Powerful message
‘Border’ show highlights danger and beauty of area
Borders, bottles and barbed wire. Artists working along the U.S.Mexico border bring both the danger and terrible beauty of these arbitrary political crossings to life through sculpture, printmaking, photography, installation and film.
These borders divide both cultures and families. Indigenous people who traditionally straddled both sides can no longer hunt game across these borderlines.
“The U.S.-Mexico Border” opens on Saturday, Jan. 13 at the Albuquerque Museum. The show is being presented in conjunction with the companion exhibition at 516 ARTS opening Jan. 27. The museum show features works by two Los Angeles artists augmented by works from the permanent collection and major loans.
The colorful works of New Mexico’s Luis Jiménez will hang alongside the stark border photographs by former Albuquerque photographer Delilah Montoya.
Jiménez’s “El Buen Pastor” (1999) is a lithograph of a haloed goatherd gathering his flock as yucca-disguised border patrol agents loom in the background. The piece depicts the 1997 killing of 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez in Redford, Texas; Hernandez was mistaken for a drug smuggler. Jiménez shows him as a Christlike good shepherd cuddling a kid. The piece balances both propaganda and fine art, curator Andrew Connors said.
Now at the University of Texas at Austin, Montoya shot desert landscapes scattered