Tanya Aguiñiga

Artist Statement

I am a Tijuanense first, a transfronteriza second and an artist third. My parents are still in Tijuana, Mexico, and most of my extended family. I consider Los Angeles part of the transnational metropolitan area and stay involved in what my border community and those like it face. In 2016, I founded Art Made Between Opposite Sides: AMBOS Project, to document, investigate and address issues faced at both sides of the US Mexico border through art/craft. Through AMBOS, and our extensive work along the entirety of the border, my collaborators and I include voices of people who represent every border facet in a larger multinational dialogue. We work to understand how the physical fence impacts people’s lives, how each city’s border policies affect lives, how new arrivals of migrants shape cities and how migrants are perceived and received/excluded in each city.

Day to day, those directly affected by border policy changes depending on local, regional, national and international politics and world events. My approach has been to remain adaptable to changing systems and create collaborative networks to widen the impact and reach of any initiatives. Borders, migration, and safety are all aspects of society that every human is implicit in—either directly, or inadvertently though their civic, environmental/consumer choices. These views create a framework for my practice, where people most directly affected by current border policies are at the center (core), surrounded by those who work with migration issues (community) so that we can share resources and improve efficacy of the project as well as widen our toolkits on our own respective fields, followed by those who seldom think their lives are connected to borders and migration (public).

I try and mediate lateral systems where power is distributed more equally amongst the 3, so projects become vested catalysts for change.

My studio operates as a safe space for women/femmes, BIPOC and LGBTQ communities to come together and learn how to run a small art-based business and create work together that addresses the needs of our communities in a non-hierarchical structure. The works made and sold by my studio fund larger community initiatives focusing on immigration, equity, femme rights, and issues facing our collective communities. In the past this has included working with indigenous communities in the US/Mexico, rape survivors in college towns, unhoused populations and underserved youth in Los Angeles.

As border/immigration policies became increasingly inhumane during the Trump administration, processing/sharing and continuing advocacy work on the US/Mexico border became more urgent. Since then, much of my work has explored understanding the psychological, political, and environmental impact of border policy on people’s lived experiences to find ways of living together in border communities that restore justice, understanding, and bring healing opportunities to all who are directly impacted by border policy through craft.

Gallery

Bio

Tanya Aguiñiga was born in 1978 in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. An artist, designer, 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.

Aguiñiga began her career by creating collaborative installations with the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, an artist collective that addressed political and human rights issues at the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2016, in response to the deep polarization about the U.S.-Mexico border, Aguiñiga created AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of projects that provides a platform for binational artists.

Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. She is a United States Artists Fellow in the field of crafts and traditional arts, a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures awardee, Creative Capital grant awardee, and a recipient of an Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2018); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); among others. Aguiñiga lives in East Los Angeles, California.

Links

www.tanyaaguiniga.com

www.ambosproject.com