'A time for guerrilla DIY': how the Mexico-US border became a hub for protest art
'A time for guerrilla DIY': how the Mexico-US border became a hub for protest art
Donald Trump’s executive order to build a border wall has caused frustration and anger, but it’s also shining a light on an urgent and focused set of artists
Nadja Sayej
Monday 13 February 2017 16.50 EST
Save the rainbow and dove paintings for kindergarten art class. The new school of protest art at the Mexican-US border shows how far we have come since the Berlin Wall. Artists are using far more than just paint: they’re slapping on glow-in-the-dark stickers, building plywood treehouses and even using cello bows as forms of resistance.
By now, we all know that Donald Trump signed an executive order to start building a border wall and that Mexico is expected to foot the bill, which could run into the tens of billions. Ask any art dealer to sniff around the wall today, and they might say the artworks being made there could be worth even more.
According to Tijuana muralist Enrique Chiu, a bigger wall is just a bigger canvas for artists. The Los Angeles arts journalist Ed Fuentes says painting this wall could be a sequel to the Mexican mural movement of the 1970s.
“The wall may introduce new forms of graffiti,” said Fuentes. “It might have typography by poets and writers speaking for themselves, or others using the wall like a journal to document elegant defiance to a political barrier.”
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/feb/13/mexico-us-border-wall-art-protest