Sublime Borders: Re-Visioning the Landscape Aesthetic in Recent Latinx Art

From the soft sculptures of Margarita Cabrera to the Baroque paintings of Rigoberto González, Latinx art perpetually visualizes the complexity and complicity of US-Mexico borderlands. Across various spatial imaginings of the border, the artist shows the “sublime” otherness of nature as fragmented by contemporary crises such as racialized violence, ecological disaster, narco-culture, or the precarity of migrant populations. Drawing on the eco-critical writings of WJT Mitchell, Jason W. Moore, and Gloria Anzaldúa, my paper develops a Marxist-decolonial lens to define this hybridized configuration of landscape in recent border art. Synthesizing the insights of Mitchell and Moore, I argue that Latinx border art criticizes the pictorial sublime’s historical centering of a white gaze that aids in the interlocking systems of oppression, EuroAmerican imperialism and Anthropogenic climate change. Then, following Anzaldúa’s concept of conocimiento, I claim that Latinx artists recuperate landscape aesthetics. In particular, the tradition of the sublime is recontextualized into an image-making process that re-visions nature as an “imaginal link” capable of staging new unities of body, mind, and spirit. The artists-in-focus for this analysis include the painter Rigoberto González, the sculptor Margarita Cabrera, and fiber artist Consuelo Jiménez Underwood. I conclude that these image-makers fabricate a new border art of the sublime, one that counters histories of colonial domination while also putting emphasis on biocentrism, indigeneity, and collective storytelling in the borderlands.