RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT TUCSON’S YA HECHO ART EXHIBIT

Tucson Museum of Art Highlights Borderland Latino Art–Ya Hecho: Readymade in the Borderlands.

Ya Hecho: Readymade in the Borderlands, an exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block, reflects the intersections of art, place, material culture, and lived experience.  The prolonged  U.S. government shutdown and disrupted airline flights prevented me from seeing the show. However, thanks to my good Los Angeles friend Jesus Treviño, publisher of Latinopia, who provided me with the catalog and excellent photos, I can present the exhibit to my readers.

In an excellent explanation of where the original  inspiration for Ya Hecho or Readymade came from,  art critic Christine C. Brindza  wrote in the exhibit catalog that  “past and present concepts of the readymade form [are] most often associated with Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), whose use of everyday, prefabricated objects challenged traditional notions of art and was an act of resistance– an idea that carries through in today’s contemporary representations, especially present in the Ya Hecho exhibition.”

Brindza reminds us that it was a porcelain urinal (Fountain, 1917) that “presented the biggest challenge to the traditional ideas of art and craftsmanship of its time.”  I recalled seeing Duchamp’s urinal in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art some years ago. Duchamp did not sign his name to the urinal with the intention of challenging “the notion of the role of the artist in the physical act of creation.”  Most importantly, Brindza tells us, using a urinal “as a sculpture also changed the perception of what could be considered art.”

In a prologue to the Ya Hecho catalog, Guest Curator Rigoberto Luna discussed how the “visual language of the border can be derived in spaces like flea markets, produce markets, secondhand shops, scrap yards that are not just commercial spaces but cultural institutions as significant and culturally relevant as a panaderia, the molino, the tortillería, or local botanica.”  Of course, these cultural institutions exist beyond the border, in small and large towns of Mexico and in small and large towns of the U.S. Southwest. What makes our borderland visual language distinct from that of Mexico City botanicas is related to American cultural influences. Thus, our Latino art in the Borderlands–Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona is neither Mexican nor American–it is a bit of both and distinguished by its bilingual-bicultural element.

Latino poet and cultural disruptor,  Guillermo Gómez-Peña, offered another perspective in the catalog, arguing that the border is “a place of recycling of cultures, identities, and languages— a site where nothing is thrown away but everything is transformed.” This cultural deconstruction is instructive and leads us to the discussion of the term “rasquache sensibility.”  Luna argues that artists in Ya Hecho generate a new visual language when they “mobilize what the dominant culture deems discardable surplus and material that carries lived experiences embedded in the borderlands.”

Artists in this exhibit, such as Margarita Cabrera, construct nopal plant sculptures from discarded Border Patrol uniforms as examples of the borderland experience.  Cabrera notes that her “work centers on social-political community issues, including cultural identity, migration, violence, inclusivity, labor, and empowerment.”  She has created sculptures made of steel, copper, wood, ceramics, and fabric.  Cabrera likes to take her artwork to a higher level, revealing that her “emphasis is on creating a social consciousness through art, generating solutions to these problems, and empowering members of highly diverse communities.”

Most of the artists in the exhibit are from the Borderlands. Luna suggested that for these artists of Ya Hecho, “living and creating with a border identity means grappling with layers of displacement and connection that are felt most intensely when crossing physical and political borders.” The border has undergone significant changes over the past year.  Reports from the Border Patrol show a substantial drop in “encounters” from October 2024 to the same month of 2025.  No doubt, ICE is scaring many would-be migrants from crossing into the U.S. Thus, while the border-crossing encounters a year ago stood at an estimated 150,000 for one month, this year they had dropped to 30,000, an 80 percent decrease.

Although many of the artists in the Ya Hecho exhibit may challenge the traditional notion of art, there is more than the concept of “readymade” in this exhibit.  Rigoberto Luna seeks to introduce us to borderland images, constructed rather than readymade. For example, Luna introduced the New Mexican artist Vicente Telles to Texas audiences several years ago.

Thanks to Luna, Telles is the artist in the Ya Hecho exhibit with whom I am most familiar. Harriett and I have attended his solo openings in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and San Antonio. In 2025, Telles notably became a finalist for the National Portrait Gallery’s prestigious Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, marking the first time a born-and-bred New Mexican santero has been featured in the triennial American Portraiture Today exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution.

Telles’s sculpture, “A Sacred Game,” falls between the categories of readymade and rasquachismo.  According to Telles, “Growing up the game of basketball was omnipresent, but the courts and gyms were not. Rather than be deterred, we neighborhood kids would make our own baskets/hoops from whatever materials we could, just so we could play.”  His adaptation of the basketball backboard with the hoop and net offers a borderland modification.  The “readymade” in this art piece is the American-manufactured metal hoop and nylon cord net, and the improvised component is the the weathered wooded backboard. His creative talents as a santero artist are evident in the elaborate hand-carved frame of the basketball backboard.

Telles is a native of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is best known as a Santero [painter of saints] and a cultural iconographer with a strong devotion to honoring the culture and traditions of his native New Mexico.  Much of his artistic creativity has been influenced by the traditional New Mexico santeros, yet over the last decade, his style has evolved to include various reinterpretations of traditional Catholic and Cultural iconography. To Telles, being a Santero and Cultural Iconographer is so much more than being an artist.

Sophia Mayorga, also in the Ya Hecho exhibit, is a Tucson-based multidisciplinary artist and art educator with over 15 years of professional experience in the arts. She obtained her BFA in Art and Visual Culture Education and her teaching certificate through the University of Arizona.  Although she considers herself  a professional artist, she is also the owner of Galeria Mitotera, a community-focused art space dedicated to “celebrating Chicanx culture and uplifting artists of color.” Her artistic practice is deeply exploratory, using a variety of materials to examine themes of identity, culture, nature, and decay.

Mayorga wrote in the exhibit catalog that her painting in the exhibit “Don’t You Feel Like Crying?”  is a love letter to her family and the land.  She explained, “As a child of an immigrant, we always had two homes, one in Mexico and one in so-called America, but neither felt like home. Between the constant back and forth, it was difficult to establish any roots.” We learn from her artist’s statement that she never felt “any real connection to the land, traditions, and its peoples.”   She constantly experienced  “a disconnect and an uncertainty of how to navigate life as an individual.”   In her art piece in the exhibit, she addressed her profound sadness, “because if we consider the theft, exploitation, destruction, and colonization of the land, it should bring you to tears.”

In the Ya Hecho: Readymade in the Borderlands exhibit, Luna reminds us that we inherit a visual language grounded in necessity and ingenuity. Living in the Borderlands necessitates learning the value of making do, repurposing, reinventing, and resisting waste.

Latinos have been living in the borderlands since the settlement of San Juan de Caballero, a New Mexico village founded in 1598. When distances made material supplies and food goods difficult to acquire from colonial Mexico City, the New Mexicans, and soon after the Tejanos and Californios, made their own material goods, added their paintings to their houses of worship, and grew their own food. The beginning of borderland social and cultural adaptation began four centuries ago, and perhaps earlier.

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Copyright 2025 by Ricardo Romo. All photo credits as indicated.