bord·er·line
1a : being in an intermediate position or state : not fully classifiable as one thing or its opposite
1b : not quite up to, typical of, or as severe as what is usual, standard, or expected
1c : characterized by psychological instability in several areas (such as interpersonal relations, behavior, and identity) but only with brief or no psychotic episodes
2 : situated at or near a border
A group exhibition featuring Felipe Juárez, Fernando Serrano, Laurie McKenna and Margarito Jiménez, bringing together four perspectives rooted in Mexico, border life, and traditional weaving.
bord•er•line
Central School Project will present bord•er•line, an exhibition spanning handwoven wool tapetes, ceramic sculptures, works on paper, and a video installation, opening October 23 at the Ida Power Gallery. The show marks the culmination of Emmanuel Fernando Serrano's 2025-2026 Assembling Voices Fellowship at Columbia University's Incite Institute, and brings together Serrano's own work with tapetes by master weavers Felipe Juárez and Margarito Jiménez of San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, alongside new work by mentor and collaborator multidisciplinary artist Laurie McKenna.
Serrano presents a series of functional wool tapetes, alongside select works from ter•ri•to•ry, his ongoing sculptural body of work. The exhibition also includes Port Of Entry: 2603, a video installation co-created with Laurie McKenna: two video loops projected onto wool tapetes, each framed within a chain link enclosure and shot on a modified PXL-2000, whose low-resolution image gives the footage the quality of memory.
The exhibition brings together four artists working from lived knowledge: Felipe Juárez, Margarito Jiménez, Laurie McKenna, and Fernando Serrano. Together, their work speaks to the labor, artistry, and continuity of the borderlands - a geography where people live, work, raise children, and make things by hand that outlast the circumstances of their making.
bord•er•line
OPENING RECEPTION - Friday, October 23, 2026, 6-9 PM - Free and open to all
Ida Power Gallery, Central School Project - 43 Howell Ave, Bisbee, AZ 85603
SHOW RUNS - October 23 - November 8, 2026
GALLERY HOURS - Saturdays & Sundays, 11 AM - 4 PM
This Exhibition is sponsored by:
“My work honors the hands that came before mine and the communities that shape it.”
Emmanuel Fernando Serrano
Multidisciplinary Artist · Naco, Sonora / Bisbee, Arizona
Emmanuel Fernando Serrano is a multidisciplinary artist working across fiber arts, photography, ceramics, and metalsmithing. He grew up in Naco, Sonora, a town split by the U.S.-Mexico border, now lives in Bisbee, Arizona, and works out of his studio at Central School Project fifteen minutes from where he was raised.
Serrano came to weaving through a 2021 silversmithing course at Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, where he wove his first tapete on the loom of master weaver Agapito. In June 2025, funded by a community fundraiser, he returned to San Miguel de Allende for a thirty-day intensive with Yumiko Murai, who carries Agapito's lineage forward. That residency deepened his relationships with Felipe Juárez, Margarito Jiménez, the weavers whose work anchors bord•er•line. At the end of the residency, he learned he'd been awarded an Artist Opportunity Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Later in 2025, he founded Border Loomers, a free bilingual weaving initiative now offering workshops in Bisbee-Douglas-Naco-Agua Prieta corridor.
The past year has marked a rapid expansion of Serrano's practice and recognition. He is a 2025-2026 Assembling Voices Fellow at Columbia University's Incite Institute. In January 2026, two of his works were acquired for the private collection of President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico. That spring, he exhibited in Material Conversations at Central School Project, and received a grant from the University of Arizona's Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry to support ter•ri•to•ry, an ongoing mixed-media body of work translating migrant oral histories into ceramic, print, and woven form. In the summer of 2026, he was accepted by the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona's 2026-2028 Public Artist Roster, and was awarded a grant from the same organization to support his curatorial work with Central School Project. That September, he received a fellowship from Border Arts Corridor. That same month his work was selected to exhibit in the Border Biennial at the El Paso Museum of Art and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez. The works selected are three pieces that first debuted at Material Conversations: two functional tapetes, Mi Cadena de Oro and Untitled Self-Portrait, and the experimental weave Migration, a cotton-and-Mylar piece incorporating emergency blankets and clothing left behind by migrants, hung from barbed wire to represent the border itself. For Serrano, seeing his work in these institutions was a reminder that the border isn't a line you cross once - it's something you keep finding on the other side, in other cities, in other hands. What started as a practice rooted in Bisbee is now in conversation with artists all along that same line, and that's what belonging looks like for a border artist: not one place, but all of them at once. The exhibition remains on view at the El Paso Museum of Art through May 2, 2027, and at the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez through early February 2027.
“The minimal data of the medium calls up both dream states and surveillance. Same shared geography, some borrowed time, found and lost signals. There are steel dividers, and forever persisting: the plants and the sky.”
Laurie McKenna is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work examines labor, immigration, abuse of power and social margins. She holds a BFA in Filmmaking from Massachusetts College of Art and has lived and worked in the Bisbee area since 2002.
She combines drawings, video, endurance work, and conceptual art in her installations. Her work has been presented at the Migrant Center in Agua Prieta; Bisbee Clay Gallery, Bisbee; the Tohono Chul Park Gallery, Tucson; the Arizona History Museum, Tucson; Central School Project, Bisbee; Cornelius Project San Pedro LA,CA, and Cochise College, Douglas, Az. Her more recent media work has been screened at Cornell Cinema, Cornell, NY, the Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin, Germany. A selection of her work from the 1990s was part of a screening program in Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York.
McKenna was deeply involved as a subject and a performer in the 2017 documentary Bisbee ’17 directed by Robert Greene which premiered at Sundance in 2018.
Since 2017, her projects have been supported with funding from the Bisbee Arts Commission, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Arts Foundation of Tucson and Southern Arizona Grant, and an award/mini-grant from the Confluence Center of Creative Inquiry, as part of the Fronteritades program at the University of Arizona, which was supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
In bord•er•line, McKenna has created two video loops and is a subject of POE:2603, a video installation she co-conceived with Fernando Serrano. Shot entirely with a modified Fisher Price PXL-2000 toy camera, the low-resolution pixelated image lends the footage the quality of memory. This abstract piece follows McKenna and Serrano across separate but converging landscapes and is projected onto wool tapetes framed in chain link. Also included are works on paper and clay tiles and her latest conceptual piece, Executive Orders, a sculpture that seeks to capture and diminish the devastating Presidential directives that threaten civil society and democracy
Laurie McKenna
Multidisciplinary Artist · McNeal, Arizona
Felipe Juárez
Master Weaver · San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico
"I learned everything from my maestro. The loom, the patterns, the patience. You cannot rush this. The thread knows when you are in a hurry.”
Felipe Juárez does not just weave - he builds the looms he weaves on. Working from his studio in San Miguel Viejo, a neighborhood on the edge of San Miguel de Allende where textile knowledge has been held for generations, Felipe constructs his own telares by hand, ranging from one to six meters wide. He learned the craft over years of apprenticeship under a maestro named Casimiro Amaro - not through classes or workshops, but through presence: watching, doing, undoing, and doing again.
He sources his raw materials from Guanajuato, working with natural wools and custom-dyed colors that he mixes himself depending on the design. His work is rooted in the plants, landscape, and animals of central Mexico - cacti, roadrunners, maguey - translated into bold geometric form.
The tapetes Felipe brings to bord•er•line were made in San Miguel Viejo and traveled north with Fernando Serrano, who worked alongside him during his 2025 residency at Instituto Allende. Each piece depicts a plant or animal of the Sonoran and central Mexican landscape - saguaro, nopal, maguey, roadrunner - rendered in Felipe's signature palette of teal, green, cream, and red.
Margarito Jiménez has been weaving for six decades. He started as a child, taught by his father, in the same way his father was taught by his father before him - a continuity of gesture and rhythm passed down through generations rather than learned from a book.
His designs carry the mark of that long tradition: geometric, bold, and rooted in the visual language of central Mexican textile work. His sense of color is particular and hard-won, built from decades of watching how colors age, how they hold under sun and handling, and which combinations last. Today, his own children and grandchildren are learning at his side, carrying the tradition forward and changed, as he believes any living tradition must be.
In bord•er•line, Margarito presents six colorways of a single design - a meditation on variation within tradition, and a companion piece to Felipe's six tapetes of different subjects. Together, the two bodies of work form a complete thought about how a design lives and changes depending on the light and the wool that carries it.
Margarito "Mago" Jiménez
Master Weaver · San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico
“I learned to weave from my own father, beginning as a child and continuing through a lifetime of practice. For me, sharing this knowledge is not just teaching a skill - it is an act of care for the community.”
