Volume Gallery is delighted to announce Swallowing Dirt, artist, activist, and craftsperson Tanya Aguiñiga’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery opening April 28, 2023, from 5-8 pm at 1709 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL 60622.
Tanya Aguiñiga’s latest pieces are unconventional portraits–abstractions of the human experience. Cotton rope weavings with ceramic renditions of body parts woven into their rich surfaces represent the external and internal physical body as well as the metaphysical body. One piece cascades terracotta hands, another has ceramic internal organs, and another is long like a spine with woven pieces attached along its length like vertebrae. The portraits are a continuation of Aguiñiga’s ongoing weaving practice which is often layered with meaningful materials.
Los Angeles-based Aguiñiga was raised in Tijuana, Mexico, and crossed the border daily as a child to attend school in San Diego. This binational experience indelibly formed her perspective and continues to be an essential influence on her artistic and activist practices.
Aguiñiga often uses heavily symbolic materials tied to her Mexican heritage. Off-loom weaving techniques and terracotta have a rich history in Mesoamerica. Her use of unglazed terracotta objects and a slurry of the red-brown material to dye sections of cotton reference this history. Either in its shaping by stone or salt from her hands operating as a glaze–the objects act as a record of her body and of their own making. Aguiñiga’s work frequently addresses the U.S./Mexico border, whether with pieces of the border wall, performances along its edge, or activism with those affected. By using clay from Mexico and the U.S., Aguiñiga addresses colonization, commodification, and ownership of land.
Tanya Aguiñiga’s ongoing investigations of identity, place, and craft are powerful and emotive abstractions of her and her community’s experience.
Swallowing Dirt will be on view at Volume Gallery through June 17, 2023.
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.
Aguiñiga is a 2022 Latinx Artist Fellow, a recipient of the 26th annual Heinz Award, a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of Crafts and Traditional Arts, a NALAC Grant Recipient, and a Creative Capital 2016 Grant Awardee. She is the inaugural fellow for Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has been the subject of numerous articles in American Craft Magazine and has been featured in Art21’s Art in the Twenty-First Century, KCET’s Artbound, and 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.
Recent museum exhibitions include This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, Hella Feminist at the Oakland Museum of California, the 2022 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, LatinXAmerican at the DePaul Art Museum, Disrupting Craft: Renwick Invitational 2018 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., and Craft and Care at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Her work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Decorative Arts collection and Contemporary Arts collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and The Mint Museum in Charlotte. Aguiñiga will be included with AMBOS in the sixth edition of Made in L.A. later this year.
