Stories of migration, refugees and human rights are frequently in the news, but they rarely focus on Central America. A new exhibition at Krannert Art Museum looks at those issues as they relate to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – a region known as the Northern Triangle.
The exhibition, titled “Northern Triangle,” opened Aug. 26 and runs through Dec. 22. It was originally commissioned by Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio in response to a migration crisis in 2014, when 68,000 unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle countries were taken into custody trying to cross into the U.S. at the Mexican border. The exhibition examines the visual representations of the region, and it goes beyond the migration crisis to look at the history of U.S. intervention there.
Members of Borderland Collective – Reed, Duganne, Menjivar and artist Adriana Corral – will be at the U. of I. for a three-day residency Oct. 5-7. They’ll participate in a dinner workshop at La Casa Cultural Latina from 6 to 8 p.m. on Oct. 5. Corral will be part of a lunch discussion at La Casa on Oct. 6, and Reed, Duganne and Menjivar will give an artist talk at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 6 at Krannert Art Museum.
In addition to the Borderland Collective residency, a second artist residency Oct. 26-28 will host Jen Hofer and Gelare Khoshgozaran of Antena, a collaborative project that looks critically at language and how art and social justice work are linked. La Casa Cultural Latina will host a dinner conversation from 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 26 with Hofer, a poet, and Khoshgozaran, an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Hofer will give a brown bag lunch workshop at noon Oct. 27 hosted by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at Levis Faculty Center. Hofer and Khoshgozaran will give an artist talk at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 27 at Krannert Art Museum.