California Lawyers for the Arts is proud to present its fifth annual bi-national symposium, INTERSECTIONS: Art and Law at the Border. With a focus on the geo-political context of the Tijuana-San Diego region, the intention of this gathering is to highlight artists, activists, lawyers, scholars, and researchers whose work navigates the intersection of art, praxis and legal issues.
As San Diego and Tijuana begin to activate conversation rooted in the 2024 Design Capital of the World designation, we will host an in-person panel discussion examining Border Art History and Intervention: Past Present and Future.
We hope you will join us for INTERSECTIONS 2023 as we continue the conversation IN PERSON!
Reception will follow immediately after the presentation.
BORDER ART HISTORY AND INTERVENTION
PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
Border zones are characterized by dramatic contrasts, the ebb and flow of international and political tensions, oftentimes they amplify society's greatest complexities and contradictions while simultaneously exhibiting immense creative potential. Communities living along the border are in unique relationship to this liminal and precarious ecosystem. Historically border artists have played a critical role in reflecting back the complexity of living in between. This panel will examine the history of border art and intervention focusing on the historic and contemporary relationship that artists have in responding to the evolution of the region. Panelists will also explore a vision for the future from the perspective of architecture, design and urban planning.
PANELISTS
Norma Iglesias Prieto
.jpeg)
Norma Iglesias Prieto is a transborder scholar with an interdisciplinary education (B.A. in social anthropology, M.A. in communications, and Ph.D. in sociology). She is co-founder of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Tijuana; 1982) and became a faculty member of SDSU in 2000. She has more than 40 years of academic experience in cultural studies on the U.S.-Mexico border, emphasizing identity, gender, art, and mass media (particularly cinema). Dr Iglesias Prieto’s recent scholarship draws on creative potential as a mechanism to resist oppression and express human dignity, as well as on the role of the arts in reconfiguring the social fabric. She developed the concept of borderism to understand the different meanings of border experiences and practices. She is the author of five books, among them Beautiful Flowers of the Maquiladoras (1985/1997) and Emergencias: Las artes visuales en Tijuana (2008).
In addition to her academic work, she has experience as a media producer and art curator. Her last curatorial work was the binational multisite exhibition Chicano/a/x Printmaking, Making Print and Making History. 50 Years of Art Activism.
COGNATE Collective
Amy Sanchez Arteaga makes art, teaches, and writes about living as a transborder subject between the Californias. She has an MFA in Art from UC Irvine with an emphasis in Critical and Curatorial Studies, where she also completed the Critical Theory and Graduate Feminist Emphases. She is currently a lecturer of Art History and Theory at SDSU. Misael Diaz is a visual artist, researcher and educator whose interdisciplinary photographic practice explores the intersections of cultural production, economic exchange and political discourse in the context of the US/Mexico borderlands. His projects often mobilize the materiality of photographs to establish critical relationships between publics across borders. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Media, and Design at Cal State San Marcos.
Together they collaborate as Cognate Collective, a binational art and research collective that develops research projects, public interventions, and pedagogical platforms in collaboration with communities across the US/Mexico border region.
Rene Peralta
René Peralta studied architecture at the New School of Architecture in San Diego and the Architectural Association in London, England. He has a Master of Science in Planning with an emphasis in History and Theory from the University of Oklahoma. René has been a professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, a Professor of Urban Design at Washington University in St. Louis, and from 2012-2014 was Director of the Master of Science in Architecture with an emphasis in Landscape + Urbanism at Woodbury University in San Diego. Previously, he served as the inaugural Herb Greene Teaching Fellow at the University of Oklahoma (2019-2021).
René’s work in recent years explores the contemporary and future forms of the urban border between the United States and Mexico, specifically between the cities of Tijuana and San Diego. René is a coauthor, with Fiamma Montezemolo and Heriberto Yépez, of the book Here is Tijuana, published in 2006 by Black Dog Publishing in London. In 2018, he co-edited, along with Tito Alegría and Roger Lewis, the commemorative edition of the book A Temporary Paradise: A look at the special landscape of the San Diego Region, originally prepared by Kevin Lynch and Donald Appleyard (COLEF 2018).
