A Moveable Feast That’s Expanding our Understanding of Cultures

The word “biennial” in relation to the art world may conjure up many images: enormous exhibition halls in Venice or Miami, large-scale pieces crafted from inconceivable resources, celebrity artists mingling with just-as-famous collectors. One may not visualize a street vendor furiously scraping a frozen block for snow cones under a blazing midday sun in a park in Mexico adjacent to the US border. But this performance of Raspado (Abolish ICE/Abolir ICE) by Annabel Turrado is one of many pieces curated by the MexiCali Biennial that confronts the tension that exists between two states of existence.   

The creators of the unconventional and maverick exposition program have always been conscious of the nebulous lines that separate people. When co-founder and curator Ed Gomez launched the exhibition series in 2006 with his colleague Luis G. Hernandez, they imagined an antithesis to the international biennials that the two artists had been locked out of.

Gomez and Hernandez finished graduate school together at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, bonded by the shared experience of being Latinx artists blocked from opportunities of experimentation and exhibition, locally and internationally.

Understanding that another large multinational exhibition in a flooded commercial art market did not serve their community’s motivation for cultural and political expression, they sought to craft a unique grassroots consortium for complex probes into identity, geography, and nationalism. Since its inception, several iterations of the MexiCali Biennial have been hosted in locations spanning the border region, fostering what Gomez calls “a platform for bi-national exchange.”

“For us it was a way to insert ourselves into that dialogue and then create the critique from the inside and really play with how the word ‘biennial’ was already understood in the art world,” Gomez recalls. “By doing that, we found ways to create an alternative to subvert that model with no money, no funding.”  

Resourceful and unconstrained, early designs for the Biennial were shaped by artists—a coterie that included creatives from both the United States and Mexico, and whose expansive perspectives invited an examination of the meaning and malleability of boundaries. As the community formulated this multivocal exchange of ideas, Hernandez and Gomez decided that they wanted to show pieces not just at the countries’ shared perimeters, but also to expand outside of spaces traditionally considered on the line—plotting activations, exhibits, and events in several locations.

To this day, the Biennial is conducted as a migratory series that exposes and debunks limitations in a variety of geographies and contexts. Gomez says he gives this advice to his students and the young artists he mentors: “If no one's putting you into a show, put yourself into a show. If no one's curating the kind of shows you want to see, go out there and curate them. If nobody's writing about the art that you think should be written about, go and do that. You have agency, you have power, you have the opportunity.”

The MexiCali Biennial, now a nonprofit visual arts organization, has continued to grow past the frontiers that Gomez and Hernandez originally imagined, having partnered with over 160 performers, musicians, artists, and collectives, as well as dozens of respected cultural institutions. The selection criteria for the MexiCali Biennial exhibitions are primarily based on an open call, in which artists from Mexico and California are invited to submit proposals. An open call system fosters opportunities for participants from emerging, self-taught, and underrepresented communities, while creating an inclusive roster of individual artists and collectives who may not be present in more traditional biennial models. Previous partners include both established powerhouses and independent community-centered spaces—the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Arts and Culture of the Riverside Art Museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the San Bernardino County Museum, the Armory Center for the Arts, and the Vincent Price Art Museum, among others.

Gomez still considers the Biennial a public art project in its own right. With contributors and an audience coming from a variety of origins, he believes that although it is specific to one particular cartographical line, “the border itself is a shifting and evolving palimpsest of history,” and therefore anyone can see themselves or have access to the project.

The Biennial’s artist-centered approach is motivated by the desire to cultivate community and allows for the idea of a liminal boundary to act as both a springboard and framework through which all participants can explore broader humanities-based concepts. Earlier shows explored fertile and challenging themes such as cannibalism in the new world and a study of the myth of Califia—a Black female warrior who is the namesake of the Golden State.

With support from a Mellon grant, the MexiCali Biennial launched the multidisciplinary arts and culture program Land of Milk & Honey for its 2022‒23 season. Drawing on John Steinbeck’s portrayal of the region as a corrupted Eden, the exhibition questioned practices around a universally desired resource—food—to dissect humanity’s ability to turn abundance into a struggle between haves and have-nots. Reframing the legend of endless, hallowed agricultural acres from a land of opportunity to “Manifest Destiny,” the program’s many iterations worked to expose the damage that greed and exclusion can have on individuals, social systems, and our very planet.

Land of Milk & Honey was ripe with fresh and organic artist matches: From young artists like Guillermo Estrada a.k.a. Rancho Shampoo, who was heavily influenced by the Biennial’s earlier incarnations, to a brewery partnership with Brewjeria Company in Pico Rivera, California. The collaborative beer project featured a craft ale made with oro blanco grapefruits scavenged from backyards in cans designed by Gomez himself. Another poignant alliance: a pairing with Revolution Carts—a company that manufactures food carts used to sell street fare such as tamales in Los Angeles County. A local community group drew their attention to a vendor named Juan Aguilar who had been brutally attacked and discriminated against while selling food with a legal permit. Artwork for a new cart was commissioned by the MexiCali Biennial, and after the exhibit, the cart was gifted to Aguilar so that he could continue to run his business legally and safely.

While much of their early work was, as Gomez describes, “undercover and poorly attended in alleys and garages,” the MexiCali Biennial is also considering its history. Additional Mellon support has helped the organization to establish a space—the MXCL BNL LAB in Whittier, California, launching in October 2024—that will give visitors an opportunity to experience their archive of ephemera, photographs, and articles from the past 18 years and will also host associated artists’ solo shows, salons, oral history projects, community talks, and workshops.  

Bringing an incisive perspective via a long-developed relationship with the exhibition series, Dr. Rosalía Romero—an art historian at Pomona College who was brought on as a guest curator for Land of Milk & Honey—along with curator and researcher April Lillard-Gomez continues to nurture the documentation of the biennial, participating in a joint research initiative with the Library of Congress.

“We were just trying to get whatever cameras we could to record these shows because we felt like what we were doing was really important even though it wasn't publicized. That idea of documenting and understanding the value of these artists and their work has continued and I think has allowed us to grow and expand it to a larger capacity,” Gomez says.

Even alongside fixed pop-up archival efforts, the next MexiCali Biennial exhibit in 2026 will remain nomadic. As they plan their next show, entitled PARA/Normal Borders, the curators are searching for proof of the combined regions of California and Mexico as a supernatural zone, operating outside of what is viewed as “normal” or “natural.” Dismantling the concept of a border as pure limitation, Gomez says the show hopes to lead its participants into a portal where one can walk between planes to connect with ancestral spirits, extraterrestrials, and deities that are ordinarily out of reach. “The programming will focus on the borderlands as a thin place—a site where the veil between this world and another is porous,” says Gomez.

It can be a place where otherness and other ways of thinking can be reevaluated with equity and understanding, a point of overlap where several realities can exist simultaneously.