On May 23rd, 2021 the first “Border Crossers” Performance was presented at the U.S.-Mexico border at Naco, Arizona / Naco Sonora. Scroll down to watch a recording of the live streaming.

This was the first of a series of “Border Crossers” Performances organized in collaboration with the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts in El Paso. The Rubin Center will present a series of "Border Crossers" performances at the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez border in October/November 2021. A solo exhibition of drawings and other works by Chico MacMurtrie will open on September 16th, 2021 at the Rubin Center in El Paso.

I grew up in an Irish-Mexican household in Bisbee, Arizona, and went to grade school in the nearby border town of Naco. My mother would take us to visit relatives in Mexico monthly, and many of my Mexican friends would come to school each day through a hole in the chain-link border fence. Growing up speaking Spanish put me in an interesting position of being able to mediate conflicts between Mexican and American kids. Returning to this region each year as an adult, I still admire the stark beauty of the landscape, but I hate the scar that has marred it in the form of a rusty metal barricade. I have often contemplated how I might respond as an artist to this literal and metaphorical construction. I came to see the U.S.-Mexico border as a ‘theater of the real,’ a realm shaped by representations as much as physical conditions and processes. Ten years ago, I conceived a series of inflatable performing machines that could scale the border wall without touching it and form a magnificent arch spanning the fence from each side. 

- Chico MacMurtrie

Watch a 3-minute video edit of the first “Border Crossers” Performance by clicking on the video below:

Watch a recording of the live stream of the Border Crossers performance on youtube by clicking on the link below.

The Border Crossers project has received significant financial support from the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, University of Texas at El Paso, .BEEP { collection;} the Guggenheim Fellowship, MAPfund, and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

MacMurtrie was invited to conduct Border Crosser building workshops as a visiting professor/artist in residency at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities in 2018 and at the University of Applied Arts (Angewandte) in Vienna in 2018/2019 with the support of Q21 at the MuseumsQuartier. He has further received support from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA).

The Border Crossers project has further received major support from Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York; Liberty Science Center (LSC) in New Jersey, Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery, School of Art+Design, Purchase College, SUNY; Muffathalle, Munich; Radialsystem, Berlin, El Centro Community Center, Naco, Arizona; Ayuntamiento de Naco, Sonora; U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.

The first Border Crosser prototype was presented at the City Hall Plaza in San José in 2016 by ZERO1, in collaboration with the City of San José Office of Cultural Affairs, the Lucas Artists Programs at Montalvo Arts Center, and Arizona State University Art Museum and Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, and supported by a generous in-kind donation of Dyneema® high tensile composite fabric.