Lecture: Tanya Aguiñiga

Fiber Art as Activism on the US/Mexico Border

Fiber-centered interventions through: performance, site-specific installation, community based collaborations, and object making have helped Tanya Aguiñiga and others voice the emotions felt at the edge of two cultures. In the face of injustice, fiber and textile techniques have been Aguiñiga’s companions in creating works of healing and empowerment. Join Tanya Aguiñiga in unpacking the specifics of why fiber and textile-based materials have been the most effective conduit for her to bridge worlds at the border. Together, discuss design thinking, a brief history of art at the border, and explore fiber works by other artists carried out at the border.

Best practices for community engagement guide will be provided to all participants.

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 createsculptures, 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. The artist co-built and for six years ran a community center in Tijuana, aimed at bringing attention through arts initiatives to injustices that the local community faced. Aguiñiga has maintained this spirit of activism and community collaboration throughout her career, going on to create many performances and installations that involve the participation of other artists, activists, and community members. In her installations, furniture, and wearable designs, Aguiñiga often works with cotton, wool, and other textiles, drawing upon Mesoamerican weaving and traditional forms. 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. Her inaugural AMBOS project, Border Quipu, used brightly colored strands of fabric to create quipu—an Andean pre-Columbian organizational system—that recorded the daily commutes to and from the United States.

Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. She was just awarded the Heinz Award in
Arts and Humanities (2021), is a United States Artists Target 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. Her work is in the permanent collections of LACMA, Hammer Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Mint Museum, Smithsonian, Pittsburg Museum, Museum of Arts and Design among others. Aguiñiga lives in Los Angeles, California.