded either to the north or to the south. The border is the specific nexus of an authentic zone of hybridized cultural experience, reflecting the migration and cross-pollination of ideas and images between different cultures that arise from real and constant human, cultural, and sociopolitical movements. In this decade, borders and international boundaries have become paramount in our national consciousness and in international events. As borders define the economy, political ideology, and national identity of countries throughout the world, so we should examine our own borderlands for an understanding of ourselves and each other.”
  Prieto notes that “While the first examples of Chicano art in the late sixties took up issues of land, community and oppression, it was not until later that graphic artists like Rupert García began to explicitly depict the border in their work. García's 1973 silkscreen "¡Cesen Deportación!," for example, calls for an end to the exploitative treatment of migrant workers who are allowed to cross the border and are then deported at the whim of U.S. economic and political interests.”
  Prieto notes that for Mexican and Chicano artists, the aesthetics of rascuache created a hybrid of Mexican and American visual culture. While it does not have an exact English translation, the term, rascuache, can be likened to the artistic term, kitsch. It translates most closely from Spanish as "leftover" with a sensibility closest to the English term, kitsch.
  Photographer David Taylor focused on the U.S.-Mexico border by following monuments that mark the official borders of the United States and México outlined as a result of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. He quotes on his website, “My travels along the border have been done both alone and in the company of agents. In total, the resulting pictures are intended to offer a view into locations and situations that we generally do not access and portray a highly complex physical, social and political topography during a period of dramatic change.” In his project, Taylor has covered physical borders by documenting the environment and landscape along the border but also addresses social issues by engaging with locals, patrolman, smugglers, and many other people living in and being affected by the U.S.-México border. He also chooses to ad
caption: El muro Tijuana - San Diego
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