Tanya Aguiñiga

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present Telar Terrenal / Earthly Loom, a solo exhibition of new textiles by Los Angeles-based artist Tanya Aguiñiga and her first showing with the gallery.

Aguiñiga’s practice is heavily influenced by the traditional crafts of Mexico and pre-Columbian Latin America. Using off-loom weaving techniques, as well as knots, knitting, and crochet, Aguiñiga creates elaborate networks of braided thread, some of which are dyed with a terracotta slurry that hardens like a rigid skin on the surface of the rope. The textiles are arranged in cascading forms that resemble the detritus that accumulates along the banks of the Los Angeles River. Many of the works, in fact, carry stones and sculpted objects, including terracotta hands and organs, among the warp and weft of its weave, a symbolic “catch” that relates the process of weaving to the physical sustenance provided by fishing. The elemental needs of food, clothing, and shelter thus become entry points for thinking about the kinds of practice that might aim at providing a concomitant spiritual nourishment.

Aguiñiga thinks of her works as portraits, representations of the body that capture its tenuous—and often timorous—contact with the world around it. For Aguiñiga, this body is not singular but made up of the familial bonds and informal relationships that extend out from the individual and form a community around their person. In Matriarchal Womb, Aguiñiga bases the shape of the textile on the outline of her and her daughter huddled together in a shielding embrace. The knotted mass at the center of each interconnected figure represents the physical dependence of the child upon the mother, connected by a cord belonging to both. It offers an image of motherly love in which the identity of mother and child is both conjoined and articulated as difference. 

Throughout her practice, Aguiñiga has looked to the history of migration between the United States and Mexico as a way of exploring the mutual dependence of people and the transit of labor and goods across borders. Aguiñiga’s newest textiles draw on the Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers as major waterways connected to industry and labor that also exist as sites of leisure and recreation, small pockets of nature within the urban expanse. For Aguiñiga these rivers became places that recorded the life of the city, and she began to see them not only as sources for the work but as creative practitioners in their own right—potential collaborators skilled in combining materials and eking out the relationship between seemingly disparate objects.  

During the record-breaking rains of 2023 in Los Angeles, Aguiñiga began to notice tangled webs of objects dredged up by the river and deposited into the branches of the trees near her studio. These found assemblages were the products of a serious practitioner, a weaver working with the things around her, drawing the remnants of countless lives together effortlessly and with a freedom of form that doesn’t hem or haw but arrives at the most succinct conjunction of objects, “as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella,” as the old surrealist adage goes. Aguiñiga’s textiles are a tribute to the river as an artist overlooked for too long, whose work has the potential to reveal the hidden currents that connect countless different lives to a place over time.

Matriarchal Womb, 2022

The Noguchi Museum, New York

May-June 2023

This textile work layers materials and methods to express poignant metaphors about family and community. It is a homage to matrilineal support and the tender relationship between Aguiñiga and her daughter. Based on the outline of the two of them, huddled side by side, the work uses a variety of techniques including off-loom weaving, knotting, crochet and knitting as a metaphor for the interconnected non-hierarchical relationships within communities. Sections of the work have been dipped in self-drying terracotta, an important material to cultures of the global south, which forms a rigid but flexible skin around the fibres.

Photo by Gina Clyne

Volume Gallery, 2023

Chicago, IL

LACMA

Nov 12, 2022–May 29, 2023

New Abstracts showcases an expansive range of practices constituting abstract art today. Despite strong counter currents in the contemporary art world, such as the resurgence of figurative painting, innovations in augmented reality, and the development of NFTs, abstraction continues to offer rich possibilities for innovation and introspection. Many artists working with abstract vocabularies today interrogate not only the possibilities of color, material, gesture, and form, but also the potential for injecting abstract art with political, spiritual, or personal meaning.

LACMA has a long history of presenting abstract art, dating to the 1964 exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction at the Los Angeles County Museum in Exposition Park. All of the works in New Abstracts are recent additions to the museum’s permanent collection, many on view for the first time since being acquired. Featured artists include Tanya Aguiñiga, Peter Bradley, Sarah Crowner, Jadé Fadojutimi, Marley Freeman, Channing Hansen, Naotaka Hiro, Alex Hubbard, and Lee Ufan.

Volume Gallery, 2023

Booth #236

VAMA Gallery, LACC, 2023

Tanya Aguiñiga

Maria Maea

Marco Rios

Often masking our inner selves through the distraction of our exterior representation, how the world views us is filtered through our choices of sartorial distinction. Clothing is the message to constitute a self that consistently shifts to meet the needs. The artists in New Clothes look to materials and processes that are suggestive not only of corporeal forms, but figures linked to a history, place, and time. The materials in question go beyond their tactility; they are used as proxies, a means to approximate, if not adopt, identities. Evidence of a substitution initiated by the artists in New Clothes may infer the vestiges of displacements where one body is replaced for another. Tanya Aguiñiga’s anthropomorphic sculptures, mimicking a fleshy appearance, mark the gallery with quiet tension as they hang from loose cradles woven by the artist. Paying tribute to dignified voices through the use of plant culture and found materials, the work of Maria Maea draws upon multifaceted histories as sites of collective labor. Erstwhile, Marco Rios adopts personas and humor as a means to destabilize, or make sense of, the artist as catalyst. Displaying various methods of production, New Clothes needles the concern, for better or worse, that perhaps the body may not be enough.

Photos by Kimberly Gavidia

Extraño 9, 2020

Hôtel de Guise

October 18 - 23, 2022

Zut! is a collaborative exhibition which celebrates the intersection of art and design. Occupying an 18th century mansion on 72 rue de l’Université in the 7th arrondissement, this immersive exhibition is the brainchild of 7 international galleries: A1043 (Paris, France), Deli Gallery (New York, USA), Friedman/Johnson (New York/Miami, USA), Galerie Mitterrand (Paris, France), Salon 94 Design (New York, USA), The Breeder (Athens, Greece), and Volume Gallery (Chicago, USA).

Built in 1728 as the Hôtel de Guise, this once opulent hotel particulier has been known under many names including Hôtel du président Chauvelin, Hôtel de Rougé, Hôtel de Mme de Lurcy and finally, L’Hôtel Chauvelin de Crisenoy. While its former grandeur eventually fell into romantic decay, it has more recently become inspiration for artists and curators alike who have breathed new life into its derelict shell. Zut! embraces the building’s storied past, and responds with different visions of how contemporary art and design can synergistically co-exist. Installed in this modern ruin, each installation triggers the imagination with a sense of possibility, impermanence, and play.

Colorful, corporeal, and hirsute braided textiles, Tanya Aguiñiga’s new pieces combine technicolor ice-dyed cotton and synthetic hair. The increasingly anthropomorphic pieces have a variety of referents from neon signage to plants and animals. The bright colors of Aguiñiga's recent weavings are meant as a respite from current turmoil. Aguiñiga began working in craft to embrace significant and fundamental maker traditions, many of which are passed down generationally. Her weavings and other objects are craftivist gestures, using both traditional and experimental techniques to uplift these essential practices. Her object-making practice works in tandem with her activist and performance practice which strives to build solidarity among border communities.

The 2022 Focus section, titled Landscape Undone, features artists that examine the intersectionality of issues surrounding the environment, focusing on personal and political climates as they interact with race, gender, and power. In these South-South ecologies, the landscape is simultaneously physical, psychological, and geographic—a human and non-human entity—where a range of historical and cultural processes collide. Through abstract, representational, and materially driven approaches, the artists whose work is featured in this section all address the natural and the built environment as a personal yet public territory loaded with the legacies of racism and colonialism. Mirroring the diversity of the landscape as a concept, the section features a wide array of perspectives, mediums, and approaches. Overall, their work becomes an act of undoing, allowing us to see beyond what is in front of us.

-Carla Acevedo-Yates

Tanya Aguiñiga’s weavings and other objects are craftivist gestures, using both traditional and experimental techniques to uplift these essential practices which are passed down generationally. The booth features a grouping of hanging sculptural weavings from her “Extraño” series. Braided textiles, the “Extraño” pieces are a combination of raw cotton, flax, synthetic hair, and ice-dyed technicolor weavings. The series is titled after the two meanings of the Spanish word extraño: the experience of missing and the adjective strange. The “Extraño” objects are a reaction to the grief, gratitude, rage, exhaustion, and worry the artist has experienced in response to the constant threats the BIPOC community faces and the diverse effects and losses of the pandemic.

Images Courtesy of Volume Gallery

OMCA

July 29-Jan 08, 2022

Feminism. It’s a loaded word; as empowering to some as it is challenging for others. OMCA takes on this complex and timely topic with Hella Feminist, celebrating the lesser-known stories of feminism here in Oakland and the Bay Area.

Bringing together historic objects from the Museum’s collection such as posters, pins, and photographs, alongside newly commissioned works by artists, Hella Feminist is rooted in the idea that discrimination against all elements of identity (gender, class, race, sexual orientation, physical ability, education, age, etc.) is interlinked and that no element can be addressed in isolation.

The exhibition aims to challenge, provoke, and inspire visitors to reconsider and expand their understanding of feminism and its complicated history.

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Hella Feminist is rooted in the idea that discrimination against all elements of identity (gender, class, race, sexual orientation, physical ability, education, age, etc.) are interlinked and that no element can be addressed alone. Bringing together historic objects from the Museum’s collection, alongside newly commissioned works by artists, the exhibition explores the lesser known stories of feminism in the Bay Area and beyond.

Designed to be responsive to the current moment, Hella Feminist’s opening comes just one month following the United States Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

Photos courtesy of Claudia Escobar

Volume Gallery

Photos by Gina Clyne

Harris Art Gallery

University of La Verne,

La Verne, CA

March 15-May 12, 2022

Curated by Ichiro Irie & Laura Reséndiz

About Place presents contrasting cultural and geographic backgrounds as artists address the idea of “place” with transformative works that showcase their unique aesthetic visions, languages, and processes. Rapid global transformations and unprecedented movements of people caused by poverty, economic opportunity, gentrification, leisure, conflict and climate change continuously shifts the way we as humans perceive, relate to, and signify the idea of “place”. As displaced populations and migrant communities adapt to new cultures and environments, integration is both welcomed by humanitarian ideals and resisted by fearful intolerance. The aim of this exhibition is to serve not merely as a reflection or simulacra of a place, but an attempt to see how artists create objects and/or experiences that become their own destinations while simultaneously exploring complex ideas and issues.

Some of the pieces deal with local and personal histories, such as Taniyama’s sound sculpture dealing with the city of La Verne’s own history as a once thriving agricultural orange-growing industry, or Aguñiga’s woven earth sculpture containing soil from her places of origin. Other artists approach their works from a much more global or philosophical vantage point such as Mann’s sculptural photo installation chronicling her travels around the world or Aho’s kinetic sculptures and video that seem to playfully beckon viewers to contemplate time and nature.

Courtesy of University of La Verne. Photography by Gene Ogami.

LACE

May 15 -Aug 14, 2021

Curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar

Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento is a diasporic research and exhibition that brings together artworks examining the violence that is generated from physical and conceptual borders, and severe immigrant policies. With this perspective, the exhibition presents a counterpart–the many forms of resistance built collectively across regions–intended to establish a platform of exchange and dialogue among artists, poets, activists, curators and writers from different areas and practices against isolation.

The exhibition focuses on both the southern border between Central America and Mexico and the northern border between Mexico and features commissioned work by The Fire Theory, Tanya Aguiñiga, Cog•nate Collective, and a collaboration between Beatriz Cortez, Kaqjay Moloj and FIEBRE Ediciones.

Borders are a historic tool for segregation, isolation, and discrimination. In our contemporary moment, the border has become the ultimate machine of necropolitics (the politics of death) and the nullification of the human body, especially in the United States. As a response to border systems, the “struggle for life” has been manifested in many different ways. Historically artists have contributed to the fight against the power of the borders that perpetuates global necropolitics and bodily oppression.

Isolation is a strategy to attack and debilitate the intergalactixs, our coalitions, our collective life, and our cosmic condition that connect humans with all living forces. The loss of land (destierro), being dispossessed, erasure, displacement, and unrooted, are actions towards human isolation, against collectivity. It is not a coincidence that detention centers along U.S. borders are designed to isolate and degrade humans and criminalize the human condition of mobility. Intergalactix listens to the heart of the Americas, Central America and spirals into Mexico and the diasporas in the US.

The concept of intergalactix comes from the Zapatista indigenous rebellion in the south of Mexico, who have built autonomous communities of resistance since 1994 in remote locations. In 1996, the Zapatistas called for an “Encuentro Intergaláctico” (Intergalactic Gathering), a forum in defense of humanity and against neoliberalism that summoned the attendance of any life form in and out of our galaxy. This encuentro is considered a watershed moment in global movements, like the Battle of Seattle protest at the World Trade Center in 1999.

As a long-term research project, Intergalactix maps genealogies of artistic collective and collaborative practices in border zones and their extensions, using as a point of departure the implementation of NAFTA in 1994 and its neoliberalist politics and practices. Maps have been traced collectively through encuentros (gatherings) in different cities of Central America, Mexico and U.S.

The genealogies presented in Intergalatix will function as a root system to the exhibition honoring the work of many artists and activists that have worked with these issues for many years.

During the last 41 years, LACE has supported this intergalactix spirit through exhibitions such as Destination L.A. by Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo BAW/TAF (1991), Art Against Empire: Graphic Responses to U.S. Interventions Since W.W.II (2010) and El Salvador, organized by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) and Doug Humble (1981). The legacy continues with Intergalactix, to extend the transversality between these artists and activist and current practices.

“El legado continúa con Intergalactix, para extender los cruces transversales en el arte contemporáneo.”

-Daniela Lieja Quintanar

Support for Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento is provided by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the California Arts Council, Karen Hillenburg, and the National Performance Network. Initial research funding was provided by the Andy Warhol Curatorial Fellowship.

Curatorial Assistant: Jocelyn Lopez- Anleu

Associate Researcher: Claudia Pretelin

This exhibition is a part of the Se habla español program at LACE. To view more bilingual projects, click here.

Exhibition graphics by Carolina Ibarra-Mendoza. Image: Tanya Aguiñiga, Metabolizing the Border, 2020. Performance. Photo by Gina Clyne.⁠⁠⁠ Courtesy of the artist.

Documentation done by Yubo at OfPhoto Studio

Friedman Benda
New York, NY

A New Realism Curated by Glenn Adamson

Within/without, 2021

Dyed cotton rope, spaghetti straps, steel, synthetic hair
101 x 64 x 18 inches

Photo by Gina Clyne

Craft Contemporary

Los Angeles, CA

May 9, 2021 — September 12, 2021

Curated by Holly Jerger

Making Time celebrates a selection of L.A.-based artists who have shared their artwork in solo exhibitions at Craft Contemporary over the last ten years. Their iconic works mark time in a variety of ways and showcase the diversity of materials and processes that have made contemporary craft vibrant and relevant. This exhibition is an opportunity to reflect upon the dynamic work of these artists and highlight the impact they have had on the museum’s development over the years.

Exhibition artists: Tanya Aguiñiga, Uzumaki Cepeda, Beatriz Cortez, Keiko Fukazawa, Katherine Gray, Gronk, Sherin Guirguis, Betye Saar, Timothy Washington, and Ann Weber.

Making Time has been organized by Craft Contemporary Exhibitions Curator Holly Jerger.

This exhibition is supported in part by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture and a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.

Images courtesy of Craft Contemporary, 2021

Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum at Mesa Arts Center

Tempe, AZ

May 14 - Aug. 8, 2021

Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum at Mesa Arts Center is proud to present the collaborative, site-specific exhibition Passage by renowned multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, European). The centerpiece, Something to Hold Onto, is Luger’s second project from his Counting Coup series. This immersive installation is made from 7,000+ 1-inch unfired clay beads, created by Arizona residents and national/international partners. Each bead represents a life lost along the US-Mexico border in the last 30 years and is intended to humanize these staggering statistics. The installation mirrors a large-scale floor mural by Phoenix based artists Thomas ‘Breeze’ Marcus (Tohono O’odham) and Dwayne Manuel (Onk Akimel O'odham). The exhibition is accompanied by artwork and a pop-up educational experience by Tanya Aguiñiga (Mexican) and journalistic documentation by Thosh Collins (Onk Akimel O'odham) and Chelsey Luger (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Standing Rock Lakota Nation).

El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Mesa en el Centro de Artes de Mesa se enorgullece en presentar la exposición colaborativa y exclusiva: Passage, del reconocido artista multidisciplinario Cannupa Hanska Luger (madan, hidatsa, arikara, lakota, europeo). La pieza central de la instalación, Something to Hold Onto (Algo en que aferrarse), es el segundo proyecto de Luger de su serie Counting Coup y es una instalación de inmersión que contiene más de 7,000 trozos de arcilla sin cocer, creada por residentes y socios nacionales / internacionales. Cada pedacito de barro representa una vida perdida a lo largo de la frontera entre los Estados Unidos y México en los últimos 30 años y tiene la intención de ver el lado humano de estas alarmantes estadísticas. La instalación refleja un mural de piso a gran escala realizado por los artistas de Phoenix Thomas ‘Breeze’ Marcus (Tohono O’odham) y Dwayne Manuel (Onk Akimel O'odham). La exposición incluye obras de arte y una experiencia educativa emergente de Tanya Aguiñiga (mexicana) y documentación periodística de Thosh Collins (Onk Akimel O'odham) y Chelsey Luger (Turtle Mountain Band de Chippewa, Standing Rock de la nación Lakota).

Courtesy of Mesa Art Center

Extraño, 2020
Solo Exhibition

Volume Gallery
Chicago, IL

info@wvVolumes.com

Photos courtesy of Volume Gallery

Cosas que Sangran, 2020

Braided cotton rope, cochineal dye, heckled flax

92h x 21w x 10d inches

‘Cosas que Sangran’ a special piece made for ‘Color and Production’ curated by Libby Sellers for Collective Design Fair | Frieze Art Fair’s Viewing Room with Volume Gallery

R & COMPANY

Vestigial, 2020

Curated by GLENN ADAMSON, JAMES ZEMAITIS, ABBY BANGSER, and EVAN SNYDERMAN.

R & COMPANY PRESENTS OBJECTS: USA 2020 - A LANDMARK EXHIBITION REFRAMING THE HISTORY, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF HANDMADE AMERICAN ARTS

Objects: USA 2020 surveys American handmade arts through a curated selection of 100 artists, including 50 of the most impactful contemporary makers working today and 50 historical artists, whose work viewed together is a testament to the diverse, pluralistic, and hybrid state of handmade objects in American culture today.

Nowhere in the United States is more politicized than the country’s border with Mexico, despite the fact that few Americans actually spend much time there. Tanya Aguiñiga, though, has deep experience with the place. She can amply attest to how violently this imaginary line on the earth’s surface cuts through real people’s lives. While growing up, Aguiñiga lived in Mexico but attended school in America, and thus was obliged to wait for hours each day on either side of the border. The sheer time wasted enduring such situations is heartbreaking; the separation, anger, and resentment that arise from this highly contested boundary are worse.

Aguiñiga has repeatedly circled back to these formative experiences, working in the early part of her career with the collaborative group AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides, and in Spanish “both of us”) on either side of the border. She also has a fluid relationship to media, incorporating expressive materials as diverse as wax, charred wood, natural fibers, and human hair in her work. The wall-mounted sculpture seen here, part of her series Vestigial, harks back to the glory days of fiber art in the 1960s and ’70s. It is embellished with a highly unusual combination of substances, equal parts earth and glamor: Mylar, gold leaf, and self-drying clay.

Tanya Aguiñiga: Borderlands Within

Armory Center for the Arts

February 9 – August 9, 2020

Photos by Ian Byers-Gamber. Courtesy of the Armory Center for the Arts.

Volume Gallery

February 28 - April 11, 2020

Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art

November 26, 2019 - November 29, 2020

In 1977, feminist activists Ruth Iskin, Lucy Lippard, and Arlene Raven organized an exhibition centered on the question, “What is Feminist Art?” They invited artists to answer this question on a letter-sized piece of paper. Hundreds of artists responded in the form of collage, manifestos, drawings, and prints, providing a snapshot of the ongoing conversations around feminism in the United States.

In 2019, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art asked this same question, “What is Feminist Art?” to some of the same women who responded in 1977, as well as a new group of artists to capture the current response.

On view are more than 75 responses from then and now. These personal statements are vibrant and varied, elucidating the contours of feminist art by complicating its origins, calling out its failures, and celebrating its achievements.

This exhibition was organized by the Archives of American Art with funding from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative.

A curatorial advisory committee reached out to a range of artists whose creative practices engage with issues of feminism, gender, and sexuality. These present-day statements offer diverse perspectives to ever-expanding conversations about feminism.

Mary Savig - Curator of Manuscripts, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Nao Bustamante - Professor of Art and Director of MFA Art, University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design

Alexandra Chang - Associate Professor of Practice, Arts, Culture and Media Department & Acting Associate Director, The Clement A Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, Rutgers University—Newark

Jaclyn Roessel - Founder, Grownup Navajo

Legacy Russell - Associate Curator of Exhibitions, The Studio Museum in Harlem

Annenberg Space for Photography

October 5 - December 29, 2019

W|ALLS: Defend, Divide and the Divine is group exhibition featuring over 70 artists and photographers curated by Dr. Jen Sudul Edwards, the Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Complex, challenging, and immersive, W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine is a historical look at civilization’s relationship with barriers, both real and imagined. For centuries, across diverse civilizations, walls have been central to human history. This exhibit explores the various aspects of walls – artistic, social, political, and historical – in six sections: Delineation, Defense, Deterrent, The Divine, Decoration, and The Invisible. These categories overlap and change meaning according to context, much like the walls themselves: erected for one reason, their appearance and use is then altered and modified over centuries, reflecting the civilizations that have grown and changed around them.

Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University

August 26 - November 17, 2019

La Frontera - The Border: An Interdisciplinary Examination shows works by artists whose investigations are created around and influenced by the border and its effects. Employing multiple disciplines from painting and sculpture to video and performance the artists explore and document the wide implications of the physical border, which is at the same time informed by and feeding back into popular sentiment and psychological borders.

Featured artists include Tanya Aguiniga, Natalia Anciso, Raul Baltazar, Los Anthropolocos: Richard A. Lou & Robert J. Sanchez, Nikki Darling, Luis G. Hernandez, Ingrid Leyva, Roy Martinez, and Omar Pimienta.

Co-curated with LakeLyn Bagge, Alondra Costilla, Tram Dang, Marcus Herse, Grace Jones, Kayla Quinlan, Hannah Scott.

AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides) is a series of artists’ projects created to recontextualize borders and generate a network for international collaboration. Through artist interventions and commuter participation, AMBOS seeks to create a greater sense of interconnectedness in the border region, while simultaneously documenting life and emotion along the border.

Using a quipu, the Andean Pre-Columbian organizational system, as a framework to record the daily migrations to the north, AMBOS founder Tanya, with team of seven women artists and activists, visited each US/Mexico border crossing spanning from Tijuana | San Ysidro to Matamoros | Brownsville to create Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu (2016-2018). People who crossed the border going north were asked to fill out a postcard about their experience. Each postcard came with two strands of thread that they were asked to make into a knot to represent the relationship between the US and Mexico, the two selves that exist at either side of the border, and people’s mental state at the time of crossing. The postcards and knots of each day were collected and the latter were tied together to make Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu.

For La Frontera | The Border, Aguiñiga has paired a photograph from each border crossing visited by the AMBOS team with writing from a select Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu postcard. These images and sentiments capture one of many emotions expressed at each location where Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu was activated. In 2018 Quipu Fronterizo/Border Quipu was acquired by Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for their permanent collection.

The Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art at James Madison University

September 10 - October 13, 2020

The exhibition features the work of Tanya Aguiñiga, Doug Johnston, Ayako Aratani and Evan Fay, OOIEE, and Aya Kawabata. Curated by Keenan Rowe, Digital Design and Fabrication Manager in JMU’s School of Art, Design and Art History, Edge Walkers examines the tenuous boundaries that exist between the disciplines of art, design, and craft.

Volume Gallery

Chicago, IL

Vestigial Series, 2019

Photos courtesy of Volume Gallery

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)

April 3 - May 25, 2019

Movement as Translation of Emotion, Material as Witness Two, 2019 gatherings of women, braided cotton cord, dye, watercolor paper, pins

There is a language each of our hands speak, a way of engaging -- thereby encoding the physical world. Tactile transmissions from our pasts, projected to a future. Remembering we were once connected to a woman, we again connect to other women, and look to our generative intuition as a guiding force for an action of solidarity, communication, healing and craft.

The work was created on site at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) during two gatherings for the exhibition Unraveling Collective Forms // Quema de Papalotes curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar. One, a private introspective event before the opening and a second public celebratory event to close. Playing off the notion of women’s work being subjugated to the realm of the soft in art, and exploring our relationship to the domestic/labor, women of diverse backgrounds will be invited to help create a collaborative fiber piece that acts as a barometer of our collective feminine consciousness through making meditative knots dipped into black dye which will be allowed to continuously drip onto a cascade of paper. Questioning the importance of the action, the form and mark-making.

The process of making this piece mirrors our studio structure. We will create a space in which nurtury and support is central to our actions through food, non-hierarchical modes of collaboration, and inclusive conversation. The studio cooked our favorite comfort foods to greet collaborators in the first hour of the night.

View images from the gatherings here.

Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York

May 8 - October 2, 2018

Tanya Aguiñiga: Craft & Care assembles a selection of projects that reflect the pillars of Aguiñiga’s work as an activist and social practice artist and designer, which is built around acts of comforting, intimacy, sustenance, and connection. These values serve as the basis for AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), a long-term initiative founded by Aguiñiga in 2015, which activates sites along the US–Mexico border through collaborative art-making and storytelling projects. In the course of this exhibition, Aguiñiga and her team completed their journey to all of the sister cities along the border, collaborating with citizens on both sides to make work that creates and nurtures community.

Photos by Jenna Bascom. Courtesy of Museum of Arts and Design, New York.

Loomis Gallery, Mansfield University, September 28 - October 23, 2015

Mothering the Form

Solo Exhibition

Volume Gallery, Chicago, IL

January 30 - March 7, 2015

FUTURE TROPES

Tanya Aguiñiga, Jonathan Muecke, Jonathan Olivares, Leon Ransmeier, RO/LU, and Anders Ruhwald

Volume Gallery, Chicago, IL

IN/SITU

Tanya Aguiniga, Jojo Chuang, Matthias Merkel Hess, Sterling Lawrence, Jonathan Muecke, ROLU, Snarkitecture, Thaddeus Wolfe

Volume Gallery, Chicago, IL

June 2014