The MexiCali Biennial is a non-profit contemporary visual arts organization which focuses on the area encompassing California and Mexico as a region of aesthetic production. The organization is migratory in nature and showcases exhibitions on both sides of the California/Mexico border. The MexiCali Biennial was originally started as a project critiquing the proliferation of international and regional art biennials and as a result may be shown at any time and at any location. The inaugural exhibition was in 2006 and subsequent programming occurred in the years spanning 2009 through 2010, 2013, 2018 through 2019, and 2022 through 2023. The next Biennial is scheduled for 2026.
The curatorial theme of MexiCali Biennial 2026 will be PARA/normal Borders. This exhibition proposes the combined regions of California and Mexico as a supernatural zone. It will invite artists to reflect on physical and metaphorical borders as “thin places,” as sites where the veil between this world and another is porous. The program will provide a platform for conversations about the roles of art, philosophy, spirituality, and the supernatural as tools to creatively approach grief and recovery in a post-COVID world. MXCL BNL LAB, with locales in Whittier and Calexico, will inaugurate the PARA/normal Borders Lab, an experimental arts and culture research project in Fall 2024. This creative “lab” will precede and inform the 2026 MexiCali Biennial. PARA/normal Borders will take place at Cheech Center for Chicano Art & Culture (Riverside, CA), both MXCL BNL LAB locations, Steppling Art Gallery (SDSU Imperial Valley Campus) and select arts institutions in Mexicali.
The MexiCali Biennial was conceived in 2006 by artists Ed Gomez and Luis G. Hernandez. The inaugural round of programming first took place at La Casa de la Tia Tina, an artist-run space on the border town of Mexicali, MX, before traveling to Chavez Studios in East Los Angeles. Participating artists exhibited both within the walls of the gallery and at the U.S.-Mexico border wall, which is a potential readymade in and of itself. For the exhibition, the Biennial invited artists to transform the rustic space using humble materials, procured from home and Home Depot. The make-do aesthetic and curatorial practice established in 2006 endures in subsequent iterations of the Biennial. Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, and Pilar Tompkins-Rivas curated the exhibition.
Due to the nature of the Biennial’s programming, the second series of exhibitions didn’t occur until 2009 through 2010, taking place at four exhibition spaces in both Mexico and California. Participating artists explored many themes that defined the inaugural 2006 program, including constructions of race, nationalism, and identity. Violence and the language of violence (the program catalogue referred to the borderlands region as the “bleed” between Baja California and California) also permeated numerous works; several artists dealt directly with drug violence, especially selections for the Tijuana program at La Casa del Túnel, an independent art space located in a building where narco-traffickers had once constructed an underground tunnel for smuggling drugs and weapons into the U.S. Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, and Amy Pederson Converse curated the exhibition.
Co-curator Dr. Amy Pederson-Converse conceived of the theme Cannibalism in the New World for the 2013 MexiCali Biennial. For this series of exhibitions, the curators identified cannibalism as a means of generating a new model for avant-garde artistic practice, opening up radical new spaces in art for bodies and their environmental interactions in opposition to hegemonic Western cultural systems. Cannibalism in the New World explored the ways in which artists of la frontera consume, digest, and subsume hegemonic aesthetics and ideologies to sublimate artistic practices from the cultural centers of the global art world to its periphery. Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, and Amy Pederson Converse curated the exhibition.
The curatorial theme of the 2018/2019 MexiCali Biennial, CALAFIA: Manifesting the Terrestrial Paradise, explored the mythology, etymology, and iconography surrounding the Californias, both north and south of the border. The exhibition focused on the mythological Black female warrior queen of California, Calafia, as a source of inspiration and artistic departure. This iteration of the Biennial sought to subvert colonial conceptions of Las Californias by inviting artists to reflect on the structures of knowledge, religious and gender iconographies, and practices of demarcating borders that have shaped the art and culture of California and Baja California. Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, Daniela Lieja Quintanar, and April Lillard-Gomez curated the exhibition.
The 2022/2023 MexiCali Biennial, titled Land of Milk & Honey, drew inspiration from author John Steinbeck’s portrayal of California as a corrupted Eden, exploring ethical, cultural, and regional practices related to foodways and the venture from seed to table. The exhibition interrogated the historical promotion of California as a land of opportunity, or terra firma, which would provide sustenance and abundance to climate refugees, ultimately resulting in land grabs, ecological destruction, and the proliferation of social injustices. Artists explored themes of agriculture, labor, and ecology through engagement with a variety of topics: environmental impacts, culinary traditions, identity and migration, Indigenous agro-spiritualities, and mythical connections to food. In his review of the exhibition for the Los Angeles Times, Christopher Knight wrote that Land of Milk & Honey frames California as “part fertile and utopian paradise, part huckster marketing dystopia. Sometimes the milk is sweet, sometimes curdled; the honey fragrant or rancid.” Ed Gomez, Luis G. Hernandez, April Lillard-Gomez, Rosalía Romero, and Enid Baxter Ryce curated the exhibition.
Please visit the ARCHIVES page for more information on each iteration of the MB.
For additional info contact: info@mexicalibiennial.org
