Visting Artist and Scholar Lecture Series: Jenea Sanchez and Gabriela Muñoz of Fronterizx Collective: Building Power Through Transnational Collaboration

Please join us for the next guest artist lecture with Jenea Sanchez & Gabriela Muñoz of Fronterizx Collective.

Jenea Sanchez and Gabriela Muñoz of Fronterizx Collective began working together in 2009. Their practice is rooted in their experiences as women of color who grew up in the liminal culture between Mexico and the United States. Their projects and collaborations uplift the labor of women and center movements of social justice and racial equity. From their first project, weaving a site-specific community offering into the US/Mexico border fence titled Tapiz Fronteriza de La Virgen de Guadalupe, they have collaborated with borderlands communities in the creation of nourishing spaces that provide opportunities to make visible the abundance and creativity found in the borderlands. Through skill-sharing and mutual aid, Fronterizx Collective develops projects and artworks that center the experiences of women of color and explore issues of power, labor, and transnational feminisms. Their social practice centers participatory budgeting and program design processes. They work in video, printmaking, paper-making, installation, performance, sculpture and socially engaged practice that centers community voices. 

They are recipients of the 2024 United States Artist Fellowship, the 2023 Phoenix Art Museum’s Scult Award, the 2020–2021 NALAC Catalyst for Change Award, the 2019–2020 Mellon-Fronteridades Creative Scholar Fellowship at the UofA’s Confluencenter. Their work has been exhibited internationally at the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, Phoenix Art Museum, MOCA Tucson, the Barrick Museum of Art, The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the University of Arizona Art Museum, Juniata Museum of Art, the Mexican Consulate in Douglas, and the United States/México border fence, among others. In 2024, their work will be featured in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture.

Jenea was born and raised in Douglas, AZ/Agua Prieta, Sonora. Her multidisciplinary practice explores notions of borders and the ways in which the fronterizx’s occupy, cross and imagine liminal spaces. She is co-founder of Border Arts Corridor (BAC), a nonprofit arts organization providing the borderlands community an immersive arts district through bi-national artwalks, workshops, performances, public dialogues, and artist residencies. 

Gabriela was born and raised in Chihuahua and lived in Arizona, undocumented, for more than a decade. Her work as an arts administrator focuses on the equitable liberation of resources. Her installations, printed works and collaborations function as a growing archive documenting the lives of women of color and the spaces where they build a counternarrative that values power-sharing, peer-to-peer learning and horizontal leadership models in the borderlands.

This lecture is sponsored by the School of Art and the Humanities Institute.