<p>Located less than a mile from Juárez, the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso is a non-collecting institution that serves the Paso del Norte region. In Curating at the Edge, Kate Bonansinga brings to life her experiences as the Rubin’s founding director, giving voice to a curatorial approach that reaches far beyond the limited scope of “border art” or Chicano art. Instead, Bonansinga captures the creative climate of 2004–2011, when contemporary art addressed broad notions of destruction and transformation, irony and subversion, gender and identity, and the impact of location on politics.</p>
<p>The Rubin’s location in the Chihuahuan desert on the U.S./Mexican border is meaningful and intriguing to many artists, and, consequently, Curating at the Edge describes the multiple artistic perspectives conveyed in the place-based exhibitions Bonansinga oversaw. Exciting mid-career artists featured in this collection of case studies include Margarita Cabrera, Liz Cohen, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and many others. Recalling her experiences in vivid, first-person scenes, Bonansinga reveals the processes a contemporary art curator undertakes and the challenges she faces by describing a few of the more than sixty exhibitions that she organized during her tenure at the Rubin. She also explores the artists’ working methods and the relationship between their work and their personal and professional histories (some are Mexican citizens, some are U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, and some have ancestral ties to Europe). Timely and illuminating, Curating at the Edge sheds light on the work of the interlocutors who connect artists and their audiences.</p>

Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the U.S./Mexico Border (The William and Bettye Nowlin Series in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere)

Arts & Photography

Bonansinga, Kate

History & Criticism

University of Texas Press

Showcases the talent of four exceptional artists: Christyl Boger, Mark Newport, Mary Van Cline, and SunKoo Yuh.

Staged Stories: Renwick Craft Invitational 2009

Other Media

Scala Books

The American West has had an enormous influence on the nation's imagination, including its fine art. From the Western Realists—as epitomized by the Cowboy Artists of America's mission to produce "authentic representations of life in the West"—to the Western Modernists—who introduced not only modern visual languages but a range of political and ethnic perspectives—Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture brings together a range of images to present a more complex picture of the American West. Section one surveys art from the collection of John McMullen's collection of accomplished Western Realists; section two presents new images of cowboys to investigate the mythology that has developed around them. Section three features work by Native American artists who seek to express their version of the history of western settlement and to articulate the complexities of living in two postmodern cultures, and the final portion of the catalog presents a changed western landscape, bearing layers of social and environmental history. In presenting this body of work, the exhibition presents many Wests, offering an alternative to the debate about which images and styles represent the American West as it was—and is in the present day.

Cowboys, Indians, and the Big Picture

Garroutte, Eva Marie

Fryer, Heather

Johnson, Marilynn

Mcmullen Museum Of Art, Boston College

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Books by Bonansinga, Kate