“Photographs look like the truth, but they feel like a memory.” This quote, by photography scholar Alison Nordstrom, well articulates the evocative realism depicted by more than four dozen photographs featured in Picturing the Border. The exhibition aims to spark vital conversations of what constitutes citizenship, as well as complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. Through these images, the exhibition shows that Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers have significantly rethought what has defined citizenship, nationality, family, migration, and the border beyond traditional frameworks for decades.

To preview the exhibition, we interviewed Nadiah Rivera Fellah, curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Cleveland Museum of Art: Tell us about your connection to Picturing the Border.

Nadia Rivera Fellah: I realized that as basic as it is, there had not been a focused study on photography of the US-Mexico borderlands done in the past. This project started as my doctoral dissertation while I was at the CUNY [City University of New York] Graduate Center, so it has been almost a decade in the making. While there I focused on Latin American and Latinx art, and an interest in the US-Mexico borderlands and photography led to the development of the project.

CMA: As a curator of contemporary art why did you choose photography as the medium for this exhibition?

NRF: The story of Picturing the Border grows from a unique connection between the history of photography and the history of the border. In the 1970s, photography was becoming more affordable and widely available as a medium to artists. This was a generation of artists who had lived through the social movements of the 1960s, and whose practices were radicalized as a result. At the same time, the border was changing, too, becoming more militarized due to US immigration policies, industrialized due to economic policies of the era, and more urbanized due to the influx of workers moving to the borderlands. This show investigates this distinct convergence of moments.

CMA: In what ways can photography provide insight into the perspectives and lived experiences of strangers that is different from other art forms?

NRF: There’s a documentary quality to photography that provides a compelling element. In this show, I often include multiple photographs by each photographer, and I think that heightens the insights into their perspective. You can see the types of subjects they chose to investigate with their photographs by looking at multiple frames from a single series. In the case of Louis Carlos Bernal, the exhibition even includes some of his contact sheets, so you really get a window into the way he was shooting a roll of film while he was in the homes of borderlands residents and taking their portraits. Contact sheets are great for getting a sense of the photographer’s relationship with their sitters, the interactions they’re having, and the different angles they tried before settling on their final choices.

CMA: How many artists are featured in Picturing the Border?

NRF: Picturing the Border features seventeen artists. The checklist represents a mixture of well-known and emerging artists and is comprised almost entirely of Latinx or Mexican photographers. It includes work by artists previously ignored, underrecognized, or misrepresented in my view.

CMA: What are the unifying themes in their work?

NRF: One theme that connects many photographs revolves around complex negotiations of personal identity as it relates to the border. This theme grows in part from the constructed nature of the border in general—a symbolic (and relatively recent) division between nations that does not always represent a divide between identities and cultures.

CMA: What was the most unexpected lesson you learned throughout the process of curating this exhibition?

NRF: The artists are sometimes years ahead in investigating subjects and topics that news journalists or academic authors eventually focus on. The selection of artists featured in Picturing the Border were remarkably ahead of their time in presenting the topicality of space and exclusion as it relates to issues of the borderlands and Latinx identity in the US.

CMA: What do you hope that visitors take away from this exhibition?

NRF: First and foremost, a viewer can enter this exhibition with no prior knowledge of the border and leave with a broad historical understanding of photographic practices about the border from the 1970s to the present, a story told almost entirely through the lens of border resident, Latinx, Chicano/a, and Mexican photographers.

Another goal of this exhibition is for viewers to think more critically about the US-Mexico border (and borders in general) and how they arbitrarily divide territory in a way that is not reflected in identity, language, culture, political, and social ties among communities. This politically engaged photography serves as a counternarrative to derogatory images of migrants that have circulated in the mainstream media since the 1970s and ’80s.

Picturing the Border is on view until January 5, 2025, in the Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Gallery. Free; no ticket required.

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
11150 East Boulevard
Cleveland, Ohio 44106
clevelandart.org
216.421.7350

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