Art Wall / Tanya Aguiñiga: Border Fall Height

Tanya Aguiñiga (b. 1978, San Diego; raised in Tijuana, Mexico) creates sculptures and installations using natural materials and objects gathered from her environment. Her Art Wall installation at BAMPFA is her first solo presentation in the Bay Area. Participating in a redefinition of the distinctions between art, design, and craft, Aguiñiga upsets these hierarchies through her innovative practice. She situates her work in conversation with urgent issues affecting our world today, from tensions that define national politics to rapid climate change affecting the environment. For her Art Wall installation, Aguiñiga produced a series of rust prints depicting a thirty-foot ladder. These works were made using an actual object that Aguiñiga found near the US-Mexico border, where the boundary between nations has been demarcated by a thirty-foot fence, among other militarized forms of division.


Image Credit: Tanya Aguiñiga: Border Wall Ladder, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.