La Frontera/The Border: An Interdisciplinary Examination

Tanya Aguiñiga

Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles based artist/designer/craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. She holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. In her formative years she created various collaborative installations with the Border Arts Workshop, an artists’ group that engages the languages of activism and community-based public art. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture and gender while creating community. This approach has helped Museums and non-profits in the United States and Mexico diversify their audiences by connecting marginalized communities through collaboration. Recent solo exhibitions include Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. (currently on view) and Craft and Care at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Aguiñiga is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a NALAC and Creative Capital Grant Awardee. She has been the subject of a cover article for American Craft Magazine and has been featured in PBS’s Craft in America Series. Aguiñiga is the founder and director of AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of artist interventions and commuter collaborations that address bi-national transition and identity in the US/Mexico border regions. AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness while simultaneously documenting the border. Aguiñiga is the inaugural fellow for Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. The award supported her creative work in communities over 2018.

AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides) is a series of artists’ projects created to recontextualize borders and generate a network for international collaboration. Through artist interventions and commuter participation, AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness in the border region, while simultaneously documenting life and emotion along the border. Using a quipu, the Andean Pre-Columbian organizational system, as a framework to record the daily migrations to the north, AMBOS founder Tanya Aguiñiga along with team of seven women artists and activists visited each US/Mexico border crossing spanning from Tijuana | San Ysidro to Matamoros | Brownsville to create Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu (2016-2018). People who crossed the border going north were asked to fill out a postcard about their experience. Each postcard came with two strands of thread that they were asked to make into a knot to represent the relationship between the US and Mexico, the two selves that exist at either side of the border, and people’s mental state at the time of crossing. The postcards and knots of each day were collected and the latter were tied together to make Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu.


For La Frontera | The Border, Aguiñiga has paired a photograph from each border crossing visited by the AMBOS team with writing from a select Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu postcard. These images and sentiments capture one of many emotions expressed at each location where Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu was activated. In 2018 Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu was acquired by Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for their permanent collection. 


 

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