ABSTRACT
In the 1980s the art world, ever eager to highlight a new trend, announced that border art was it. Critics in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other art world centers adjusted their myopic focus to accommodate distance, periphery, and margin. Suddenly art produced along the United StatesMexico borderspace became hot, and critical discourse abounded with terms such as cultural hybridity, liminality, and bicultural identity. Particular attention was paid to the San Diego-Tijuana region where an artists’ collective, the Border Art Workshop, staged a series of brilliant cultural interventions. But the group disbanded, and the art world’s restless gaze, endogenously incapable of sustained focus, flickered and moved elsewhere. Border art entered the penumbra to which yesterday’s fashions are assigned.
