Collective Borderpalooza:
Otherwise, It Would Be Just Another River
Thursday, September 14, 2023
5:00 to 6:30 PM
Flowers Hall 230
Jason Reed, Mark Menjivar, Erina Duganne, Adetty Ramos Perez de Miles, Molly Sherman
Collective Borderpalooza:
Otherwise, It Would Be Just Another River
The Center for the Study of the Southwest is hosting this borderpalooza to foreground the work, the engagement, the joy, the patience, the wisdom, the naivete and the broad collective energy it takes to engage in community-based collaborative art, bridging relatively disenfranchised community spaces, schools, and established museums and galleries.
The Center for the Study of the Southwest has invited the collaborators who are working in San Marcos to share their perspectives on a decades-long, continent wide set art engagements. In alphabetical order, the conversation will include Adetty Perez Ramos de Miles, Erina Duggane, Jason Reed, Mark Menjivar and Molly Sherman, who will discuss their work, their disciplinary moorings, their writing and art, and the edited collection process.
The book, Otherwise, It Would Be Just Another River: Ten Years of Borderland Collective’s Practice in Collaboration and Dialogue, focuses on the participatory education and socially engaged art practices of Borderland Collective over the last ten years. The book shares stories and collective knowledge about the US-Mexico border created by students, teachers, artists, and community members in an array of Borderland Collective projects through poems, prose, photographs, and drawings.
Borderland Collective is a long-term participatory art and education project based in Texas. The project utilizes collaborations between artists, educators, youth, and community members to engage complex social issues and build space for diverse perspectives, meaningful dialogue, and varying modes of creation and reflection. For more information on the book, please visit the publisher’s website.
Editors
Jason Reed
Jason Reed is the Jones Professor of Southwestern Studies and a Professor of Photography at Texas State University. He holds a BA in Geography from the University of Texas and an MFA in Photography from Illinois State University. Before joining the Texas State University faculty in 2008, Reed served as an AmeriCorps member in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the co-founder and lead facilitator of the long-term art and education project Borderland Collective. With a focus on the confluence of land, politics, and visual histories, Reed has created gallery and public space exhibitions at venues such as Artpace in San Antonio, Krannert Museum at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, storefront windows in Miles, Texas, Galerie Reinthaler in Vienna, Austria, La Asamblea Legislativa in Mexico City, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Molly Sherman
Molly Sherman is a designer, artist, and educator. Her practice spans client-based work and collaborative creative projects, while operating within the overlapping fields of graphic design and socially-engaged art.
She is an Assistant Professor in Communication Design at Texas State University. Previously, Molly worked with Project Projects and the Center for Urban Pedagogy in New York. Her work has been shown at Artpace, Centre Pompidou, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz, the Matisse Museum in Le Cateau-Cambresis, the Portland Art Museum, and the San Fransisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art.
She holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University.
Collaborators
Mark Menjivar
Mark Menjívar is a San Antonio based artist and Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University. His art practice primarily consists of creating participatory projects while being rooted in photography, oral history, archives, and social action. He attended McLennan Community College, holds a BA in Social Work from Baylor University and an MFA in Social Practice from Portland State University.
Mark has engaged in projects at venues including the Rothko Chapel, Eastern State Penitentiary, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The Houston Center for Photography, The Puerto Rican Museum of Art and Culture, Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum and the Krannert Art Museum.
He has partnered on projects with many community organizations including San Anto Cultural Arts, Bloom Project, Black Outside, Mitchell Lake Audubon Center, CAST Schools, Libraries Without Borders, and the H. E. Butt Foundation.
Mark is the artist-in-residence with the Texas After Violence Project, a public memory archive that fosters deeper understandings of the impacts of state violence. He is also a member of Borderland Collective, which utilizes collaborations between artists, educators, youth, and community members to engage complex issues and build space for diverse perspectives, meaningful dialogue, and modes of creation around border issues.
Erina Duganne
Erina Duganne is Professor of Art History at Texas State University where she teaches courses on contemporary art, photography, and visual culture. Her current book project looks at the solidarity practices of the short-lived 1984 campaign, Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America. Through its artist activism, Duganne charts an account of the 1980s, overlooked in most art historical considerations, that turns away from postmodernism’s skepticism and critique to take up solidarity’s future thinking and belonging. The book, entitled Artists Call’s Visual Solidarities: Central America and Anti-Imperialist Activism in the 1980s, is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
Additional publications by Duganne include Cold War Camera (2023), co-edited with Thy Phu and Andrea Noble; Global Photography: A Critical History (2020), co-authored with Heather Diack and Terri Weissman; The Self in Black and White: Race and Subjectivity in Postwar American Photography (2010); and Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain (2007), co-edited with Mark Reinhardt and Holly Edwards. In 2022, Duganne co-curated, with Abby Satinsky, Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities at the Tufts University Art Galleries. That exhibition traveled to the University of New Mexico Art Museum and is currently on view at the DePaul Art Museum until August 6, 2023.
Adetty Pérez Ramos de Miles
Adetty Pérez de Miles, Associate Professor and Coordinator of the Art Education Program, earned a dual Ph.D. in Art Education and Women’s Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research interests include contemporary art and theory, socially engaged art practices, the intersection of art and technology, postcolonial and feminist theory, post-qualitative inquiry, and teacher education in the visual arts. At Texas State University, Pérez de Miles teaches courses in curriculum and pedagogical design to prepare preservice teachers to enter the field of art education and earn Texas Teacher Certification (EC-12). Professor Pérez de Miles’s teaching is guided by arts-based and inquiry-based approaches to learning, digital pedagogies, socially responsive teaching centered on equity and diversity, and exploring critical and post-critical frameworks to support inclusive LGBQ+ and transgender curriculum and instruction. Prior to her teaching experiences in tertiary education, Pérez de Miles earned All-Level Teacher Licensure and was an art educator in public schools. She taught Advance Placement Art History, AP Studio (drawing, photography, ceramics), and led her schools’ International Baccalaureate Diploma Program in the Visual Arts.