On Display | April September, 2024
Made in El Paso, Texas on Thanksgiving weekend of 2023, these pictures document aspects of community life in El Paso. Home to one of the nation’s largest military bases and located on the U.S.-Mexico border, El Paso is a unique cultural place, distinct from the other Texan cities both in its diverse heritage as a long-standing place of exchange and crossing and its striking basin and range landscape.
On Display | February 13 - April 21, 2023
Pecos consists of an installation of photographs made by Hope Mora in Pecos, Texas from 2018-2021. Her work is an ongoing exploration of how the dynamic between hard labor and resilience is sustained within communities as she looks at working life, regional culture, economy, and ideas of home. She documents how communities joyfully celebrate their lives through family, food, music, dance, and fashion using photography, video, sound, and text.
All the Sacrifices You've Made/Todos los sacrificios que has hecho
On display through August 2022
Over the last two years, Borderland Collective artists Mark Menjivar and Jason Reed worked closely with Luz Inguez, Natalia Esquivel Silva, Orfil Olmos, Gabriela Ruiz, Moises Mendez, and Alondra Torres from CAMP to explore their family albums, photograph their lives, and record oral histories. The pictures were scanned and reproduced, allowing the family to keep the originals in their possession. The resulting pictures, text, video, and audio exhibited are an expression and acknowledgment of the contributions, resilience, joys, and sacrifices made by farm worker families from the eastern Washington agricultural regions of Yakima and Wenatchee.
Migration Stories
On display through April 2022
In fall 2021 artist Mark Menjivar hosted two Migration Stories workshops with the Center for the Study of the Southwest. Participants were invited to explore their family history resulting in an exhibition of eleven stories printed as a set of broadside posters and installed in the CSSW gallery. Migration Stories is an oral history project started in 2015 focusing on personal narratives of how we arrived at where we are now. We all have a migration story, some are closer than others.
Intimacy Interrupted
On Display through Summer 2021
In November 2019, a group of Texas State based photographers worked with artist Will Wilson (Dine), learning tintype techniques alongside the overlapping history of the American capture of native communities and Dine’ lives in prisons and photographs after Civil War times.
What brings these portraits and photographers together is their experience on many sides of the tintype photo exchange, their ongoing work with photography and their commitment to challenge hierarchies embedded in a more democratic and inclusive practice of photography.
The portraits included here were completed after the photo exchange and were first printed during the first COVID19 wave in Texas.
Valentine From Borderlandia
On display through Summer 2019
In summer 2019, the Center for the Study of the Southwest commissioned Andrea Muñoz Martinez to exhibit her work on the landscapes of the Uvalde – Piedras Negras region. Muñoz Martinez starts small to capture these vast views. She uses one brush per canvas to paint tiny individual squares. Together, these small splashes of paint on eight-foot by twelve-foot canvases merge to become images of South Texas landscapes. Each square mirrors the splash of light the receptors respond to when we see; Andrea Munoz Martinez seeks to catch the moment when landscapes become part of our bodies, or our bodies begin their response to our landscapes. Her paintings mirror the memories we carry with us of the landscapes of our home; her work, the labor it takes to share experiences and feelings with others.
Fairy Tales for Truth and Justice
On display through April 2018
Developed through a one-year onsite artist-in-residence program at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California, SanTana’s Fairy Tales is a visual art installation, oral history, storytelling project initiated by artist/author Sarah Rafael García. The project integrates community-based narratives to create contemporary fairytales and fables that represent the history and stories of Mexican/Mexican-American residents of Santa Ana (inspired by the Grimm’s’ fairy tales).
The book and multi-media installation, created by the García in collaboration with local visual, musical and performance artists, include a bilingual collection of stories.
A Land without Borders:
The Comanche Range An exhibit about Comanche geography and adaptation to the land
On view February 7 – May 10, 2017
This exhibit highlighted the relationship between the Comanche and the land. Comanches were one of the most influential peoples of the Greater Southwest throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Despite their confinement in 1875 to a small reservation in today’s southwestern Oklahoma, the Comanches’ connection to their once vast range has survived in place names and historical memory. The exhibit was developed and designed by public history graduate students at Texas State as a semester-long team project.
Black Theater in Texas: Stages of Struggle and Celebration
On Display October 17th - December 15th, 2016
This exhibition highlighted the extensive groundbreaking research developed during the production of two new historically and artistically related publications written by Dr. Sandra Mayo and Dr. Elvin Holt.
Road to Abilene
On Display Summer 2016
The photos in this exhibit were taken by Lawton Cook, a recent graduate of the MFA program at Texas State, in preparation for writing his thesis--a novel that looks at the effects of urbanization on rural life in Texas.
Iglesias y Camposantos: Sacred Spaces for Mexican Catholics
On Display February 16 - June 3, 2016
Conducted over several years, the project, led by Ana M. Juárez (Department of Anthropology), involved collaboration between students, faculty and others at Texas State University, local agencies and institutions, and most importantly the local Mexican American community who generously shared the stories of their lives.
Ladrilleria
On Display September 17 - December 16, 2013
Our photography exhibition on display at Brazos Hall on artisan border brickmakers in Reynosa, Mexico.
