This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
Walk too quickly past the sculpture — a slender bar of brass suspended in a clear display case — and you might not notice that this work of art is wearable. With a post at either end, the delicate piece of metal is a single earring, designed to be worn by two people.
The work, “‘Bad’ Hyphens Separate; ‘Good’ Hyphens Attach,” made its debut in this year’s Border Biennial, a collaborative exhibition organized by two museums on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border: The El Paso Museum of Art (E.P.M.A.) and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez (M.A.C.J.).
In June, the artist behind the work, Haydee Alonso, will stage a performance at the El Paso museum in which two women will don the earring and walk, tethered together, through the exhibition.
“What I want is to create this kind of nervousness or tension,” said Alonso. “Because if one doesn’t walk in sync or isn’t balanced, something is going to happen. Something is going to break.”
For Alonso, who grew up commuting from her home in Juárez to schools in El Paso, the piece is a metaphor for the relationship between the two cities. As the title suggests, borders can be barriers or bridges. Here, the reality is often both.
This year’s Border Biennial was the first in six years because of pandemic-era border closures and other issues, and the sixth since 2008. Although the exhibition was originally set to close on April 14, and the portion in Juárez did conclude on schedule, Edward Hayes, the director of the El Paso museum, has extended the show there by reinstalling select works. This new version, which features 22 works from the original exhibition, opens on Sunday and will be up through August 11.
Since its inception, the biennial has captured the fraught history of the region, as well as the subtleties that tend to get lost in news reports on its more recent challenges.
El Paso and Juárez were one city until 1848, when the Rio Grande rushing through town became the dividing line between the United States and Mexico. Today, what’s left of the river — a shallow, murky stream — flows through concrete channels under a 30-foot stockade of rusted steel bollards on the northern bank.
Over the past few years, thousands of migrants seeking asylum have lined up along this wall, waiting to be processed by the U.S. Border Patrol before entering El Paso. Last December, when a large number of new arrivals overwhelmed the local shelter system, the encampments that formed on city streets in frigid weather attracted widespread coverage. In March, hundreds of people broke through concertina wire barriers along the Rio Grande, some clashing with members of the Texas National Guard. Every day seems to bring another story about a historically welcoming city on the brink of chaos.
“Just seeing the sensational headlines about the migrant crisis, it appears that El Paso is on fire all the time,” said Hayes. “I think what the Border Biennial does is that it helps you get past that layer of sensational, polarizing coverage into something a lot more relatable, more human, and multifaceted.”
When I visited the two museums in February, the range of works was dizzying. Textiles and photographs hung near ceramics, abstract prints, realist paintings, assemblages, and videos. Some works were earnest, others ironic. The sometimes bewildering contrasts were apt reflections of the area’s complexities and contradictions.
“We don’t all come from the same place, we don’t all have the same experience, and that’s why I think the Border Biennial is such an important exhibition,” said Alonso, the maker of the long earring, a slight woman with Bettie Page bangs and a septum piercing. “It has all these different voices.”
Even the 22 works in the trimmed version at the El Paso museum speak to a broad range of perspectives. Several artists address the region’s most notorious issues, from the kidnappings and murders associated with cartel warfare in Juárez to the plight of migrants who attempt to enter Arizona through the Sonoran Desert.
Nereida Dusten channels the stories of deportation common in Playas de Rosarito, a coastal city near Tijuana, into small collages as striking as they are spare. In “Delimitation of a Landscape III” (2023), a man cut from a vintage photograph stands, head bent, below snarls of red thread reminiscent of razor wire. Dusten has an undocumented friend in the United States who has been living in constant dread of deportation for nearly 30 years. “He wouldn’t know what to do if he goes back to Mexico,” she said in a phone interview from Mexico. “He doesn’t know how to live here, how life works here.” Perhaps those tangled loops are tortured thoughts made visible.
“This is an extremely political show,” said Edgar Picazo Merino, one of the show’s curators, and a founding director of Azul Arena gallery in Juárez. “The only difference is that it’s not in your face.”
He theorized that the reason previous biennials have been more “harsh and shocking,” might be the fact that previous curators, who visited from larger cities, had limited time to absorb the area’s nuances. The director of the Juárez museum, Christian Diego Diego, agreed. “Sometimes it was very difficult for the curators to understand the themes we were talking about,” he said.
The biennial first emerged at a moment when crossing the border had become difficult on both sides. In 2008, cartel violence was erupting in Juárez, deterring El Pasoans from visiting as they once had. Passports and visas, which had not been needed to enter El Paso before 9/11, were prohibitively expensive for some people in Juárez.
“Many of our artists are either apprehensive about traveling to each other’s countries, or for a variety of complications, simply cannot,” wrote the former museum directors — Michael Tomor at E.P.M.A. and Rosa Elva Vazquez at M.A.C.J. — in the catalog for that inaugural biennial. They conceived the show, originally called “Art Binational,” as a solution: audiences could experience the same group of regional artists at either venue.
“The exhibit was really built for accessibility,” said Tomor, now director of the Tampa Museum of Art. Since then, the biennial has endured as a platform for emerging talent in an area with few commercial galleries.
Claudia S. Preza, assistant curator at the El Paso museum, who led this year’s curatorial team (which also included Jazmín Ontiveros Harvey, an artist and filmmaker based in Albuquerque), said she was looking for artists who were “stepping beyond stereotypes,” as she reviewed the 270 submissions from artists born or based on both sides of the border, from the Pacific Coast to the Gulf of Mexico. Ultimately, Preza and her collaborators selected 173 works by 51 artists and collectives.
Some of the most magnetic pieces — which will remain on view in El Paso — illuminate largely unreported experiences of the border. Andres Payan Estrada, who grew up in Juárez and El Paso, photographs the floors of local gay bars and transforms them into jacquard tapestries where plastic cups, cigarette butts, and debris form oddly beautiful black and silver landscapes. He sees parallels between the queer nightlife spaces where he was able to try on different selves as a young man and the border region, which he said “really mishmashes identity and nationalism and language.”
Eric Manuel Santoscoy-Mckillip, an El Paso native, lives in Brooklyn now, but the inspiration for his work — vivid paintings composed of interlocking geometric forms with coarse stucco surfaces — comes from the desert landscape (for instance, he said, “the way in which a cactus can look neon at night when it blossoms”) and the vernacular architecture of the Southwest.
For the people who live in El Paso and Juárez, the border is not a stage for political grandstanding. It’s the stuff of family histories, childhood memories, and daily commutes. One 2019 study, conducted by community foundations in El Paso and Juárez, in conjunction with the University of Texas at El Paso, found that 47.6 percent of El Pasoans surveyed grew up in Mexico. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 1,000 students from Juárez cross the border daily to go to school. When I stepped onto the caged pedestrian path of the Paso Del Norte Bridge one afternoon, I joined a stream of children with backpacks.
The Border Biennial seeks to capture this fluidity. Although there have been other transborder art programs, the Border Biennial is a rare recurring exhibition between government museums in different countries. The El Paso museum is run by the city; the museum in Juárez is a federal museum managed by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts.
“I think it does take a special stamina to be able to create this collaboration within those bureaucracies,” said Kerry Doyle, the director of the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso, who is not affiliated with either museum. “Not working together is much easier.”
Every edition of the biennial brings fresh challenges for two museums with lean staffs and limited budgets. This year, Hayes personally collected artworks in San Antonio and Austin, Texas, and drove them to El Paso to avoid shipping costs. Picazo Merino picked up pieces in Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz., and took them to Juárez. These solutions were not exactly “best practices,” said Hayes, but they did exemplify the resourcefulness that is part of the local culture.
“This is a blue county in a very red state,” said Ben Fyffe, El Paso’s managing director, quality of life. “Sometimes that has ramifications for funding and resources.” Surrounded by mountains and desert, El Paso is more than eight hours by car from Austin, Houston and Dallas. When it comes to arts and culture, said Fyffe, the city’s attitude has been, “Nobody else is going to come in and do this for us. Let’s do it ourselves.”
This sense of self-reliance underscores the Border Biennial, where artists seek to tell their own stories about a widely discussed but often misunderstood region.
“If you don’t experience the border and if you don’t live around the border, you assume that the things that you read in the media are true,” said Alonso. She senses, however, that outsiders are increasingly “eager to understand the border in a different way.” The feeling is mutual. “We are hungry for that too,” she said.