TANYA AGUINIGA

Tanya Aguiñiga was born in 1978 in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. An artist,designer, and craftsperson, Aguiñiga works with traditional craft materials like naturalfibers andcollaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, andcommunity-based art projects. Drawing on her upbringing as a binational citizen, who daily crossedthe border from Tijuana to San Diego for school, Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experienceof her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnationalcommunity.Aguiñiga began her career by creating collaborative installations with the Border ArtWorkshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, an artist collective that addressed political and human rightsissues at the U.S.-Mexico border. The artist co-built and for six years ran a community center inTijuana, aimed at bringing attention through arts initiatives to injustices that the local communityfaced. Aguiñiga has maintained this spirit of activism and community collaboration throughout hercareer, going on to create many performances and installations that involve the participation ofother artists, activists, and community members. In her installations, furniture, and wearabledesigns, Aguiñiga often works with cotton, wool, and other textiles, drawing upon Mesoamericanweaving and traditional forms. In 2016, in response to the deep polarization about the U.S.-Mexicoborder, Aguiñiga created AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series ofprojects that provides a platform for binational artists. Her inaugural AMBOS project,Border Quipu,used brightly colored strands of fabric to create quipu—an Andean pre-Columbian organizationalsystem—that recorded the daily commutes to and from the United States.

Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA fromSan Diego State University. She is a United States Artists Target Fellow in thefield of crafts andtraditional arts, a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures awardee, Creative Capital grantawardee, and a recipient of an Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists TransformingCommunities. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum,Washington, DC (2018); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); among others. Her work hasbeen included in exhibitions at Annenberg Space for Photography (2019) and Craft and Folk ArtMuseum, Los Angeles (2018), among others. Aguiñiga lives in Los Angeles, California.