See you at the crossroads

Art of The U.S.-Mexico Border

Inside a snow globe, men and women sit along a countertop. A tall slatted wall runs along the counter; on its other side, a woman prepares a meal at a kitchen station. Words and food can pass through the wall’s gaps, but the partition itself is insurmountable. The piece, designed by the Rael San Fratello architecture studio, is called Burrito Wall .Itis one of several works included in the exhibition The U.S.-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility, in which the current debates and misgivings about a border wall resonate. Yet the show, on display at locations across Albuquerque this winter, including principal sites 516 Arts and the Albuquerque Museum, was originally conceived while a Donald Trump presidency was still a Simpsons joke. (Even Burrito Wall was built, presciently, in 2013.) Josie Lopez, a curator at 516 Arts, explained, “At the time when [exhibit co-curator Lowery Stokes Sims] was conceiving of it, it was really about celebrating the border and the exchange that has always gone on.”

The U.S.-Mexico Border initially opened in September at Los Angeles’ Craft and Folk Art Museum as part of Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, a Getty-sponsored series of LA and Southern California exhibitions on Latin American and Latino art. It was co-curated by Sims, a curator emerita at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, and Mexico City-based curator Ana Elena Mallet. For the exhibit’s transfer to Albuquerque, newly added works include pieces by Santa Fe-based artist Daisy Quezada Ureña and