LatinXAmerican is an intergenerational group exhibition featuring nearly 40 Latinx artists from Chicago and beyond. The exhibition assesses the presence and absence of Latinx artists in DePaul Art Museum’s collection, and reflects efforts to build in this area as part of a multi-year initiative to increase the visibility of Latinx artists and voices in museums, working towards equity and lasting transformation. Occupying all of the museum’s galleries, LatinXAmerican includes photographs, paintings, works on paper, sculptures, textiles, videos, and installations primarily drawn from DPAM’s collection, including several recent acquisitions, as well as new works from artists living throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. Included in the exhibition, America’s Wall (El muro de America) was inspired by the persistent questioning that received during her travels between the US and Mexico regarding the existence of a wall on the countries’ borders. Aguiñiga grew up on both sides of the San Diego/Tijuana border, crossing between Mexico and the United States daily for 14 years. Aguiñiga’s work documents and extracts evidence of the wall’s existence—there are three consecutive walls in the part of Mexico where Aguiñiga grew up —all in front of Trump’s proposed wall prototypes. The particular section of the border fence found in this work is made up of corrugated jet-landing mats recycled from Operation Desert Storm during the Gulf War. This wall segment was erected during Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, a strategic reinforcement tactic on the US/Mexico Border, which was responsible for more migrant deaths in its first year than in the entirety of the previous 75 years of Border Patrol history. Aguiñiga and her team from the bi-national project AMBOS (“both” in Spanish, or an acronym for “art made between opposite sides” in English) took rust impressions on cotton from these walls, as evidence of their existence. More on this exhibition here.