The Heinz Family Foundation today named visual artist Tanya A. Aguiñiga as a recipient of the prestigious 26th Heinz Awards for the Arts, which annually recognize a small handful of outstanding individuals with a $250,000 unrestricted cash award.

Tanya Aguiñiga’s visual artworks blend contemporary craft, sculpture and performance to address issues of migration, gender and identity. Born in San Diego and raised in Tijuana, Mexico, she draws on her life experience as a binational citizen, who as a child crossed the border daily from Tijuana to San Diego to attend school. Ms. Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community.

Often incorporating cotton, wool and other textiles, Ms. Aguiñiga blends traditional Indigenous weaving practices and materials and contemporary design into elaborate and colorful works that hang on walls, form immersive performance installations, incorporate film and more. In 2016, Ms. Aguiñiga created AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of projects that provides a platform for binational artists. Noted works include AMBOS: Border Quipu/Quipu Fronterizo, which captures reflections gathered from interviews with thousands of individuals crossing the border between the United States and Mexico. Travelers were also asked to tie a knot between pieces of fabric—the knotted fabrics reminiscent of quipu, an Incan method for recording information that included variously colored threads knotted in different ways—as a documentation of their crossing, together creating a large, colorful cascading installation. More about Aguiñiga and the Heinz Award here.