The Brownsville Museum of Fine Art will host a new public sculpture at its location just blocks from the Texas-Mexico border; the artist Ron Fondaw will create a large work “centering on the current policies on immigration on the southernmost border of the United States.” The Portal of Hope will be made with the collaboration of local college students and others in the community, and “and is inspired by the iconic aperture in the House of the Governor at Uxmal, Mexico, an ancient shape directing the eyes skyward.”
Portal of Hope will made of adobe that’s meant to entropy and erode over the course of two to four years, and in the process reveal items hidden within its structure: “personal objects embedded in the adobe by those community collaborators, or those who, out of desperation, risk their lives to cross into the United States in hope of a better future.”
Construction begins today, and is meant to be completed and introduced to the public on May 25 at the Museum’s grounds. Ron Fondaw, the artist, “is a professor of art at Washington University in St. Louis, and heads the sculpture department at The Sam Fox School of Visual Art and Design.” Portal of Hope is his latest in a series of unfired clay works. He is the recipient of a “Guggenheim award for sculpture, a National Endowment for the Arts award, and a Pollack/Krasner award.”
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