Other Border Wall Podcast

In our surprise final finalé episode, we bring you the audio recording from the Artist Talk for the Border is a Weapon Exhibition, moderated by Jose Diaz - the former Chief Curator at the Andy Warhol Museum.  It took place February 22, 2022 over zoom to an audience of about 50-60 people.  All artists were present except Daniela Cavazos Madrgial and Tereneh Idia who were not available that evening.  At that point the exhibition The Border is a Weapon, curated by Gil Rocha at 937 Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA had been open almost a month and had been seen by thousands including the opening night that was packed and overflowing with people.

This conversation flowed easily between the artists and Jose Diaz.  It serves now as an important historic document of a show that continues to grow and travel, most recently it was shown at the Laredo Center for the Arts, summer 2022, and will continue to the University of Syracuse later in 2023.

Enjoy! And thank you for being part of our Other Border Wall Podcast series.  It has been a pleasure serving you in such creative and positive ways!

For anyone interested in starting a podcast who has never done anything like this before, please seriously reach out to us.  We believe in the power of art and collaboration and doing things that seem nearly impossible!

In late October 2022 Tereneh, Leah and Jenn sat down for one last time to record our final episode for the Other Border Wall Podcast, now in its Third Season. We reflect, laugh, and remember not only this Podcast but all the work we have made together since 2017 as "Creative Resistance to Borders". So much has happened over these past five years - and we are now moving onto other projects but will always hold space and respect for the amazing people we met and worked with together as a collective. We feel so grateful for the work of building community in these many ways, and for all the support we have received. It has been an incredible journey and we wanted to hold space for it with this episode.

As we sign off we want to encourage our listeners to stay in solidarity with the incredible work that inspired us and will continue to be a beacon for all of us:

Border Angels

Join us in our next interview with the artists from the exhibition THE BORDER IS A WEAPON, curated by Gil Rocha.

Here, Jose Villalobos speaks with Tereneh Idia in an engaging and illuminating conversation about art, politics, tradition and resistance.

José Villalobos grew up on the US/Mexico border in El Paso, TX. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was awarded the Artist Lab Fellowship Grant for his work De La Misma Piel at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. 

Villalobos is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant Award and Residency and the Tanne Foundation Award. His work has been exhibited in the nationally recognized exhibition Trans America/n: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX; ArtPace, San Antonio, TX; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; NARS Foundation, New York, NY; the Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX; El Paso Museum of Art, TX; El Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and The Latino Cultural Center in Dallas, TX. He has two upcoming group exhibitions, one at the Phoenix Art Museum: Desert Rider, curated by Gilbert Vicario, and Xican-a.o.x. Body at The American Federation of Arts in New York curated by Marisa del Toro, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Gilbert Vicario.

José Villalobos’s work is included in the collection of Mexic-arte Museum, Austin, TX, the City of San Antonio Public Collection, TX, Albright College, Reading, PA, and Soho House International in Austin, TX.

Jose Villalobos is currently represented by Liliana Bloch Gallery.

For Season Three, we are featuring the artists of THE BORDER IS A WEAPON exhibition curated by Gil Rocha and presented by Other Border Wall.  The exhibition features five artists from the US/MX border and was curated by Gil Rocha.  First opening in January 2022 at 937 Gallery in the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust  the show then traveled to the Laredo Center for the Arts in July 2022. Each interview is conducted by Tereneh Idia. Tereneh is the founder of Idia'Dega, an award-winning journalist, and the co-founder of Other Border Wall Project.

Maritza Bautista is a Tex-Mex/pocha multi-disciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker from Laredo, Texas. She received a Master of Arts in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology with a minor in Studio Art from Texas A&M International University (2002). Maritza was awarded the SAIC Masters Fellowship in Art Education (2009), and her essay Unique Voices in Youth Media was published in the book Art and Social Justice Education: Culture as Commons (2012). Her work has been screened at various festivals including the iFFY: Independent Film Festival Ypsilanti (2022), MIRAAA Media Fest (2021), San Antonio Film Festival (2019), and Cine Las Americas International Film Festival (2015). She has also presented her work at the Creating Justice Symposium (2022), PASSAGE Visions (2022), the Sixth Biennial IAS Conference Walls, Bridges, Borders (2021), and most recently the collective exhibitions The Border is a Weapon (2022) and Across (2021). Maritza started teaching in 2003 and has sustained meaningful, collaborative art practices that explore and create a dialectic milieu inhabited by issues unique to marginalized communities. She is the Executive Director for Daphne Art Foundation.  Her artistic practice explores scavenging, movement and transportation of goods as they relate to wealth along and across the U.S./Mexico border, the economic disparities that are visible and at times ironic, and survival mechanisms of working class people.

Links, topics mentioned

For Season Three, we are featuring the artists of THE BORDER IS A WEAPON exhibition curated by Gil Rocha and presented by Other Border Wall.  The exhibition features five artists from the US/MX border and was curated by Gil Rocha.  First opening in January 2022 at 937 Gallery in the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust  the show then traveled to the Laredo Center for the Arts in July 2022. Each interview is conducted by Tereneh Idia. Tereneh is the founder of Idia'Dega, an award-winning journalist, and the co-founder of Other Border Wall Project.

Angel Cabrales, MFA, is an Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of Texas at El Paso. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Arizona State University and Masters of Fine Arts from The University of North Texas. Angel views everything as an artistic resource and utilizes this in all his creations, from his extensive experience with a variety of mediums and styles, to the intangibles, such as his upbringing in the El Paso, Texas Borderlands, his work grows and expands with the requirements presented from each new idea.His father a retired engineer at White Sands Missile Range, instilled Angel with a great interest in science and engineering, while his mother, a politically active stay at home mother, taught him the importance of community and social work through her volunteer work. Angel's work is an amalgamation of his upbringing resulting in social/political commentary with an engineered flare. The artwork’s concept ultimately dictates the medium needed for its creation, so artistic evolution is intrinsic in his philosophy. 

Cabrales is an artist fellow for the Looking for America project out of Washington D.C. He is exhibiting in the American Embassy in Mexico City and has exhibited in the International TransBorder Biennial, Texas Biennial, AmoABiennial600, the Chamizal National Memorial, the Mexic-Arte Museum, MAC Dallas, the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum in Mesa, AZ, The Latino Cultural Center of Dallas, El Paso Museum of Art, Wave Pool Gallery in Cincinnati, OH, Grand Art Haus in Phoenix, AZ, Baton Rouge Gallery, and collaborated with the AMBOS Project (an intervention collaboration along the Border) from Los Angeles. He is also featured in the Icons and Symbols of the Borderland book by Diana Molina and La Frontera: Artists along the Mexican/American Border by Stefan Falke. Angel was recently interviewed by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to be included in the Estrellas y Cuentas initiative on Latino Futurism. He is represented by the Ro2 Gallery in Dallas, TX and the Royse Contemporary in Scottsdale, AZ. Cabrales is also a member of the International Sculpture Center, the Texas Sculpture Group, and a board member in the JUNTOS art collective. Angel was also a juror for the 2020 Student Achievement Awards for Sculpture Magazine.Cabrales teaches all levels of Sculpture at UTEP, includingExperimental Systems in Sculpture focused on STEAM elements in art and the Neon Sculpture program. He is head of theEASSI (Engineering + Art + Science = Social Impact) team that works on community engaged projects involving the arts and sciences in the Borderlands of El Paso.

Join us in our illuminating conversation with Kinselland!

As collaborators Anqwenique and DS work in the areas of performance art, visual art, and music performance. The work is intimate and shares pieces of their personal lives as a married artist couple while also challenging them to create in new ways and explore intimate everyday activities as artistic expression.

DS Kinsel expresses his creativity through the mediums of painting, installation, curating, action-painting, non-traditional performance and #HASHTAGS. Kinsel’s work puts focus on themes of space keeping, urban tradition, hip-hop, informalism and Cultural Re-Appropriation.  As a visual artist working primarily through the mediums of painting, installation, hip-hop, and web based media platforms, he uses these mediums as weapons and tools towards cultural space keeping and creative place making.  He explores self perspective and personal awareness through place and how association with locations can shape perceptions. 

D.S. has a deep community based practice and is the co-founder of BOOM Concepts, founded in 2014. BOOM Concepts is a creative hub dedicated to the advancement of black and brown artists representing marginalized communities. BOOM serves as a space for field building, knowledge sharing, mentorship, and storytelling. BOOM Concepts consistently challenges artists and communities to find new and innovative ways to share their own narratives.

Anqwenique is an extremely versatile vocalist and educator specializing in opera, classical music, jazz and soul. Anqwenique has performed lead operatic roles, recitals, immersive theater experiences, jazz combos and more. As the founder and director of Groove Aesthetic, a Pittsburgh based multidisciplinary artist collective experimenting with contemporary performance and collaborative processes. Groove Aesthetic and partnerships with organizations like Chamber Music Pittsburgh have given a platform for artists across identity and discipline to collaborate and create wonderful experiences for audiences. In recent years, she has taken a wellness approach to singing and performing, hosting workshops that share with everyday folks how to use their voices for self-care practice. Anqwenique has also been very active in the arts and education community as teaching artist, consultant, program manager and advisor. Currently she serves asDirector of Programs for Arts ed Collaborative. She has also served as the Studio Manager of BOOM Concepts working to provide affordable studio space and resources to artists and creative entrepreneurs.

The Westmoreland Museum of American Art established a new Artist-in-Residency Program, made possible by generous support from The Pittsburgh Foundation, in collaboration with BOOM Concepts in September 2020. The program, which will feature 4 to 6 artists annually, emphasizes the Museum’s commitment to engaging and supporting Black and marginalized artists, to promoting equity in the arts, and to sharing compelling and meaningful cultural experiences with the regional community. Inaugural artists selected include Anqwenique, D.S. Kinsel, Gavin Benjamin and Madame Christiane Dolores.

Continuing our theme with Season 2 that focuses on the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, we spoke with the artist Gavin Benjamin about his recent artist residency at the museum and his own practice.  Tune in to a great conversation between Gavin, Leah, and Tereneh!

Gavin Benjamin is a multifaceted artist who combines original analog photography and appropriated images with collage, paint, and varnish to create rich and luxurious works that call back to baroque traditions while incorporating  elements of current culture to provoke, critique, and explore.

Born in Guyana, South America and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Benjamin received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. During this time, he worked as an interned for the legendary portrait photographer, Arnold Newman. Benjamin also worked as black and white and color printer at LTI and Baboo color labs. From there, he went on to work at Edge Reps and Exposure NY, agencies representing commercial and advertising photographers, prop stylists, and hair and makeup artists. After Exposure NY, he worked as a freelance production coordinator/photo editor with stints at Kenneth Cole productions, Esquire Magazine, Hachette Filipacchi Media, and Good Housekeeping magazine.

“I am very inspired by the work of artists  during the 15th to 17th centuries, especially the Dutch and Italian masters. There is something very romantic, dark, mysterious, and brooding about these works. I find this period fascinating because of the deep, luxurious colors and intense light and dark shadows. I am drawn to the juxtaposition of objects and compositions that come together to tell a story”

Benjamin investigates the intersection of culture, media, politics, fashion, and design, addressing questions that (continue to) confront a men of color in America today.

“My work reflects everything that I’m thinking – it includes everything that I love and everything that I’m challenged by. It’s honest and curious and bright and thoughtful. And sometimes a little dark. It’s all of the things that made me want to be a professional artist in the first place.”

His work has appeared at the Slick Paris, Sotheby’s NY, Architectural Digest Home Design Show, Art Hampton, Affordable Art Fair, Scope Miami, Palm Beach Modern, Context Miami, Context NY, Art Silicon Valley, and the LA Art Fair.

Links:

Website:

We had the great opportunity to sit down with Stephen Towns in August.  We talked about his artistic practice, his residency at Falling Water, and his upcoming show at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art curated by Kilolo Luckett.  Tune in!!

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Stephen Towns was born in 1980 in Lincolnville, South Carolina and lives and works in Baltimore. He trained as a painter with a BFA in studio art from the University of South Carolina, and has also developed a rigorous, self-taught quilting practice. In 2018, The Baltimore Museum of Art presented his first museum exhibition, Stephen Towns: Rumination and a Reckoning.

His work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Artforum, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Cultured, AFROPUNK, HYPEBEAST and American Craft. Towns was honored as the inaugural recipient of the 2016 Municipal Art Society of Baltimore Travel Prize, and in 2021, Towns was awarded a Maryland State Arts Council’s Individual Artist Award.

Towns’ work is in the collections of The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Art + Practice, Artist Mark Bradford’s nonprofit based in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, The Petrucci Family Foundation, The Baltimore Museum of Art, the City of Charleston, South Carolina, The Nelson Atkins Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, and is held in private collections nationally and abroad.

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More about Stephen Towns:

@ The Westmoreland Museum of American Art

In August, Tereneh had the great pleasure of speaking with Kilolo Luckett.  It was a very special conversation between just the two of them, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do!  This is part of our Season Two series that is focused on looking at what the Westmoreland Museum of American Art is doing to build bridges both internationally and regionally.  Kilolo plays a big role in this story!

Kilolo Luckett is a Pittsburgh-based art historian and curator. With over twenty years of experience in arts administration and cultural production, she is committed to elevating the voices of underrepresented visual artists, specifically women and Black and Brown artists. Luckett is founding executive director and chief curator of ALMA|LEWIS (named after abstract artists Alma Thomas and Norman Lewis), an experimental, contemporary art platform for critical thinking, dialogue, and creative expression dedicated to Black culture. She recently served as an Art Commissioner for the City of Pittsburgh’s Art Commission for twelve years. Luckett is guest curator of the upcoming exhibition titled, Stephen Towns:  Declaration & Resistance, which opens January 30, 2022 at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art. She is also currently writing an authorized biography on Naomi Sims, one of the first Black supermodels.

For more information on some of the many wonderful things discussed in this conversation, please follow these links:

Hello! We are wrapping up our first season with a conversation between us three co-founders here at Other Border Wall Project and Podcast - Tereneh Idia, Leah Patgorski, and Jennifer Nagle Myers.  We are sharing our thoughts on the many creative pivots we had to do in 2020 and what it all felt like, as well as more in depth conversation about what our own creative practices look like.  Join us!

And here's a deeper look into who we are individually and what we do....

Tereneh Idia...works on issues of social justice especially in environment, design, arts and culture as designer and writer.  She launched IdiaDega, a global eco-design collaboration of Indigenous women artisans in 2014 and became a journalist in 2018.  The IdiaDega eco-design collaboration has presented work in Amsterdam, Paris, New York City, Nairobi, Copenhagen and Pittsburgh, including exhibitions at August Wilson African American Cultural Center, The Frick Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Tereneh was Pittsburgh Style Week’s Designer of the Year for 2019, an inductee into the Taylor Allderdice High School Hall of Fame inductee and awarded the Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award for Emerging Artist.  As a writer, Tereneh began publishing regularly in 2018 and her work has appeared in Pittsburgh City Paper, Pittsburgh PublicSource, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - among others, she is a multiple award-winning writer: Winner of the Golden Quill 2019 and 2020 for best columnist in daily paper and nominated again in 2021; The Robert L Vann Pittsburgh Black Media Federation Award; and the Billy Manes Award in 2020.

Join us for a powerful conversation with Alberto Tlatoa: food justice advocate, social entrepreneur, historian, artist, and community organizer based in South Central, Los Angeles.  When Alberto was a child, his family had a farming plot in the largest urban farm in the nation in South Central Los Angeles. However, it was destroyed in 2006. Since that time, he has helped organize community residents to challenge irresponsible developments. He co-founded the South Central Farm a grassroots organization that promotes the establishment and preservation of green and open space in South Central Los Angeles, a community where green and open space is rare, as well as promote urban farming, public health, and effective participation in the planning of developments that intimately affect every one of the residents that reside nearby.

Be sure to follow Alberto and South Central Farm on IG:

We recently spoke with Asa Martinez: writer, immigration-support worker, and creator of Brushfire Press - a small-scale zine press and information distro centered on QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color).  Their message is Fight Back: Read Radical, published out of Pittsburgh, PA.   Their recent work has focused on mutual aid, immigrant rights, and harm reduction.

Asa is our friend and ally.  In 2020 we commissioned Brushfire Press to dream up a project with a small amount of funding we had available, and what was born is the ongoing, growing Pittsburgh Solidarity Guide.  This Solidarity Guide was created as a directory of groups that center the most marginalized among us and work to make Pittsburgh a more livable city for all. 

What follows is an open, honest, and extremely urgent conversation between all of us.  Asa speaks truth in each breath and it was a great treasure to have them in conversation.

Here are just a few of the many amazing things we touched on that we wanted to include in the show notes:

Join us in rich conversation with Houston-based artist and collaborator David Janesko. As the former curator of Flatland Gallery in Houston, he invited us in 2018 to present our work as Other Border Wall Project.  Speaking in February 2021 with Jenn and Leah (Tereneh was not on this call), we touched on many topics including art and mental illness and collaboration.  David Janesko is an artist exploring the emergence of complexity using an experimental approach that encompasses a wide array of mediums, technology and subject matter. He is specifically interested in the genesis of life, and death, from the early Earth, the emergence of the Self and how the senses and mental illness shape reality. David grew up in Western Pennsylvania and worked for a number of years as a geologist before attending the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA, 2013). From 2013 to 2015 David was a Graduate Fellow then Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Artist in Sausalito California, and the curator for Flatland Gallery in Houston from 2017 to 2019. David is represented in Houston by Gray Contemporary.  From 2019-2021 he was a Studio Artist in Residence at the Lawndale Arts Center in Houston, where he collaborated with the choreographer Jacqueline Boe on a series of work and explorations at the intersection of dance and art.  

This week, we spoke with Shellee Laurent: an activist, artist, mother, and a proud Guatemalan-Mexican-American woman/queen living in Laredo TX. We first met Shellee during our visit to to Laredo in 2018. We stayed connected via social media and then profiled her on our Laredo on the Line publication. We wanted to speak with Shellee here as well, to find out more about how her roles intersect and learn about her work with the No Border Wall Coalition. This is a grassroots organization based in Laredo that works to counteract border wall construction through protests, education, legal action, and art. They sometimes travel to join forces with other allied groups in the Rio Grande Valley who share common interests in resisting the wall and protecting communities and the environment.

Symbolic of this moment in which Covid has brought so many of our spheres to overlap in one space: the home… Shellee sat down to speak with us from her kitchen where her kids were nearby doing their tasks. So we ask for your patience with the sounds as we move through our conversation with a true QUEEN!

Shellee IG/FB

Hello!  In Episode 6 we are sharing our rich conversation with Zhiwan Cheung: artist, educator, and podcast host currently living and working in China.  We know Zhiwan from Pittsburgh, and Tereneh has been a guest on his podcast 'Seeing Color' twice now.  So we thought it was time to have him as the guest to talk about all things art, politics, identity, and life.  

Zhiwan's artist statement: The intersection of national identity and the personal psyche is complex, not always clear nor fixed; as an artist, I probe these paths and how and where they join and diverge. As an odyssey toward a home that does not exist, a rite of passage with no destination, I use my work to search for a critical understanding of an impossible homecoming. Through sculpture, film, and performance, I focus on the meaning and space between identities, examining the feeling of a liminal displacement. It is a journey guided by an allusive visual language, with a mix of pop cultural, art historical, and aesthetical signals and choices that also guide audiences into finding their own rites of passage.

We are super excited to share this conversation with Gil Rocha, artist, educator and curator from Laredo, Texas.  Gil is a phenomenal contemporary artist who shows around the United States and in Mexico, most recently in a solo exhibition at Presa House Gallery in San Antonio, Texas.  Gil brings together his profound abilities to mix the absurd, poetic, and political into works of art that span sculpture, drawing, painting, language and sound to really speak to the place and time he is living and working in.  As an artist from Laredo who left and returned, he is both insider and outsider and his work really speaks to the depth, humanity and experience that encompasses. 

Gil teaches art at Vidal School of Communications and Fine Arts in Laredo, Texas and continues to be an ally to the No Border Wall Coalition who actively and creatively make work and actions that speaks truth to power to protect the river and her people.   He is an ongoing friend and ally to the OBW Project, welcoming us with open arms in 2018 when we visited Laredo.  Gil and Leah met during graduate school at School of the Art Institute in Chicago and became fast friends!   Gil also came to Pittsburgh in 2019 to work on a mural project called Disrespecting the Border/Irrespetando la frontera: a weekend-long collaboration with the community and as part of the University of Pittsburgh's Year of Creativity initiative.

We recorded this interview (without Tereneh unfortunately) in October of 2020, before the election and so many other things to follow.  We sound anxious and optimistic for 2021 to be a "new" year....and in more than one hour of talking we discuss a wide range of topics including what happens when you buy MAGA hats for art projects, the future of robots vs. truck drivers, making art in times of great crisis, the impact and experience of coming to Pittsburgh in 2019 for the 'Disrespecting the Mural' project.  Enjoy, share and let us know what you think!

We are thrilled to share our conversation with Chris Dos, the bassist for the Pittsburgh-based legendary punk band Anti-Flag. Launching in 1988, Anti-Flag’s powerful live performances match their intense lyrics, imploring the world and their fans to work in solidarity for justice for all. They have released 12 studio albums, their most recent, 20/20 Vision, a pointedly anti-Trump, anti-Fascist album that portended the former president’s 2020 election defeat. Chris Dos joined Anti-Flag in the late 90s. Co-host Tereneh follows Chris on Twitter and when he followed her back she nearly fell off her chair. Through this “meeting” he agreed to sit with the OBW pod. This just goes to show you that social media isn’t all bad.

Here we speak with the brilliant and enigmatic artist and craftsman Jaime Guerrero, known internationally for his work in glass.  Jaime has been at the forefront of using his work to connect to marginalized communities through empowering them to the incredible world of glass art.