A long horizontal scene places a group of nine women at the center of a charged Mexican - U.S. border landscape. Tall rust-brown steel slats rise behind them, but the barrier is not shown as fixed or invincible. Several women grasp metal poles and broken pieces of the wall, pulling and levering them apart. They stand alert, calm, and determined. American artist Erin Currier gives each figure presence and individuality through patterned dresses, shawls, jewelry, braids, and dark hair gathered or falling loose. Skin tones range across warm browns, and the women stand close enough to read as a collective rather than as isolated portraits. The surface is layered with collage and painted detail, so that fragments of printed paper and found material seem embedded into the clothing, fence, and barren land itself. The color is vivid and sunlit, but the mood is not carefree. It is purposeful, communal, and resolute. The painting’s meaning becomes clearer when read through Currier’s larger “La Frontera” project. She has described that series as confronting not only the physical U.S.-Mexico border, but also the social and economic borders that divide people by race and class. Here, the women do not merely endure the wall. They actively unmake it. That shift matters. Currier turns a wall associated with surveillance, exclusion, and state power into something human hands can dismantle. Her art often identifies Indigenous women on both sides of the border and stresses that national boundaries are imposed lines across lands inhabited for millennia. Her collage method deepens the symbolism as she gathers post-consumer waste and ephemera during travel, then rebuilds those discarded materials into images like this of solidarity, memory, and resistance. “American Women (Dismantling the Border)” is not only a protest image. It is a visionary painting about kinship, Indigenous continuity, women’s collective action, and the possibility of remaking the Americas on more humane terms.
“American Women (Dismantling the Border)” by Erin Currier (American) - Acrylic and mixed media on panel / 2016 - Harwood Museum of Art (Taos, New Mexico) #WomenInArt #ErinCurrier #Currier #HarwoodMuseum #ContemporaryArt #BorderArt #artText #art #AmericanArt #americanartist #womenartists #WomensArt
