There is plenty to say about the U.S.-Mexico border, and the featured artists in the Mingei Museum’s exhibition, “La Frontera,” use the craft of creating contemporary jewelry to explore what the border represents and means to them.
Featuring more than 85 works from dozens of artists — including those who were born and raised, or who live and work, along the border region — this traveling exhibition runs from Jan. 27 to Aug. 4 at the Balboa Park museum, with a concurrent exhibition at CECUT – Centro Cultural Tijuana from Feb. 6 to June 9.
Two of the artists whose work is being featured, Maru Lopez and Kerianne Quick, use the work of their craft to reflect on their individual experiences with the border and the similarities they see as a diasporic Puerto Rican, and as someone who has the privilege of choice in whether to cross the border, respectively. Part of this exploration includes an understanding of the physical body as its own border where the jewelry can be placed to communicate stories and perspectives.
Lopez is an artist and educator, and manager of education and engagement at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego who comes from a long line of makers, including her mother and grandmother who she learned from while growing up in Puerto Rico. Much of her artistic and writing practice has recently been focused on Puerto Rico, which she hasn’t had a chance to return to in the last 15 years. Quick is a jeweler and metalsmith, as well as an associate professor at San Diego State University in the school of art and design. They use craft as a way to make art and “connect with the ways in which humans, historically and now, mark time and commemorate the important parts of our lives.” Both Lopez and Quick took some time to talk about their work in “La Frontera” and their individual relationships to, and understandings of, borders. (These interviews have been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: Can you talk about your perception, as an artist, of the physical U.S.-Mexico border?
Lopez: Yeah, that’s a tough question. It’s something that I think of a lot because I do think there’s no denying it. Of course, it’s a physical space for so many people. It feels like this barrier that’s there, we can see it now with the migrant crisis and how that affects lives; but I also see it as something broader. I think of the border and how it also influences and goes beyond the physical space. Like, the border is also what people imagine it is, how it’s beyond that physical space and it kind of just fits into the political and the imaginary of the nation. I think of that a lot and how it influences how other things are perceived. I can’t not think of how, now that I’ve lived here for so long, it influences how I think of the situation in Puerto Rico and the relationship of Puerto Rico and the United States, and other types of borders that are not necessarily just land borders that we’re so familiar with here in San Diego. Borders of water, or shifting borders, depending on the convenience of certain nations. I think of it not being necessarily defined, but as a thing that moves beyond. I’m thinking of, not necessarily San Diego, but the image of how the border in places like El Paso and Juarez have, throughout the years, been defined by the river, and the river moves. For many years, before there was a wall, that [river] determined what the border was. We see borders as such a definite, permanent, very tangible thing; in a way, they’re not. They move, they’re fluid things that, in certain cases, have allowed for this movement of a shifting border.
Quick: I think that, as someone with privilege whose daily life is not impacted by the border (I don’t cross the border every day to come to school or to go to work), I have a mediated relationship with the border. I don’t cross because I have to. I cross because I want to, and I try to be really aware and conscious of the way that I am receiving that information through the mediation of news — of listening to the news or reading the news, or hearing about policy, hearing reporting, not only from news media outlets, but also from nonprofit organizations that do work at the border. My college at San Diego State is kind of an unusual college; the art and design school is also in the same college with public affairs, so I have colleagues who are really plugged in to, and are making scholarship about, what’s happening. I make an effort to be aware because we have lots of students whose relationship with the border is a daily thing. So, I try, as an ally, to understand what that means and be sensitive to what that means for me as part of a community, and how that impacts those in my community. Even in graduate school, I was really interested in the border and thinking about the border as a third space. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and. I went to school here, as well, and that’s when I really started to become aware of the border as this kind of interesting hybrid of two cultures. It’s really something different, it’s not one or the other.
Q: Tell us a bit about the pieces you’ll have on display in “La Frontera.”
Lopez: I have five pieces. They are small brooches with pins. You could call it a layered brass that I hand paint with acrylic paint. They’re objects? How can I explain? For example, to give you dimensions so you can visualize them, they’re between 3 inches to 6, 7 inches wide. They range in objects from a table, a jewel, or a ring. I have a box. They are all objects that are related to the names of places here in San Diego. Like, a box is El Cajon; a table is La Mesa; La Jolla; and I have Otay Mesa, which is a sagebrush, like a bush. They are displayed on mock postcards that I made. So, it says “Greetings from La Mesa” or La Jolla or El Cajon. They are a way of me reflecting and making a little bit of fun on the language and how the language here, sometimes we don’t even know what these names mean or where they come from. If we were to explore something like “la jolla,” it’s a name that we assume means “a jewel” and comes from the Spanish word “jolla,” but it actually comes from the Spanish word “hoyo,” which can also mean “hole.” The Kumeyaay called La Jolla “the land of caves.” There’s a connection there to the name being a land of caves. That’s not the only story to the name, but a lot of names have multiple interpretations. People have different interpretations of how a name evolves, and this is reflecting on that.
Quick: In the winter of 2019, I started going on water drops with Border Angels. That’s one of these nonprofit organizations that are doing what, in my opinion, is important border work. So, the work in the exhibition is really about my experience of that act, of making this concerted effort. I guess I see it as a real act of optimism, a real act of hope to make this extraordinary effort to carry hundreds of gallons of water out into the hostile terrain in the hope that someone will find it when they need it. In the last couple of years, I finished a body of work that was really about conveyance and how that is an act of care, to go to the trouble to carry something from one place to another can be very meaningful. I was looking at luggage and the way that human beings have carried things for millennia. We make a container to contain the things that are important so that we can move them physically on our bodies from one place to another. In a way, there’s a relationship to jewelry in that. We put these things on the body because they’re important to us and maybe even valuable, so we keep them as close to us as possible. So, to go out into the desert and carry water—this very precious thing that we often take for granted in the city because it just comes out of our taps and it doesn’t necessarily feel scarce—when you take it out of that context, it does become a precious commodity, so that’s what that work is about. When we were out on water drops, everything you find gets documented, including the empties from previous water drops. So, bottles that have been emptied or crushed, or sometimes cut open by Border Patrol, all of those things really had an impact on me. Everybody is taking photos of everything because that’s what we’re supposed to do, you’re supposed to document everything that you find when you’re out there. Then, when I came back into my studio, I used those forms as a way to think through some of that. The bottles are recreated as leather, which is material that we associate with conveyance, like with luggage, but it’s also a body, it came from a body. So, there’s this kind of relationship between the thing that we need to sustain the body, and the body itself.
They are necklaces. I think that there starts to be a limit to the language that we use because pretty much everyone on the planet has an understanding of what jewelry is, or a preconceived notion about what jewelry is. Most people think small, metal. We’ve got these really particular ideas about what jewelry is. Most people picture a solitaire diamond ring, or a pearl necklace, or something like that. When you’re confronted with something that doesn’t match the scale that you understand as jewelry, or that the material seems odd, then it’s really about a redefinition of jewelry. In a way, anything can be jewelry if the body can carry it, so those works are necklaces. The idea is that they would be carried on the body, either by the neck or by the shoulder, like a handbag and that relationship defines them as jewelry. What I’m trying to do is think about the water (or, in this case, the absence of water) as a connection to preciousness [based on their work with Border Angels in 2019, a nonprofit working for human rights and immigration reform, with programming that includes leaving drinking water in the desert for migrants]. That’s the value, when water is absent, that’s when it’s the most valuable.
Q: What do you want to say/stories do you want to tell, through your pieces, about these ideas of migration, identity, home?
Lopez: I think, in my broader work — I’m not only thinking of “La Frontera,” but a lot of work that I do concerning Puerto Rico—it is a way to amplify. Sometimes, I think that if we are interested and we follow the news and we are aware of what’s happening in the world, we assume that everybody does the same, and are aware of these issues that are important to us. So, then to realize that that’s not necessarily the case, I see my work as a way to tell one story. One story of multiples, of my own trajectory of what it is to be a diasporic Puerto Rican and having to move from a place, and the relationship that Puerto Rico has with the United States. That’s such a complex one. There’s definitely a way of amplifying that and sharing that with people. Talking of issues of the border, I’m coming from a place of, also, privilege. Sure, I’m Puerto Rican, I’m still decoupling the complex situation that Puerto Rico has. We have certain rights that not necessarily other Latin American or Caribbean people have. It’s very complex. For me, “La Frontera,” I see a sensitivity in talking about a place where I came here, I haven’t been here that long. I don’t want to position myself as somebody who can tell the story of people from this region. I can only reflect on certain things that I see connections with what is my own experience, and I think that’s why I decided to go with language. I’m a Spanish speaker; San Diego has, in that sense, a familiarity because it has these layers of it used to be a Spanish colony and it used to be Mexican, so it has these layers that I also see in the place that I come from. I can relate to that and talk of that more than I could talk on subjects of migration or the migrant crisis, or issues that concern the border.
Quick: I’m always careful, I don’t want to fill in all the blanks for a viewer because I’m hoping that they can make some connections with the objects themselves (and I’m speaking generally about my work); but I think that in this case, this is really about a very personal experience to me, which is not normally how I approach my work. For me, this is a document of that moment of literally and figuratively realizing the weight of what an act like that is, and how commemorating it in a way that is materially related to why we carry things and the way that we carry things, is a way for me to mark that moment in time, through material. In a way, I guess the story that I want to tell is about water drops. A lot of people don’t know about water drops. You can volunteer a Saturday morning once a month and you can walk out with a guide and just help them physically carry the water out to the places where they know people will find them. There’s that side of it, but then there’s also a personal side to it where it is about me, and I’m trying to commemorate and the importance of that act.
Q: Generally, how do you see the art of making jewelry as uniquely suited for exploring how borders tell stories about place and existence?
Lopez: I think jewelry, especially contemporary jewelry (which is strong in San Diego with a place like SDSU and having an incredibly strong metals program there) is a rich, rich practice. Not that everybody that goes into it necessarily approaches it conceptually, but I think it’s a medium where it’s unique. It’s a field that allows for such rich conceptual exploration, but I think within the art world, it’s not seen that way. I think jewelry has a lot of connotations of frivolity and luxury and all these stereotypical ideas that we have of jewelry, that I think people kind of dismiss it. I also think it gives the people that are involved, including myself, in this field, there’s a richness to it because even that in itself is an issue to think about. Not necessarily all contemporary conceptual jewelry needs to go on the body, but we are thinking of the body as it springs from it and the bodily interactions, like the body in space, for example. It can be how objects relate to persons. I think, in that sense, it allows for such a rich exploration of human interactions. If I add another element to it, I, as a maker of jewelry; but then it’s like jewelry and the viewer and the interaction I think that people then have with pieces that could be wearable, that you could imagine on a body or you could imagine this connection that we have with adornments. That’s such a historical connection, right? It’s something that humans have been doing for millennia, so I think, for viewers, there’s a familiarity that allows them points of entry to be able to learn. It sparks conversations, it sparks reflection that sometimes a piece on a wall doesn’t necessarily do.
Quick: I think it’s interesting because jewelry, generally, is the things, the symbols that we decide to put on our bodies that tell something about our interior space, our emotional space. They are things that reveal something that’s often hidden. So, if I wore no jewelry and you and I met, information like my marital status or my religious affiliation would be an invisible part of me. As soon as I put on a necklace that has a religious symbol, or I put a ring on a certain finger, it starts to publicly project information about the wearer. The body being, essentially, a border in and of itself; the outside of our skin, the surface of our body is itself a border. Our interior, where our emotional or intellectual lives reside, those things can be communicated by what we decide to put on the outside of the body. That, I think, is an interesting tie.
I also think that the fact that the body itself is something that traverses our physical, like this geopolitical border, where we move from one side to the other and the things that we decide to carry on the body in the form of jewelry or in our pockets or whatever, all of those things kind of tell our stories. If you dump out your handbag, you can absolutely tell things about people. They are the kind of artifacts that communicate important information . So, jewelry makes so much sense because it is so intimate, but it’s also a communication language. We absolutely project what is inside of us on the outside of our body, by what we put on it. That, to me, makes so much sense. It’s also a way that we commemorate and mark time and celebrate. How we even just beautify the body with it, it just made so much sense to me to be tied to this kind of thematic exhibition.
Q: What do you hope people see, or consider, as a result of visiting this “La Frontera” exhibit?
Lopez: I think the multiplicity of stories and how everybody lives the border so differently. I think that is a great thing. A lot of the main things that come so clearly across because of the variety of materials, the different things that everybody’s reflecting on and thinking of in their work, from people who are crossing constantly. I’m thinking of here, in San Diego, like the piece that Georgina Trevino did really emphasizes a reality of somebody who moves between Tijuana and San Diego. From that, to people who maybe have lived here and the border has influenced how they perceive space and place, but they don’t live here anymore so it’s like looking at the border from far away. There’s so many different perspectives and it’s a multiplicity of voices, but I think also represents what this region is. If we’re going to talk about the beauty of what this region is, there’s a multiplicity and richness of our voices and you can see that in the exhibition.
Quick: I think that parts of the exhibition are challenging in of what we talked about earlier, the definition of jewelry, or people’s preconceived notions about what jewelry is. I hope that it can help people I don’t know expand their ideas about what jewelry can be, and also kind of help people understand the importance of jewelry. Jewelry is actually a communication language and it is a tool that we use to communicate with one another. It isn’t just baubles and shiny things. I mean, it can be that, too, but it can also hold this other kind of important information that is really tied to our culture as humans. In every culture, there is some form of putting something on the body to say something about your status or your affiliations, or all of these things, so it’s something that’s so ubiquitous I think it’s often taken for granted, but it’s actually a really powerful tool.
