“Liminality is a Solid Place”, a group exhibition showcasing the work of five Juárez-based artists and 6 artists from New York with personal ties to the US-Mexico border area, opens in New York.

Kates-Ferri Projects and Azul Arena are proud to announce, “Liminality is a Solid Place”, a show that brings together a group of five artists working from the US-Mexico border and six New York-based artists with personal ties to the border region. The exhibition will take place in the Lower East Side of New York City, at Kates-Ferri projects from October 10 to November 2, 2024. An opening reception will be held Friday, October 11, at 6 pm at 561 Grand St, New York from 6-8 pm.

The exhibition, curated by New York-based, El Paso native artist Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip and Edgar Picazo Merino, creative director of the Juárez art space Azul Arena, parts from depictions of the border as a liminal place, questioning the idea of the region as a merely transitional phenomenon and focusing on the real, lived experience of millions of borderlanders that call, or have called, the area home. 

Although certain aspects of life at the border can be assumed as transitional, thinking of a place as liminal reduces the experience of its inhabitants to an abstract idea, stripping it of substance and creating a void that allows external voices to assign controversial preconceptions to the collective imaginary of the place.

The majority of the work shown goes beyond image-based artwork, which in the past years has been the prominent media to portray the border, and includes ceramics, jewelry, installation, painting, risograph, among others, touching on ideas such as landscape, memory, gender, and natural and social relationships. The border is represented in a variety of degrees, working as a common background that brings the artists together without completely defining them or their work. 

Participating artists: Cassandra Adame, Alonso Robles, Mariana Ajo, Itzel Alejandra, Daniel Barragan, Troy Montes Mitchie, Carlos Rosales-Silva, Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip, Haydee Alonso, Israel Gómez, and Astrid Terrazas.

About the Curators:

Edgar Picazo Merino is a cultural worker from the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso border region. As an artist, writer, curator, and producer, his area of work and research is the ethical representation of border identities and issues in the arts. He has extensively collaborated with local, regional, and international artists, organizations, and institutions in a wide range of initiatives, including exhibitions, publications, and multi-disciplinary projects.
In 2018, he founded the non-profit arts organization Azul Arena dedicated to promoting the artistic and cultural production of the border region, for which he is currently director. Since 2023, the organization has been operating from a brick-and-mortar art center in Ciudad Juárez, for which Picazo serves as creative director.

Eric Santoscoy-Mckillip is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He was born in 1989 and raised in the U.S./Mexico borderland city of El Paso, Texas. Eric earned a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, in 2011, a Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2015 focusing on art education and border studies, and a MFA in Fine Art from the New York University in 2017. He has show in Texas, New Mexico, Florida, Ohio, Tennessee and New York. Most recently his work was included in the 2024 Border Biennial / Bienal Fronteriza at the El Paso Museum of Art and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juarez.

Available Art Work from Exhibition 

Video of exhibition on YouTube