On view at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University from August 5, 2024 to February 26, 2025, this two part exhibition explores the border and its crossings by bringing together Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and the participatory art and education project known as Borderland Collective. The exhibition considers how Meiselas’s installation Crossings irrevocably links the clandestine movement of migrants to a longer history of U.S. imperialism in Central America. It pairs this effort to reckon with injustices of the past with the collaborative practice of Borderland Collective, whose locally centered engagement with the border fosters vulnerability, uncertainty, and self-reflection while giving voice to the lived experiences of the borderlands.
On view at the Grossman & Anderson Galleries/SMFA at Tufts + Aidekman Art Center/Medford from January 20 to April 24, 2022, Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities focuses on the formative 1980s activist campaign, Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America. Growing out of the friendships, solidarity networks, and political organizing amongst artists and activists, the campaign resulted in exhibitions, performances, poetry readings, film screenings, concerts, and other cultural and educational events in over 27 cities across the United States and Canada. The exhibition, co-curated by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky, highlights Artists Call’s history through a selection of activities and works from the 31 exhibitions and over 1,100 artists who participated in New York City as well as Artists Call’s legacy today in new forms of inter-American solidarity networks and visual alliances. Support for the exhibition was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and ISLAA.
Art for the Future traveled to the University of New Mexico Art Museum from September 6 to December 3, 2022, and to the DePaul Art Museum from March 23 to August 6, 2023.
A fully illustrated bilingual catalogue published by Inventory Press.
Curator talk at UNMAM on the exhibition’s backstory
PBS Newshour Coverage: Exhibit explores push to end intervention in Central America
The Art Angle Podcast: How Lucy Lippard and a Band of Artists Fought U.S. Imperialism
Co-organized with Muriel Hasbun
Centro Cultural de España, San Salvador, January 26-March 18, 2022
Artists Call NOW arises as a contemporary response to the 1980s activist campaign Artists Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, organized by U.S. activist artists and academics, including art critic Lucy Lippard. Although Artists Call intended to invite “Central American artists to create the sketches, the scores, the new monuments and images with which to frame the issues and color public opinion,” the campaign’s various exhibitions and projects were unable to include a considerable number of Central American voices. This exhibition, co-organized by Muriel Hasbun and Erina Duganne, responds to this omission. Additionally, it considers how the current socio-political context of the Central American region, especially the present-day situation in El Salvador and its diaspora, along with the crises of the pandemic and the border, can move us to rethink the role that Salvadoran artists and their diasporic counterparts might play in affecting social change. The exhibition considers what solidarity means in the current moment, given our context and experiences from within, as well as how it might serve to repair the general omission of Salvadoran artists in the original Artists Call. Artists Call NOW was on view concurrently with the Tufts University Art Galleries’ Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities, the first major exhibition to consider Artists Call and its legacy.
Artists Call NOW included work by Alecus (Ricardo Clement), Eddie Aparicio, Miguel Antonio Bonilla, Carlos Cañas, Beatriz Deleón, Muriel Hasbun, Walterio Iraheta, Mario López, Rosa Mena Valenzuela, Mark Menjivar, Alexia Miranda, Ronald Morán, Nadie, Dagoberto Nolasco, Baltasar Portillo, Abigail Reyes, Elena Salamanca and Fred Ramos, Studio Lenca (Jose Campos), Carmen Elena Trigueros, and Verónica Vides.
"Activating the Past in Borderland Collective's Northern Triangle" by Erina Duganne
On view at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, in San Antonio, TX, from December 4, 2014 to February 15, 2015, Northern Triangle was created by Borderland Collective to open a space for constructive dialogue and exchange around the current Central American refugee crisis along the U.S./Mexico border and the long and complicated history of U.S. intervention in which it is irrevocably entangled.
Originally commissioned by Blue Star Contemporary, Northern Triangle subsequently traveled to Threewalls, Chicago, IL (18 March - 23 April 2016), Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, IL (26 August - 22 December 2016), University of Arizona Art Museum, Tucson, AZ (4 February - 2 April 2017), Staniar Gallery, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA (November 6 - December 8, 2017), and Baylor University’s Mayborn Museum Complex (April 19 - September 16, 2018).
On view at the Williams College Museum of Art from January 14 to April 30, 2006, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain used photographs drawn from art, advertising, and photojournalism of the last two decades explore the ethics and aesthetics involved in depicting human suffering. Through work by such diverse photographers as Alfredo Jaar, An-My Lê, Susan Meiselas, Andres Serrano, and Sebastião Salgado, the exhibition documented some of the key debates concerning the aestheticization of suffering in photography and considered the ethical, economic, and political impact of the production and circulation of these images.
Beautiful Suffering was conceptually framed around a series of interrelated inquiries: Is seeking beauty in the representation of suffering inherently problematical? If so, why—and do these problems attend any kind of “aestheticized” response to suffering? Should our evaluation of an image be shaped by the cause it was intended to serve? By the places in which it is displayed? By the pictorial conventions deployed? By the kinds of acts or persons represented? By the relationship between photographer and subject? Are there ways of picturing injury that do additional violence to the subject, while making the spectator complicit in this transaction? What forms of spectatorship or witnessing are worth cultivating? What conventions and representational practices are most, and least, likely to do this work? To what extent can words—whether the artist’s, the subject’s, the curator’s, or the critic’s—reveal or alter the meaning of the image? Recent photographers have replied to these questions in different ways. Beautiful Suffering explored these questions and responses through every aspect of its content and design.
