Latin American Speakers Series 2025: Tanya Aguiñiga
"On Borders"
The border is a people, a place, an idea, a thing. As a transnational U.S. citizen, Tanya Aguiñiga probes the complicity of all the communities she represents in maintaining this systemic oppression and how the border is used to dehumanize in all its ways. The artist will discuss how all forms of the border are constantly in flux depending on national/state/local politics. Aguiñiga’s lecture will emphasize how their work centers the narratives of the most vulnerable folx in the borderlands, to be seen and heard through art and mutual aid initiatives. As such, the artist liaises and organizes border communities to collaboratively come up with ways to ensure all are safe, supported, empowered and included as a way to encourage accountability, build binational migrant support systems through craft, and advocate for pro-migrant narrative change in the U.S. and Mexico.
Register here.
Tanya Aguiñiga was born in 1978 in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. An artist and craftsperson, Aguiñiga works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Drawing on her upbringing as a binational citizen, who daily crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego for school, Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community. She is the founder of AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of projects that provides a platform for binational artists. She was recently awarded the Latinx Art Forum: Latinx Artist Fellowship (2022), Heinz Award (2021) and American’s for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities (2018). Her work is in the collection of the Hammer Museum, LACMA, Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt and Renwick Museums, and the Museum of Art and Design among others.