Collaborators

CURATOR

Michele Carlson is a multidisciplinary practitioner working across the fields of art, writing, publishing, and collaborative practice. Carlson is one of three founding members of the arts collective Related Tactics, which facilitates projects at the intersection of race, art, and culture.

GALLERY

Southern Exposure (SoEx) is an artist-centered non-profit organization committed to supporting visual artists since 1974. SoEx provides visual artists with the tools and resources they need to experiment in an open and supportive environment.

LEAD ARTIST

Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik is an artist, writer, and educator based in Oakland, Ca whose work has been called a “joyous political critique.” Her community-centered projects use craft, photography, and food to tell stories migration and displacement. Sita is a co-founder of People's Kitchen Collective and teaches the interdisciplinary course, A Taste of Resistance, at California College of the Arts in Diversity Studies.

PIÑATAS

Piñatas Las Morenitas made over 400 individual bricks stuffed with devalued Mexican currency, hot sauce packets, candy, and confetti, to give form to the piñata border wall. You can watch their tutorials online.

Little Piñata Maker is a miniature piñata studio by Isaías Rodríguez. For the wall project, he made a scale model of Trump in relationship to his proposed border wall- a height that fluctuated around 55’. Echoing the souvenirs made from the remnants of border walls from our past, Isaías made miniature recuerdos to commemorate the destruction of the wall.

Ivan Padilla Mónico, an educator and piñata maker from the indigenous Purepecha communities of Michoacan, Mexico, made bricks that Sita moved across the US/Mexico border and displayed in the gallery.

MURALIST

Cece Carpio of the collective Trust Your Struggle is a muralist who, along with collaborators, painted the border wall with messages of resistance and resilience. She documents evolving traditions by combining folkloric forms, bold portraits, and natural elements with urban art techniques. Cece can be found painting, teaching, and traveling around the world in pursuit of the perfect wall.

MUSIC AND AUDIO

La Pelanga is a DJ collective born out of Cali, Colombia, and based in Oakland, Ca. DJ's China Tu Madre, Papicultor, Pozole, and Smokestack produced a Migration Mixtape that set the sound vibe from a boombox throughout the duration of the exhibition. During the opening and the destruction of the wall, La Pelanga spun the sounds of the border live, at the event. The Migration Mixtape is available for streaming here.

Son de la Bahia is a Bay Area-based group of musicians who play Son Jarocho, a collectively played folk music from the Afro Mexican coast of Veracruz. Jarocheros circled the wall before its destruction. Musicians participating in the smashing of the wall included Luis Baltazar, Jennie Renn, Nickolas Esperanza, Leslie Vianey Chaires, and Alexandra Villegas.

dignicraft is a Tijuana-based social practice and media collective working the US and Mexico. They tell the stories of migration often through long-term collaborations with artisans. For the wall project, dignicraft recorded the sounds at the San Ysidro border crossing which played in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.

POETRY

Marvin K White, MDiv is a poet, public theologian, and Minister of Celebration at GLIDE Memorial Church. He invoked our collective power as he gathered us together to break down borders.

FOOD

Norma Listman is the Mexico City-based chef of Masala y Maiz. For the wall project she nixtamalized and hand-ground masa for tamales and made mole for two days before the community demolition. The ingredients became guajolotas, hearty tamal sandwiches to fuel border crossings, and were passed out through an opening in the piñata wall. Each visitor could respond to the question, “what dish reminds you of home?” In exchange for a guajolota.

People’s Kitchen Collective (PKC) works at the intersection of art and activism as a food-centered political education project, based in Oakland, California. PKC facilitated the destruction of the wall.

EDUCATION

Corrina Hui is a radical math educator and equity designer who created a warm-up inspired by the wall project for 8th grade students. She asked them to calculate the height of the border wall, engaging them in a larger conversation about its impact. You can see the exercise here.