Tijuana Contemporary Art

This website is the result of research derived from the project After the explosion, there is no silence: artistic production in Tijuana 2003-2023

The research aims to create a memory of the art produced in the city of Tijuana during the aforementioned period. This research seeks to fill a gap in knowledge about contemporary art in Tijuana, a city with a vibrant and diverse art scene that has been little studied in academia. Artistic production in Tijuana has experienced a boom in recent decades; however, this period has not been the subject of systematic study. This research aims to analyze artistic production in Tijuana from 2003, when the then School of Arts of the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California was founded, until 2023, a date that arises as a cut-off due to the twentieth anniversary of the degree, in order to understand its evolution, its characteristics and its significance in the artistic context of the city.

This website is a small sample of the answers to the multiple questions that arose during this project. Through documentary research in collections, archives and spaces related to artistic production, we tried to trace the beginnings of the professional careers of artists who began their education in a systematized way and their participation in artistic events in the city. Subsequently, we began to generate a mapping of the artists who are part of the study group. Afterwards, interviews were conducted and information related to the creators was collected. During this process, conversations with the artists began to provide clues about how these stories were being constructed, which were linked to their professionalizing processes during their time at the university, the cultural ecosystem of the city, their links with their peers and their relationships among these three variants.

For this reason the website tijuanacontemporary.art was created. In order to build a memory of the visual arts, it was necessary to show three aspects: its artists, relevant artistic moments in the city and texts that help to understand a little more the phenomena that occur in Tijuana. Therefore, we have a section of artists, where you can review: their profiles, resumes, artist statements, images of their most representative work and archival images. The timeline section lists a series of events, spaces and characters that have been a fundamental part in the formation of these artists. And finally, the texts section lists a series of writings related to the visual arts in the city of Tijuana.

As mentioned above, this research has triggered more questions than answers, and this site is just a small outline of those answers that hopes to contribute to the construction of the memory of the visual arts in Tijuana. This website is a space under construction, which will grow with the contribution of all those people who want to add something to this ongoing dialogue.