[groovy music]
- So I do sculptures, furniture,
site-specific installations for museums,
and then I pay my bills by making jewelry and accessories.
Yeah, just lots of stuff, lots and lots of stuff.
It all grows in and out of playing around
with disciplines and materials, but not abandoning,
I think, where I started.
[groovy music]
So now we're getting closer and closer and closer
to the border, and that little, like, hazy horizon
is Tijuana already.
You know, my parents both live there.
My sisters and I all grew up in Tijuana.
It's a safe place for me and for my family.
My grandmother had nine kids.
She had seven girls and two boys,
and my dad is one of the two boys.
- Rudy: My mom, she was U.S. citizen,
born in Azusa, California.
- Maria: One of the reasons why we're living here in Mexico
instead of living in the States because I didn't want
any of my kids to be unattached to their country.
So the roots will be pulling them
and feeling that they're Mexicans.
- Tanya: As a kid in Tijuana,
I grew up in a very, very tiny, tiny house.
The block that we lived in was not the best block
as far as looks go, but it was, everybody knew everybody.
I was always a really, really outgoing kid,
so if a new person moved into one of the houses,
I'd go knock on the door and say,
"Do you have any children, and how many children,
and what are the ages and their gender?"
You know, and they would tell me,
"oh, there's this girl, this boy, this girl."
And I'd request the one that was closest to my age
and was a girl and I'd say,
"Well, is that one available and could she come and play?"
My dad and I would cross the border every day
and I would get dropped off at my grandma's house
and then go to school close to my grandma's house.
And it wasn't because my parents wanted me
to go to school in the U.S.
It was because they didn't have a babysitter,
and so my grandmother lived on the U.S. side,
and so then they just, by default, I just ended up
being dropped off in the U.S.
It was pretty tough though,
it was really, really tough because we'd have
to leave the house like 3:30, 4:00 in the morning
for us to be able to cross the border and get to the U.S. side
in time for my dad to go to work.
So I would get dropped off at my grandma's house
sometimes around 5:30 in the morning,
and then just wait for people to wake up.
[gentle string music]
Yeah, and a lot of these blankets
are the types of blankets that are used in the weavings
that has all the crazy colors in it.
I definitely feel the freedom to work with whatever material
I want to; I guess it's a little bit
like improvising with the material
and just kind of letting the material dictate
where the composition is going.
So it's a little bit like painting with material.
[groovy music]
My exploration into color and texture
comes from the Mexican side of me, and the cleaner lines
and more minimal aesthetic come from the U.S. side of me.
- Gerard: I'm just really drawn to the spirit of her work.
Tanya puts all of herself
into the littlest detail of what she does.
The texture and feel of her pieces I think completely
relates to her own sense of self and her own environment.
And her pieces have this surface texture
that's sort of reaching out to everything around it.
Everywhere you place one of her pieces,
it suddenly feels at home.
[gentle string music]
- With Tanya, it's about the concept,
and it's about creating something
that she hasn't done before, and it's about the process.
It's all about the process that I respect about the artist
and that I cannot, you know, I don't understand.
- Tanya: While I was at the Rhode Island School of Design
working on my thesis for grad school, I was thinking a lot
about just growing up on the border
and having this kind of dual personality, where sometimes
I was one thing on one side of the border,
and then on the other side,
I'd have to become something else to fit in.
And so I was thinking of a lot of stuff
that had to do with dualities.
Because I was studying how to make furniture,
I started thinking about if there was a chair
that I could work with and transform into the opposite
of what it was, but still letting it retain
most of its personality,
and so that's kind of how the Felt Chair idea came out,
was just taking something that was super cold
and uninviting, and transforming it into something soft.
It comes as raw wool, and then through the process
of hand rubbing it for 20 hours, it becomes felt.
So it's like making a gigantic dreadlock,
but just around a chair,
which is what Karla's currently doing.
- It's her work; I respect it.
I want it to be perfect as if she was doing it.
Tanya has been like, she's my best friend,
she's my mentor, she's my boss.
She got me introduced to art because when I was a kid,
she kind of noticed that I really liked drawing,
so she would buy me art supplies and take me to art classes.
- She always tried to push us to do whatever
we enjoyed doing, whether it was Karla drawing
or even when I was really into writing,
she would always kind of make us,
you know, push us to keep doing that.
You see, this is, like, show me your tricks.
- Karla: Tanya has been felting for, like,
about seven or eight years now,
so a lot of the felting now comes to me
because she's just, like, really sick of it.
And it used to be, like, this process
that was really friendly and really amazing,
but then it just takes so long
that you just kind of, like, hate it at some point.
- 'Cause it's like, doo, doo, doo, you know.
Getting into felting didn't have to do
with a love of felt; it had to do with wanting
to learn a technique that I could take to small places
that didn't have electricity, running water,
or anything like that and teach people a skill
that could help them earn some income.
- Todd: Early on with Tanya, she felt a responsibility
to support where she came from and support the underdog.
- Tanya: This is the community of Maclovio Rojas
in what was the outskirts of Tijuana,
but now seems to be more and more connected
to the rest of Tijuana.
I started coming here in, I believe, 1997.
And when I started coming here,
it was with the Border Art Workshop.
And so this community is really special.
This place was settled mainly by women,
and when I got here in '97, there was already
over 8,000 families.
This entire place is scrapped together,
and so the motto here was "Pound to Fit, Paint to Match."
And so it was just whatever we could get our hands on,
we would make use of.
We had a lot of different projects going on
throughout the community.
One of them was to build this community center
that was to stand as a beacon,
as a ship of kind of freedom and education.
The art that was created out of this community center
was a really, really important part of what was happening
because it was a way for them and us to help them
tell the story of this community.
When we would talk to the women about how it was
that they settled this land, they would talk about
that they would lay down and they would cover themselves,
and then rattlesnakes would go in underneath the covers
and sleep with them at night to keep warm,
and then the women would wake up in the morning,
chop off their heads, and eat them for breakfast.
And so it was just always a really beautiful way
for us to think about how strong the women
of this community are and just how amazing the circumstances
in which they founded this area.
My experience in Maclovio Rojas inspired me
to become an artist.
It also just really taught me
to trust and love working with other people.
Okay, so then we have, these are the doubles.
- Okay, those are singles?
- The singles and then there's mediums that are inside there
as well, they're just like kind of off-white.
[inaudible conversation]
- Karla: Jewelry is what allows
for all the other things to happen
because there's a larger market,
and especially with the internet,
people from all over the world
can have these products available.
So a lot of the times, we get really big orders
and because everything is made by hand,
we can't really catch up.
- Let's move this over closer to you.
- Karla: We don't outsource anything, so they have
to understand that we do it all by hand, so, yep.
- There's, if we need doubles in chartreuse.
- She's a teacher at Otis College of Art and Design,
so at the end of my junior year,
she's like, "Oh, would you like to be one of my interns?"
And I was like, "Okay, sure."
So that's where it started.
- Lydia: It was kind of like a little experiment each class,
where she would, like, show us a new thing.
She would, like, bring her burners to class
and, like ,show us how to, like, boil leather
and weave and dye things.
[groovy music]
- With this exhibit and the title of it,
I was thinking about lines and what did lines mean.
You know, one of the first things that I thought about
was the line is the border,
and the line is artificial boundaries.
So the space is really laid out with all these
artificial boundaries because if you really wanted
to get through it, it's just string.
You could just go through stuff.
But then also I was thinking
about how my work crosses in between
functional and nonfunctional, fine art and craft,
traditional and modern.
It just makes sense for me
to be able to play with whatever I want to play with
and not really stay within the certain definition
of what people call me.
I think it's a very frontier sensibility about making work
and about, yeah, just how you're defined as a person.
[gentle string music]