Photos now on view at the Annenberg Space for Photography: W|ALLS: Defend, Divide and the Divine (Oct 5-Dec 29, 2019)

Last week was a really special one for me. Photographs I took during a 3 year period at the US/Mexico border (spanning from California through Texas) with AMBOS Project and Tanya Aguiñiga opened in a new exhibit W|ALLS: Defend, Divide and the Divine at the Annenberg Space for Photography.

Complex, challenging, and immersive, W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine is a historical look at civilization’s relationship with barriers, both real and imagined. For centuries, across diverse civilizations, walls have been central to human history. This exhibit explores the various aspects of walls – artistic, social, political, and historical – in six sections: Delineation, Defense, Deterrent, The Divine, Decoration, and The Invisible. These categories overlap and change meaning according to context, much like the walls themselves: erected for one reason, their appearance and use is then altered and modified over centuries, reflecting the civilizations that have grown and changed around them.

Featuring over 70 artists and photographers, W|ALLS invites guests to contemplate how these structures – from the decorative to the divine – affect the human psyche and why we keep building them. The show is curated by Dr. Jen Sudul Edwards, the Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.