Curated by Orlando Ochoa, Jr. and Isabel Saavedra-Weis.

Visit the exhibition at 20 Cooper Square, 3rd Floor Gallery, through December 10 (Tuesday-Friday, 11am-5pm). The exhibition is free and open to the public. Click here to register.

Ships, buses, suitcases, and maps are sites and symbols of mobility that raise a series of questions: Where are the people they transport going? Why are they being taken? Will they arrive? What did they leave behind? What did they bring with them? Crossing Relations: Migrations and Possible Worlds speaks to the experiences and relations of people on the move, as well as the violent structures that dismember ties between family, homelands, and self-identity. This exhibition becomes a space to re-stage connections that were denied during the act of crossing. By reaching out towards that which no longer exists, the artists imagine and inhabit a place and time where their communities can come together anew. 

Featuring works by seven artists from Colombia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and regions of the United States, the exhibition centers personal and familial accounts of desire, loss, and refusal in the contexts of migration, dispossession, and diaspora. Juana Estrada Hernández’s Nuestra Historia lithograph series encapsulates these stories in the context of undocumented migration. Kevin Quiles Bonilla documents his first time on an airplane from Puerto Rico to the United States in his islotes series, using sand to make mounds of land on family photos as if looking down at little islands from an aerial view. The tapestries of Johana Moscoso reflect acts of belonging and accompaniment, featuring street dogs and cats she has adopted in her new home. The representation of ships and sea in Juana Valdés’s The Journey Within draws attention to histories and processes of colonialism and slavery that shape contemporary migrations and diasporas. Together, the artists inaugurate their own geographic practices that revere the flow of spirit and water, as Chelsea Ramírez’s River Echo, you & i & i & i does; and honor and remember the dead, as Paola de la Calle performs through her suitcase-memento sculpture, Envios/Encargos. Their works, like the marks on Victoria Martinez’s alternative map guides, are in constant motion, asking us to consider the radical possibility that movement might open up.

Compositionally, these works incorporate and intermingle mediums; the sand, calling cards, plants, and family photos repurposed by the artists draw attention to forms of belonging, kinship, and intimacy that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state. The artists in Crossing Relations remember those who came before them to dream of modes of living where itinerancy and connection with others are not constrained. 

—Orlando Ochoa, Jr. and Isabel Saavedra-Weis