Suburbia is where I grew up, but I don’t think you realize the meaning of the word until you live in a city. People drive everywhere to get anywhere. Having that kind of experience growing up feels like that cheap Hollywood special effect where someone appears to be driving but the car is stationary, since a projection on a screen provides the illusion of motion. This is even more convincing when you add to it the metronomic repetition of vinyl-clad tract houses and neatly trimmed fescue lawns. But I guess the same could be said about Manhattan anywhere North of 14th Street, and I would further argue that Los Angeles is an amalgamation of suburbs posing as a city. Read the full interview with Sam Stewart here.

Tanya Aguiñiga at Volume Gallery, Chicago

Tanya Aguiñiga is a Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and craftsperson originally from Tijuana. She sees craft as a performative medium and has collaborated with various border groups in activism and community-based public art. Her work is currently on view in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery exhibition, This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World. There is a beautiful formal quality to her work, which also plays with double entendres and language, all related to her experience with indigenous communities and speaking to the history of craft. There is also a powerful resistance to the limitations of craft. Please have a look at the artist’s website to see the broad range of themes, places, and spaces Aguiñiga has addressed. Read the full article here.

Tanya Aguiñiga

Presented by Chicago’s Volume Gallery, LA-based artist, craftsperson and performance artist Tanya Aguiñiga transformed ice-dyed cotton rope and synthetic hair into twisting, knotted wall-hung sculptures. Among the multi-textured works, “Azulito Sonriente” (2022) and “Barragán Tierno” (2022) mesmerize with their use of color and form. Vibrant and meticulously crafted, these artworks are unlike anything else at the show. Read the full article here.

For this episode, we asked artist, mother, and activist Tanya Aguiñiga which artist she would most wish to speak with and she chose visual artist and curator Julio César Morales.

The pair discuss the versatility of the border experience, unlikely influences, and functional art practices.

This episode is in partnership with The Armory Show. Both artists appearing in the episode are part of the curated sections of the fair’s 2022 edition. Tanya Aguiñiga’s work is presented by Volume Gallery in Focus, curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, while Julio César Morales’s piece La Linea is presented by Gallery Wendi Norris in Platform, curated by Tobias Ostrander.

Listen to the episode here.

This week the Armory Show returns to New York for its 2022 edition in its new, post-pandemic home at the Javits Center. But for the first time in the storied art fair’s history, the event brings together three voices with related curatorial practices, offering a distinct, unified lens to engage transcultural questions in contemporary art. Heavyweight curators Carla Acedevo-Yates of the Museum of Contemporary Chicago, Tobias Ostrander of Tate, London, and Mari Carmen Ramírez from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston each lend a Latin American and Latinx viewpoint to this year’s iteration of the Focus and Platform sections, as well as the fair’s curatorial leadership symposium. Galleries in the Armory’s wider programming have also stepped up and taken the initiative to present artists that compliment this year’s speciality mission. Ahead of this year’s exhibition Cultured highlights five of the most dynamic legacy and emerging Latin American and Latinx artists on display throughout the fair this week.

Tanya Aguiñiga
Volume Gallery, Chicago

Growing up in Tijuana, Tanya Aguiñiga, 44, recalls crossing the Mexican/California border daily to attend school in San Diego, witnessing people sacrificing their lives every day trying to make it to the United States. As a child, she struggled to understand why being born on one side of a line determines a person’s ability to move freely. Along with collaborators in a massive quipu project (an ancient Andes system of record keeping comprised of fibrous strings) along both sides of the divide, Aguiñiga captured the liminal realities on the brink of the two countries by asking U.S./Mexico commuters about their perspectives: thousands of people from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas that each contributed a knot that represents their individual borderland experience. Read the full article here.