When Tanya Aguiñiga was a young woman growing up in Tijuana, Mexico, she would commute across the US-Mexico border to go to school in San Diego, California. This experience informs her current textile practice and the projects she’s helped launch—particularly AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), which stages “interventions” that use the border wall itself as a mechanism to form connections, much like the game “ring around the rosie.” Using the likes of human hair and beeswax, along with weaving traditions and furniture design studies in her site-specific installations, Aguiñiga considers how porous spaces, borders and such, can elicit tactile feelings of belonging and exclusion. Full article here.

Novelist, playwright, and scholar Yxta Maya Murray has been a law professor for the last three decades and long moonlighted as a respected art critic. An important bridge between the academic and artistic worlds she inhabits, We Make Each Other Beautiful: Art, Activism, and the Law (2024) allows Murray to bring her legal expertise into the critical sphere to elucidate not only the role that artists play in society with syntactical brio but also how the most rigorous critiques of the law often emerge from artistic practice. Murray opens the introduction in Tijuana, Mexico, in August 2021, a sweltering end of summer marked by desperate migrants caught in the crosshairs of a hostile, xenophobic immigration policy a year after the Trump presidency. Local news stations report that an elderly woman was fatally seized by cardiac arrest while waiting in her car for hours to cross the US-Mexico border. It is against this backdrop that Los Angeles-based and Tijuana-raised artist Tanya Aguiñiga deepens her commitment to change policy. Full article here.

More Light! Luftwerk x Aram Saroyan
(Poetry Foundation)
Aram Saroyan’s single-word poem “lighght,” inspires a site-specific installation.
Opens October 17
Full list here.

While many Americans are embroiled in heated debates about political parties symbolised by red and blue, two exhibitions in PST Art are focused on those colours in the form of cochineal and indigo, two early sources of dye and pigmentation. Sangre de Nopal/Blood of the Nopal: Tanya Aguiñiga & Porfirio Gutiérrez en Conversación/in Conversation (until 12 January 2025) at UCLA’s Fowler Museum features the California artists Tanya Aguiñiga and Porfirio Gutiérrez, who specialise in fibre arts and use cochineal in tapestries and other work. The prized red of cochineal derives from a humble insect living on the prickly pear cactus and was cultivated and processed by the Zapotec starting around 500BCE. Later it became an important export of Mexico under Spain. The exhibition looks at that history and how the contemporary artists use cochineal to raise awareness of ancestral knowledge and collective memory. Full article here.