Fronterizx Collective (Gabriela Muñoz and M. Jenea Sanchez)

Gabriela Muñoz and Jenea Sanchez of Fronterizx Collective began working together in 2009. Muñoz and Sanchez’s practice is rooted in their experiences as women of color who grew up in the liminal culture between México and the United States. Their projects and collaborations center movements of social justice and uplift the labor, wisdom, and contributions of women. From their first project La Tapiz Fronteriza, weaving a site-specific community offering into the US-Mexico border fence, they have collaborated with borderlands communities, creating nourishing spaces and making visible the abundance and creativity in the borderlands. Their social practice centers participatory budgeting and program codesign processes. Centering collaboration and community voices, they work in video, photography, printmaking, installation, performance, sculpture, and socially engaged practice. They are recipients of the Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award and they have fellowships from the Mellon-Fronteridades Creative Scholar Program, NALAC’s Leadership Institute, and the Catalyst for Change Fellowship.

Muñoz was born and raised in Chihuahua, Mexico and lived in Arizona, undocumented, for more than a decade. Her installations, printed works, and collaborations function as a growing archive documenting the lives of women of color and the spaces where they build a counternarrative that values power-sharing, peer-to-peer learning, and horizontal leadership models.

Sanchez, born and raised in Douglas, Arizona/Agua Prieta, Sonora, cofounded Border Arts Corridor, a nonprofit arts organization providing the borderlands community an immersive arts district through binational art walks, workshops, and artist residencies.