Border Cantos | Sonic Border
May 27 2019 - September 20 2019
Richard Misrach & Guillermo Galindo
This exhibition is a multisensory experience featuring 10 large-scale photographs by Richard Misrach and eight sculptures accompanied by a sound composition created by experimental composer Guillermo Galindo about the zone surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border. The borderlands are home to more than 80 million people in four United States and six Mexican states and extend nearly 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. The bulk of United States-Mexico trade ($3.8 trillion combined annual GDP) as well as illicit trade, passes through its many borders. Misrach, who has photographed the border since 2004, documents landscapes and objects, including things left behind by migrants. Responding to these photographs, Galindo fashions instruments, and unique sound-generating devices, and composes graphic musical scores, many of which use Misrach’s photographs as points of departure.
Misrach and Galindo create work that reports on and transforms the artifacts of migration: water bottles, clothing, backpacks, Border Patrol “drag tires,” spent shotgun shells, ladders, and sections of the border wall itself. This exhibition examines issues surrounding dislocation and forced migration and investigates political versus cultural boundaries and human rights.
Border Cantos | Sonic Borders is organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art with generous support for this project provided by Art Bridges.
Related Programs:
Pre-Lecture Reception for Members, September 4, 5:30 pm
Richard Misrach: Voices in Contemporary Art Lecture/Performance by Guillermo Galindo, September 4, 7 pm
First Friday Reception with Artists, September 6, 5–8 pm