Exposing Unseen Boundaries: Works by Consuelo Jimenez Underwood

photo credit: James Dewrance

The Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender at Brown University is pleased to welcome artist Consuelo Jimenez Underwood from October 3rd through 8th, 2019. During her visit, she will work with student artists to install Exposing Unseen Boundaries, which will be on exhibition at the Sarah Doyle Center from October 7, 2019 through May 23, 2020.

She will give a public lecture on Monday, October 7, 2019 at 6 p.m. in Room 201 of the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center at Brown University (75 Waterman Street, Providence, RI). For details click on this link.

The opening reception for the exhibition is immediately following her lecture at 7:30 p.m. in the Sarah Doyle Center at Brown University (26 Benevolent Street, Providence, RI). For details click on this link.

Exhibit Statement | In Exposing Unseen Boundaries, artist Consuelo Jimenez Underwood weaves narratives of the U.S./Mexico border and its effect on people, communities, and the natural environment. Her artwork transports viewers to the mystical threshold between the void and the mundane, exposing the unseen boundaries of the borderlands and the hope for a future filled with flowers and song. This exhibition includes “The Brown-Violet Borderline.”  This is one of a series of Underwood’s “Borderlines” wall installations, which she has created at museums and cultural institutions across the country. Brown University students and local Rhode Island middle school students helped create some of the elements embedded in this piece. In “Apocalyptic Rain Song,” a new site-specific installation, the artist asks viewers to contribute a song of healing, which will be added to this piece throughout the year. Underwood shares additional sculptural, print, and performance work that highlights her use of art to focus on and document the impact of borders and boundaries.

Exposing Unseen Boundaries is a culmination of a week-long artist residency supported by the Institute for Transformative Practice (ITP) whose 2019-2020 theme is “Crossing Borders, Unsettling Boundaries.”

photo credit: William Atkins / The George Washington University

Artist Bio | Fiber artist and weaver Consuelo Jimenez Underwood has exhibited and lectured nationally and internationally for more than twenty-five years. She was born in Sacramento, California and is the daughter of migrant agricultural workers — a Chicana mother and a father of Huichol Indian descent. Her work is an external validation of ancestral memory, personal quest, and border experiences — the interconnectedness of societies, insisting on beauty in struggle, and celebrating the notion of “seeing” this world through her tri-cultural lens.  Her large-scale fiber art is inspired in equal measures by land, politics and Spirit.

Underwood’s art is part of permanent collections in museums such as the Smithsonian American Museum of Art, Museum of Art & Design in New York, the National Hispanic Center for the Arts, New Mexico, the Mexican Museum in San Francisco and the Oakland Museum of California. She received her BA and her MA from San Diego State University in 1981. She began teaching fiber art at San Jose State University in 1987, where she received her MFA. Now retired, she has taught for more than twenty years and continues to inspire young artists to take up the thread.

Sponsors | This artist in residency was organized by the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender at Brown University and received generous support from the following: