CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/25/2022

As border crossings soar, we’re looking at ‘Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River’

Featured image is reproduced from Zoe Leonard’s two-volume, 592-page project documenting the one-thousand-mile-plus river boundary shared by the United States and Mexico. Featuring 350 reproductions and an anthology of writings by a wealth of international artists, journalists, poets and scholars, this publication presents a multifaceted portrait of the highly politicized and deeply symbolic border-river known as the Río Bravo in Mexico and the Rio Grande in the United States. Underneath all of its fraught history, C.J. Alvarez concludes in his opening essay, “the river has not yet been robbed of all its mystery, nor of its power. Like all civilizations, ours too will someday decline or become something else. The border will not be there forever. Perhaps new volcanos will erupt and reshape the watershed once again. Maybe some future generation will start a process of unbuilding. Possibly the places we know today as the ‘United States’ and ‘Mexico’ will erode into some new type of polity. When I imagine a time in the distant future, when all of us are long gone, I take comfort in picturing the river once again running great and wild.”

Photograph from 'Al río / To the River, 2016-2022,' courtesy of the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain and Hauser & Wirth. © Zoe Leonard