Sun 7/21-Sun 1/5/25
Anyone who’s paid even passing attention to the current affairs knows that “the border,” meaning the area where the U.S. abuts Mexico, has been used as a political football, blamed for all sorts of issues including crime, job loss and even, laughably, illegal voting, which simply doesn’t occur.
Amid all the political posturing about “the border! the border!” the Cleveland Museum of Art is opening a new photography show in its Mark Schwartz and Bettina Katz Photography Galleries called Picturing the Border, and of course it looks a nothing like the rhetoric uses to demonize the mostly law-abiding hard-working people there. It shows us the much-maligned demarcation between Mexico and the U.S. from the 1970s to today, with photos taken by residents and outsiders, most of them Latino, Chicano or Mexican. Some of the images are intimate, humanizing portraits of the individuals while others focus on protests and clashes at the border. The show offers a story of continuity in border issues over decades, giving context for the exaggerated, negative, and often flat-out wrong claims being made today about the southern border. Crime, for instance, is lower in border cities than in most American cities.
It will be on view through January 5, 2025
clevelandart.org/exhibitions/picturing-border
Cleveland, OH 44106