As a Mexican-American girl growing up in Ohio, Nadiah Rivera Fellah looked for art that reflected her experiences living at the intersection of multiple cultures. Years later, these memories guided her curation of Picturing the Border, a photography exhibition on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from this Sunday, July 21, through January 5, 2025.
“The houses that appear in these photographs could be my great-grandmother’s house,” she told Hyperallergic. “The home altars, the religious imagery, the family photographs. These experiences are my experiences.”
And that’s what Picturing the Border intends to capture. Through the lenses of photographers, the exhibition aims to reclaim and reimagine ideas of nationality, belonging, and place at a time when the border’s mythologization as a cultural and racial battleground threatens to obscure the human stories rooted there. Rivera Fellah curated the exhibition, which includes photographs by 12 Mexican, Chicanx, and Latinx artists from the 1970s through the present day, with the express goal of visualizing how photographers have explored cross-border identities.
For families like Rivera Fellah’s, border culture has a centuries-long presence. “But I think for many people,” she told Hyperallergic, “the border feels like a recent memory.” She’s referring to its sudden ubiquity in national discourse, especially since the 2016 presidential election. “It’s described as a place of invasion — a place where criminals just appear,” she continued. Far from being a flash in the proverbial pan, the border has long incarnated questions about the arbitrary nature of insider and outsider dynamics, legality, and citizenship.
Among the works exploring these themes is the late photographer Laura Aguilar’s black-and-white portrait “Yrenia Cervantes” (1990), in which the titular Chicana muralist and artist stares at her reflection in her dresser mirror. Her bedroom is decorated in the elaborate style of an altar: It includes photos, iconography, and handmade objects. Cervantes is simultaneously of the border and beyond it — the viewer can’t easily determine to which side she belongs.
Accordingly, the exhibition will argue that border communities exceed binomial classifications. Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide arrived in East Los Angeles in the 1980s to document cholo/a communities, with her resulting works mediating what it means to be an outcast on multiple fronts. Eight photographs from her series Cholos/as will be on view in the exhibition. “The people in the photographs are citizens of the United States, but their claim to that nation is denied,” explained Rivera Fellah. “They aren’t viewed as part of either society.”
Iturbide’s images reflect this peripherality. In “Cholos, White Fence, East Los Angeles” (1986), four female gang members pose in make-up and sleeveless shirts in front of a wall in the Boyle Heights neighborhood that bears the portraits of three male Mexican icons: revolutionary leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata and 19-century president Benito Juárez. One of them embraces her newborn. The ostensible dualities within the photo — the US and Mexico, female and male, violence and motherhood — reveal four women who exist along the frontiers of seemingly contradictory but coexistent identities.
As Los Angeles is located over 100 miles north of Mexico, Iturbide’s work demonstrates that while the border is a physical space, its communities defy any single geographical boundary.
This argument echoes in photos made over 1,500 miles away by photographer Ada Trillo, who grew up on the liminal lands between El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In her photobook on view in the exhibition, titled La Caravana del Diablo (2022), the artist documents three journeys: two alongside migrant people in caravans attempting to cross into Mexico on their way to the US border and a third aboard La Bestia, the infamous freight train that hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants ride each year to the north of Mexico — risking injury and death in the process. Trillo’s works are primarily populated by people from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, representing deep friendships the artist formed over days and weeks of grueling travel.
“The way everyone took care of one another was very beautiful,” she told Hyperallergic, recalling how her companions offered her a mask for protection against the tear gas launched by Mexican authorities. Her images are made in a black-and-white cast to intentionally strip away distractions. “I don’t want someone to think, ‘Look at that little boy, how sad,’” she said. “I want them to have an experience worthy of the sacrifice that these people have made.”
For Trillo, the effects of the border extend far beyond the United States and Mexico. “Because the US government threatened to raise tariffs on Mexican goods if Mexico didn’t deport Central Americans, the lives of millions of people have been transformed,” she explained. She also pointed to the rhetorical violence of xenophobic discourses equating Central Americans and Mexicans with criminals as a driving force for her artistic practice. “It’s like hunger,” she explained. “That’s what I feel. Except instead of food, I need to make art that shares these experiences.”
Trillo’s works, like those of other artists in the exhibition, capture how the border forces migrants and other communities to weave their stories within a maddening architecture of violence that is both systematic and capricious. “Many of the photographers in this show were inspired by one another,” Rivera Fellah explained. “And many have used their politically engaged photographic practices as a counter-narrative to derogatory images of the border that have circulated in the media since the 1970s and 1980s.”
In the exhibition catalog, fronteriza poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico writes that the border can “become an empty vessel in the imagination of outsiders to hold all their fear and anxiety.” Picturing the Border brings together artists who resist these projections through nuanced portrayals of citizenship, nationality, and family. “The border is not fact,” Rivera Fellah added. “It’s subjective, but its very subjectivity creates material realities.”
Museum of Art)
