Tanya Aguiñiga’s “Weighted” Confronts the Politics of the Border Wall

Tanya Aguiñiga crossed the U.S.-Mexico border every day for 14 years. Born in San Diego and raised in Tijuana, the artist, activist, and educator has spent decades unpacking what that movement meant—for the body, for belonging, for identity. “Weighted,” her first solo show in New York, is now on view at Albertz Benda through June 21 and features more than 20 textile works made of cotton rope, flax, copper, stone, and clay. The materials are charged, historical, and symbolic. So are the bodies they represent: border bodies, femme bodies, Black, brown, Indigenous, trans, and nonbinary bodies.

Dyed with cochineal or climbing toward the scale of 30-foot border walls, Aguiñiga’s works carry weight in every sense. Cochineal is a red pigment derived from a small insect native to what is now the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico. Only female cochineals produce the pink-red dye—by dying themselves. When Spanish colonizers discovered its power, they renamed it la grana cochinilla to obscure its origin and sold it globally, where it eventually surpassed silver in value. 

In Aguiñiga’s work, the pigment is not only a color but a record of erasure, exploitation, and change. It speaks to code-switching and border-crossing, to the commodification of female bodies and the refusal to be flattened. For Aguiñiga, the cochineal is a “borderless femme body,” a symbol of endurance and resistance, hidden in plain sight.

You crossed the U.S.-Mexico border for 14 years as a child. How has that physical experience shaped the way you think about bodies, borders, and belonging in your art?

Tanya Aguiñiga: Having to see the way that governments divide, exclude and harm people based on color and citizenship status daily at the border changed every part of my being. I experienced the fear and desperation on one side of the border and then the blatant denial of abuse on the other side every day. It is hard to not have such opposites shape the way that you navigate life, when you are actively part of both U.S. and Mexican societies. There is a constant code switching and search for safe harbors in your day. These feelings continue to shape how I make work, why I make it and who I make it for.

Growing up between cultures, when did you first realize that craft could become a language for your experience?

Aguiñiga: I first realized craft could help translate my emotional experiences when I started paying attention to how materials could capture our body’s direct engagement with a material, like fingerprints on clay and tension in weave structures.  

“Weighted” feels like such a personal yet collective body of work. Was there a specific moment that sparked the idea?

Aguiñiga: I started working on these pieces thinking of how the experiences that we each face are insurmountable for one human to carry, and so there is the need for us to collectively share the load in order to survive.

How did you choose materials like cotton, flax, copper, stone, and clay?

Aguiñiga: I love working with cotton rope, and collaborating with it to add dimension, texture and meaning while still referencing something that we as humans have had long histories with. The flax is for me, a stand-in for human and animal hair. I like the way that it tricks the mind and makes us uncomfortable even though it is a plant. It is what linen is made of, and this is how the structure looks before it is spun. I like exposing our connections to the natural world, how we have worked with it in the past and current world, and thinking about unseen labor (and through this, issues of migration). The clay is a way for me to make skins and obscure, and also to pay homage to the use of terracotta and low fire clays in the Global South. Natural materials and things that grow inside and on top of the earth help me try to heal and reconnect in a society that looks to constantly uproot my loved ones. 

What drew you to work with cochineal dye and its feminist/historical resonance?

Aguiñiga: From my first encounter with cochineal in Oaxaca, I became obsessed with sharing with others its expansive history and power as the world’s first true red pigment. Its connection to funding colonization, its sequestration and life as a commodified “crop,” the technological advancement of Zapotec people domesticating the bug, and the fact that it all carmine producing cochineals are females, and, the fact that they live all over the Southwestern United States and no one knows it make the cochineal an incredible borderless femme body that teaches us everyday. She is a touchstone for me, of place, of culture and a reminder of the power of the natural world to help us transcend harmful human constructs. 

The ladders are haunting. What conversations do you hope they start?

Aguiñiga: I hope that the ladders help create more public awareness of the increased amounts of morbidity and serious injury that a 30 foot high border wall has created. It is the first time that the border wall itself has been the cause of death rather than just a deterrent to migration. I believe it is a huge human rights issue that no one is talking about. Here’s a link to the Journal of the American Medical Association’s study. I hope that we can gather momentum to take civic action one day against causing harm to people in need of aid.

What’s one thing you hope visitors carry with them after experiencing “Weighted”?

Aguiñiga: I hope that they can imagine themselves being held in different crevices of the weavings, that they can feel a sense of protection and empowerment from the pieces, that they can feel a connection to the earth and collective care, and that they remember that art has a great power to connect, inspire and heal. 

“Weighted” is now on view at Albertz Benda through June 21.

Featured image: Tanya Aguiñiga, Buganvilla en el circo, 2025. Cochinilla-dyed cotton rope and synthetic hair, 112 × 36 × 24 in. (284.5 × 91.4 × 61 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and Albertz Benda NY | LA, Photography by Julian Calero.