Consuelo Jimenez Underwood Weaves Artworks About the Border

In 2009 Consuelo Jimenez Underwood was confronted by a clean wall. She had been invited to take part in a bunch exhibition on the Triton Museum of Artwork in Santa Clara, California, titled “Xicana: Religious Reflections/Reflexiones Espirituales.” As a textile artist, she wasn’t positive if she ought to fill the wall with small- and medium-size weavings or one thing a lot bigger. She had by no means labored on the scale of a museum wall earlier than, however she took the chance as a problem to push her follow in a brand new course. After some reflection, she knew what she needed to do. “I’m going to explode the border,” she remembered considering on the time, referring to the border between the US and Mexico. “I’m going to say the way it has simply eaten up the entire world.”

The US-Mexico border had been a focus of Jimenez Underwood’s weavings for a number of a long time. Previous works had referenced the border in indirect methods by the addition of barbed wire, the mashing collectively of the US and Mexican flags, and depictions of the colonization of the Americas. However for the “Xicana” exhibition, she took the US-Mexico border to a extra visceral excessive, marking the road as a purple gash within the wall. She surrounded it with massive paper flowers, representing the state flowers of the 4 border states—California’s golden poppy, Arizona’s saguaro blossoms, New Mexico’s yucca flower, and Texas’s bluebonnet—all of which develop on each of the border’s sides. In regards to the work, titled Undocumented Border Flowers (2010), she stated, as if to the US authorities, “What are you going to do: problem paperwork to flowers too?”

Jimenez Underwood has since made some 15 such “BORDERLINES” works throughout the nation, usually collaborating with schoolchildren or not too long ago incarcerated ladies from native communities. The collection gives “a approach for a viewer who has no clue to get into the borderline and really feel what occurs in there—the vitality,” she stated. “It’s stunning and constructive, however there’s this harshness over it. It’s horrifying to have your neighborhood affected by an arbitrary line. It damages lots of people.”

Jimenez Underwood, who was born in Sacramento in 1949, has an intimate relationship with the border, having crossed it quite a few occasions throughout her youth. Her father was born in Mexico, of Huichol ancestry, and was undocumented within the US. She remembers watching him weave of their storage, on a loom he had created with nails, as he prevented immigration brokers.

Jimenez Underwood made her first woven art work whereas in her 20s. She was dwelling in Los Angeles on the time and, on a visit to a grocery retailer, noticed a United Farmer Employees (UFW) picket line, a part of a nationwide boycott of grapes and lettuce. She was captivated by the UFW flag with a black eagle on a purple background. “I noticed the ability of the eagle,” she stated, and went house to arrange a loom to create C.C. Huelga (1974), the “C.C.” referring to UFW chief César Chávez.

She felt linked to that wrestle, not simply as a Chicana however as a former campesina (farmworker). Because the eleventh of 12 youngsters, Jimenez Underwood adopted the harvest occasions of various crops along with her household, trekking up and down Freeway 99, from the border city of Calexico to the Oregon state line. She remembers a time as a baby choosing produce and feeling depressing beneath the beating solar. The younger Consuelo stood up and yelled, “Is all people completely happy?” Her fellow campesinos checked out her with bemusement and went again to work.

Seeing the toll such labor took on her household gave her a way of urgency to get out of the fields, in order a baby she fashioned a 10-year plan—by the top of which she would get her highschool diploma and go away the croplands so she might inform the story of the individuals who remained. That was no small activity, as she attended faculty solely exterior the harvest season, taking lessons from October to March. However she went on to be the primary in her household to graduate from highschool, and he or she has been considering by way of a long time ever since.

“She by no means forgets her personal experiences—about being a farm employee, about being seen as less-than, about dwelling with a father who was undocumented,” stated artwork historian Laura E. Pérez, who coedited a 2022 anthology about Jimenez Underwood and her work.

“She’s unbiased and has her personal approach,” stated Beverly Adams, a MoMA curator of Latin American artwork, who not too long ago curated Jimenez Underwood’s Artpace residency in San Antonio. “She’s not responding
to something aside from her coronary heart, her historical past, and her engagement and love of what she does and this place the place she lives.”

JIMENEZ UNDERWOOD HAS LIVED in California her whole life. Since 2020, she has been based mostly at her property close to Gualala, California, about three hours north of San Francisco. When seeking to purchase a ranchito (little ranch) within the late ’90s, her husband peered at a map and the one city with an Indigenous title north of the town was Gualala, which implies “the place the water goes down” in Pomo. A fast flip off State Route 1, the plot of land sits above a hill, with a view of the Pacific Ocean. To the left is a small visitor home and “the lodge,” a one-room cabin with a ceiling made out of a single redwood tree. To the precise is her house and predominant studio. Once I visited in April, simply earlier than her 76th birthday, a delicate sea breeze flowed by the grass, the flowers, and the redwoods that dotted the land.

The studio, in a former woodworking store, contained two looms, two drafting tables, containers of material, dozens of rulers, vases filled with security pins and buttons, and a model with a denim jacket she embroidered within the ’70s. Her studio and dwelling quarters burst with numerous spools of thread and wire in an limitless array of colours. A few of her aluminum spools from the ’90s price $35; in the present day, she stated, they’d be nearer to $350. 5 years in the past, she donated a number of to mates, faculties, and thrift outlets, realizing that she’d by no means be capable of use all of them.

She maps out her designs upfront, creating tough sketches of the shapes that she then fills in with crayons. From there, she calculates the measurements—the variety of wefts and warps—for every part. “I can’t go away it as much as whim,” she stated. “All the pieces needs to be measured, as a result of once you’re right here”—pointing to a selected a part of a weaving in progress—“you don’t see what’s over there. I can’t take it on religion. You may unroll it to see, but when I do this, I discover I lose pressure. I feel it’s dishonest.”

She confirmed me a brand new flag she was making, with the blue nook and purple and white stripes of the US flag on the left, and the purple and inexperienced of the Mexican flag at proper. Within the middle was a completely white part. Throughout all three sections was a strand of barbed wire. After a visit to San Antonio for the opening of a present at her gallery, Ruiz-Healy Artwork, she would spend two to 3 weeks making ready her loom after which start weaving her several-foot-wide flag. “In that course of,” she stated, “your fingers, your vitality, your sweat, your physique oils, your ideas, and your intentions are within the work.”

Her working circumstances weren’t all the time so inspiring. Again within the ’70s, when she was making her first weaving, Jimenez Underwood soughtout a workshop the place she might develop her expertise, and located one in Torrance. She was one among solely two ladies of shade within the 15-person class, and the instructor, utilizing a slur for Indigenous ladies, segregated the 2 of them from the remainder of the group. Virtually instantly, she remembered, “we checked out one another, and received out of there.”

She had discovered sufficient to show to sample books for additional instruction and was fascinated by the seemingly limitless approaches to weaving she discovered. “This may take me a lifetime to grasp,” she remembers considering on the time. “You may go on ceaselessly, for the remainder of your life, and you’ll by no means do all of it.”

In 1976, after transferring to San Diego along with her husband and two younger youngsters on the age of 27, Jimenez Underwood solid one other 10-year plan—this time to get her school diploma and mount a solo exhibition like her idol, Chicano artist Rupert García, whom she had examine in {a magazine}. After junior school, Jimenez Underwood transferred to San Diego State College, the place she discovered extra about “the right way to learn textiles” and the lineage she was working inside. “I didn’t wish to be a jack of all trades,” she stated. “I needed to be puro hilo [pure thread] to get the viejitas [the female elders] on my aspect. I might hear them asking, ‘what’s flawed with thread?’”

After finishing her bachelor’s diploma in 1981, Jimenez Underwood determined to go for a grasp’s at SDSU, and commenced engaged on 10 new weavings that may kind the portfolio for her software. She had determined to create a collection of landscapes that, to an uninformed eye, would cross as simply that. To her eye, nevertheless, the scenes had been encoded with borders. “My landscapes all the time had borders—that was my first code,” she stated.

After incomes her grasp’s diploma in artwork from SDSU, she determined to go for one more grasp’s, enrolling within the MFA program at San Jose State College, the place she started to concentrate on how she might add extra than simply summary varieties to her weavings. “At San Jose, I discovered my voice: context and content material,” she stated. Upon finishing her diploma in 1987, Jimenez Underwood additionally took a tenure-track place to start a instructing profession that she continued on the college till she retired in 2009. Her resolution to show owed to one thing her mentor Joan Austin had instructed her years earlier: “In case you get the diploma, you need to give it again.”

Juggling the calls for of instructing and her artwork impacted Jimenez Underwood’s studio follow, however her college students stored her going. She remembers considering years in the past, when she had thought of giving up her instructing job, “if I keep, I’ll infect an entire era of younger ladies: Sí, se puede, with thread.”

Gilda Posada, an artwork historical past PhD candidate who has written on Jimenez Underwood’s work, stated that Jimenez Underwood had certainly impacted generations of artists to take up weaving, by her pedagogy and by instance, as one of many first Chicanas to earn an MFA and develop into a tenured professor. “She fought for her training,” Posada stated, “when society instructed her that she was nothing greater than a farmworker.”

JIMENEZ UNDERWOOD SEES THREAD all over the place and in the whole lot—together with canvases for work, traditionally on the high of the artwork hierarchy. “So why is thread all the time disdained?” she requested. “Why is it all the time smeared up with oil and brushes?”

She determined she needed to weave her canvas as a substitute, and for greater than 50 years, Jimenez Underwood has advocated for fiber artwork to be taken as critically as different varieties. “It appeared like a great battle to take up,” she stated. “The rating of what artwork is is so arbitrary in some ways.” However she has lengthy felt that a lot of the fiber artwork she sees—from the previous and the current—is simply pure kind. “That irritates me, as a result of there may be a lot injustice. I consider artwork as a technique to have an effect on society, and I don’t see kind affecting society,” she stated. “I wish to create statements, not simply stunning objects or stunning fabric.”

Carmen Febles, who’s engaged on a monograph on Jimenez Underwood for the “A Ver: Revisioning Artwork Historical past” collection revealed by UCLA’s Chicano Research Analysis Middle, stated Jimenez Underwood “has labored to reveal that what may be finished on the painted canvas may be finished in fiber, and that fiber methods have so much to supply to the painterly world as properly.”

Jimenez Underwood’s first mature physique of labor, her “Heroes, Burial Shroud” collection (1989–94), is an early try to make use of kind within the service of statements. Throughout her graduate research, Jimenez Underwood did analysis on the textile holdings on the San Diego Pure Historical past Museum and have become fascinated with Incan burial shrouds she discovered there. In 1984, making ready for her transfer to San Jose, she began her personal burial shroud as a technique to mourn the three acres of land in Escondido she had lived on for a number of years. “I’ll include my grief in that,” she thought on the time. “It was an expression of who I used to be.”

She returned to the shroud kind a couple of years later, making six different shrouds in tribute to Joan of Arc, Johnny Appleseed, Woody Guthrie, Emiliano Zapata, César Chávez, and Martin Luther King Jr. Every “Burial Shroud” is measured to the peak of the individual to whom it’s devoted, and every varies to spotlight particular person personalities. The shroud for Guthrie is an nearly monochromatic design made out of pure linen: She needed it to imitate mud, a nod to the musician’s nickname because the Mud Bowl Troubadour. The Appleseed shroud borrows from the construction of an apple ladder with a colourful border, meant to counsel the panorama. The Zapata shroud is vibrant purple, to evoke the revolutionary’s bloody assassination.

After her “Burial Shrouds,” Jimenez Underwood turned her consideration to what would develop into one other career-long curiosity: the weighted and at occasions fraught symbolism of flags. “You assume threads are nothing?” she requested. “Why is it so vital in your flag then? You may’t burn it. What makes it one thing you’ll be able to’t step on? That intrigued me greater than what makes an object into artwork.”

Amongst her early flag works is Frontera Flag #1, Revolution (1993), for which she minimize up and sutured collectively simplified variations of the US and Mexico flags. The boundaries of the 2 meld into each other, suggesting the porosity of the US-Mexico border earlier than partitions had been constructed to bisect it, and the composition is encased in barbed wire.

Jimenez Underwood included barbed wire in different work across the similar time, desirous to showcase a fabric meant to divide and minimize as stunning—and to free it from itself. “It doesn’t like being barbed wire,” she stated, including that she as soon as taught her college students the right way to use barbed wire they usually took to it immediately. “The barbed wire introduced us collectively, and but it was one thing that was made to separate us.”

She continued, “I’ll cease utilizing barbed wire and speaking concerning the border when it comes down. Till then, I’ll all the time cry out: ‘What are we doing to the Borderlands?’”

Laura E. Pérez, the artwork historian, described such work as “an invite to consider the place barbed wire is in our lives—it’s not normally in a museum.” Pérez continued, “What she’s managed to do is broaden, deepen, and enrich our expertise as witnesses of what it’s to dwell with precarity, concern, hazard, and violence that’s each bodily and psychological. Now, greater than ever, what may very well be extra profound?”

IN THE ’90S, JIMENEZ UNDERWOOD MADE a five-part set up that appeared on the roots of the borders within the Americas. She had seen how the US was celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage in 1492, which largely ignored that his arrival had led to colonization and brought the land from the Indigenous individuals who had been already right here.

For a piece titled Land Grabs: 500 Years (1996), she returned to the loom that she had seen her father make way back to assemble renderings of the Americas that confirmed how colonizers seized the land, from the arrival of European powers to the Louisiana Buy and the acquisition of a lot of the Southwest following the Mexican-American Warfare. Beneath every weaving is a candle honoring the individuals who died because of colonization. The strain within the strands of fiber that loop round every nail reveals simply how fragile the colonial challenge is. “It was ‘in your face’ as a weaving,” she stated. “I used to be so indignant, and I’ve to place my anger into one thing stunning.”

Years later, in 2005, she confronted the border in an “in your face” method as soon as once more in a efficiency titled Tortilla Meets Tortilla Wall. On a visit to the border at San Diego, she put a tortilla sculpture within the Pacific Ocean as an providing to a spot that had been divided. On the time, she was engaged on a collection of works for a 2006 exhibition titled “Tortillas, Chiles and Different Border Issues” at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) in San Jose, and he or she had heard the US-Mexico border wall known as the “tortilla wall.” “How dare they!” she remembers considering, nonetheless exasperated a long time later. By way of her artwork, she determined to indicate the wonder in a meals that was being denigrated. “Exaggerate the important—that’s what van Gogh stated. What’s important to me? Chile, tortillas, my ancestors,” she stated.

Across the similar time, she made one among her most iconic works so far, Run, Jane, Run! (2004), now within the assortment of the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum. Measuring 10 toes tall, the work is vibrant yellow, like a street signal. Its scale and shade cease you in your tracks. At its middle is the phrase warning, with a picture of three figures (seemingly a father, mom, and their daughter) operating. The imagery was drawn from a collection of “immigrant crossing indicators” that the California Division of Transportation erected alongside Interstate 5 close to the US-Mexico border, and its resemblance to a deer-crossing warning was not misplaced on Jimenez Underwood. “I hated that each time I noticed it,” she stated of the indicators. “What bothered me essentially the most is all of the generations of younger individuals who see that and are going to see us like animals.” Additionally, concerning the little one: “I noticed I used to be that little lady—that was me,” she stated. “I needed the viewer to get in there and really feel that little lady run.”

Mary Savig, a Smithsonian curator who helped purchase the work, stated Run, Jane, Run! forces viewers to consider “what methods had failed folks to place them in a scenario the place they’re operating throughout six lanes of a freeway. It reminds us of everybody’s humanity.”

The form of Run, Jane, Run! resembles a rebozo, a conventional Mexican scarf famend for its delicate weaves and fringes. However within the context of the border, the rebozo additionally carried a probably perilous actuality: Ladies, primarily Indigenous ones, who wore them in border cities had been usually focused and profiled by immigration authorities.

Jimenez Underwood had made her first rebozo weaving in 2001, the diptych Rebozos de la Frontera: Dia/Noche. The calls for of her instructing didn’t permit sufficient time for her to focus totally on the intricacies of the design required for such a textile. However when a hem on her skirt got here undone someday, an answer introduced itself within the type of a security pin—tons of of which might go on to function the perimeter. On the work, she had display screen printed the “immigrant crossing indicators,” additionally held collectively by security pins. One half of the diptych is darkish blue, the opposite tannish pink. “I’ll make them the colour of the desert within the morning and within the afternoon, late nightfall and early daybreak, as a result of that’s once you cross,” she remembers considering on the time. “They’ll mix into the desert panorama, they usually’ll all the time bear in mind: Cuidado, Cuidado, Cuidado.”

THE PAST FIVE YEARS in Northern California—the primary half of her most-recent 10-year plan—have been particularly productive. “I in all probability will go to 90, however I’m going to go away it as much as the 10-year god,” she instructed me. “My dad and all of the nameless stitchers from world wide nonetheless need me to play—they get me up within the morning.” Since her residency at Artpace in San Antonio, Jimenez Underwood has been on a little bit of a science kick, plotting out weavings of the Cartwheel Galaxy and different constellations. The division between earth and area, she stated, is simply one other border.

All through our time collectively, Jimenez Underwood jogged my memory in no unsure phrases that borders—whether or not actual or imagined—have real-world implications. They have an effect on not simply folks however the natural world that dwell amongst us—as her highly effective work Damaged: 13 Undocumented Birds (2021) attests. The weaving, with squares of purple evoking blood affixed to strips of black cloth, alludes to the birds who crash into the border wall from California to Texas. At this fraught second within the US, with current ICE raids having roiled and destabilized immigrant communities throughout the nation, Jimenez Underwood’s artwork takes on an excellent stronger poignancy. Her multivalent views on the border are meant to make us rethink what arbitrary man-made traces truly imply—and to battle for higher methods of dwelling and dealing collectively. The middle of that battle is California, the place ICE has particularly focused migrant farmworkers the place Jimenez Underwood grew up and determined as a baby to teach the world by the artwork she makes. And he or she is dedicated to defending the land that she loves. “Floor Zero is California,” she stated. “I can’t go away Floor Zero.”