AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), a collective that connects with border communities to address issues of immigration with craft, displays ceramics made at the border as part of the Hammer Museum's 'Made in L.A.' biennial.
“Con nuestras manos construimos deidades/With our hands we build deities,” by AMBOS: Art Made Between Opposite Sides, is on display in the exhibition “Made in L.A.: Acts of Living” at the Hammer Museum.In 2017, L.A.-based artist Natalie M. Godinez, who works with textiles and printmaking, was in the process of refining her artistic practice. She wanted to expand on storytelling through art.
“You can read an article about what’s happening at the border, but actually getting to hold something that someone else made, now you’re responsible for contributing to that,” says Karla Aguíñiga, AMBOS member and Tanya’s sister. Tanya Aguíñiga sought to offer aid through crafts at a time when Donald Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric was becoming more pervasive. “I just got really worried about our community in Tijuana and wanted a reason, and a project, to check in with people and make sure that they were OK,” she says.
Luis Bermudez, who worked for decades as a sculptor and educator in Los Angeles and died in 2021, is one of the artists featured in this year’s Hammer Museum biennial.Border Quipu , AMBOS’ inaugural project, invited people commuting at the border to add a knot to a quipu, an Andean, pre-Columbian system of recording history on colored threads. The AMBOS team walked from car to car traveling across the border, asking them to tie the threads into knots for the project.
He was assisted by a therapist from Centro 32/Families Belong Together Mexico during the workshops, because the stories many migrants share often have roots in trauma such as gender-based violence and persecution in their home countries. Offering people the opportunity to create with clay is a liberating experience for him. The program started as a weekly offering to a single facility and has since expanded to Casa Arcoiris in Tijuana.
“We can’t just be like, ‘Oh, we’re just here to do art’ when they don’t even have trash cans or there’s no running water,” says Karla Aguíñiga. “Sometimes some of the funding goes to emergency aid.”
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