Life in Shadows: The Border as Carceral Geography

Life in Shadows: The Border as Carceral Geography co-curated with Juan Ortiz will center on the border as a geographic and discursive site.

The Center is excited to announce “Life in Shadows: The Border as Carceral Geography,” a symposium presented with Pioneer Works and co-curated with Juan Ortiz, an inaugural Center Fellow in 2017, a 2026 Galaxy Gives Fellow and the Founder of Casa Carmelita. The symposium will feature a keynote address by Ortiz, two panels moderated by Céline Semaan and Danielle Wu featuring Frank Blazquez, Luis Camnitzer, Insha Rahman, Abraham Paulos, Juana Valdés, and Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez; and a closing performance by Laura Ortman. Food will be provided by Maya Taqueria. “Life in Shadows” is an opportunity to explore the interconnectedness between the carceral system and the United States’ border and immigration system.

The symposium will consider the border as both a place and an idea—as a geographic and discursive site—that is maintained through mechanisms of surveillance, displacement and other violences. Panelists will explore how the border functions as one of the country’s many carceral structures and machinations, interrupting human relations and movements for the project of nationhood. By breaking down the binary ways of thinking about incarceration and immigration, the symposium aims to reveal the ways in which these two systems are functionally one and the same.

About the speakers

Juan Ortiz is an artist, activist, and community organizer. Ancestrally and generationally from the borderlands of El Paso/Ciudad Juárez, Ortiz’s work draws from his familial history of activism and organizing around issues that directly affect border communities. He has over 25 years of immigrant and social justice advocacy, organizing in non-governmental, directly-impacted, autonomous and grassroots collectives and groups. He has worked on issues ranging from racial, environmental and economic justice, to indigenous sovereignty, to anti-carceral, abolitionist organizing.

Ortiz is also the first in his lineage to attend institutions of higher education. Currently a doctoral student, instructor, and fellow in the Mexican American Studies department at the University of Arizona, his research and study focus on the manifestations of mass incarceration on the border and its relationship to US imperialism and its racial caste system. Ortiz’s educational journey began while incarcerated as a youth in a Corrections Corporation of America facility, where he obtained his GED. He subsequently obtained a BA from the University of Texas at El Paso, an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and an MA in Art and Public Policy from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Ortiz’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and he has been recognized by numerous fellowships, awards, and grants, including most recently via the Mellon Foundation Frontera Culture Fund, the Media Democracy Fund, the Right of Return Fellowship, the Art for Justice Fund, the Blade of Grass Fellowship for socially-engaged art, and the Baltimore Social Innovation Fellowship.

Céline Semaan is a Lebanese-born artist, writer, designer, and educator whose work explores storytelling, political imagination, and cultural practice as tools for shaping more just futures. Working across text, textiles, film, installation, and public pedagogy, she transforms personal and ancestral histories into collective acts of memory, resistance, and worldbuilding. Her practice examines displacement, land, liberation, and the ways culture can become a site for civic participation and collective repair.

Semaan is the author of A Woman Is a School, founder of Slow Factory, and Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of Everything Is Political, an independent media platform at the intersection of culture and politics. Through these projects, she has developed new approaches to political education that make complex social, environmental, and economic questions accessible to broad public audiences while inviting people to imagine and design alternative futures.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at MoMA PS1 and the Toronto Biennial of Art, and is held in the collections of the de Young Museum and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Her writing and work have been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, CNN, and The Cut.

Danielle Wu is a writer and curator based in New York. She is primarily interested in artists who engage in biting institutional critique: against regimes of truth, beauty, religious authority, and fantasy that shape reality and dissent.

She is currently the Communications and Exhibitions Director at Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) and was previously a Digital Fellow at Democracy Now! Her reviews have been published in Art in America, Artforum, Frieze Magazine, The Offing, among other publications. Notable curatorial projects include Just Between Us: From the Archives of Arlan Huang with Howie Chen at Pearl River Mart, New York (2023); Water Worksat International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York (2022); and Ghost in the Ghost with scholar Anne Anlin Cheng at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York (2019).

She was part of Independent Curators International’s 2025 New York Curatorial Seminar and was a recipient of the Charlene Victor and Ella J. Weiss Cultural Entrepreneur Fund (2025), New York State Council on the Arts Grant (2022), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Manhattan Arts Grant (2022), Critical Minded Grant from Allied Media Projects (2020), and Brooklyn Arts Council Grant (2019). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, South China Morning Post, WNYC, and other media outlets.

Frank Blazquez, a 2020 Right of Return Fellow, is a documentary photographer, visual artist, and essayist based in New Mexico. His photography has been featured in The Guardian, Hyperallergic, VICE, and was exhibited as part of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's Outwin 2022. His essay "In Search of My Home" appears in Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, published by the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial and MIT Press. Blazquez treats the camera as a language, a way of naming lives that institutions have only ever spoken about, never spoken to. His photographs hold the neighborhoods he documents as sites of both struggle and survival, refusing the monolithic narrative that crime reports and policy rhetoric tend to impose. His photographs don't flinch from the objects and signs most readily used to criminalize the communities he documents, understanding that to sanitize the image would be its own kind of dishonesty. Blazquez's work is held in the permanent collections of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center.

Luis Camnitzer (1937), Uruguayan artist, lives in NY since 1964. Emeritus Professor State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. Studied art in the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and architecture in the Facultad de Arquitectura, of the same University. Guggenheim Fellow 1961, 1981, represented Uruguay in the Venice Biennial 1988, showed at several biennials (several iterations of Bienal de la Habana, and Whitney Biennial 2000 among them), and Documenta XI). In 2018 the Reina Sofía Museum presented a retrospective exhibition of his work. His work is in the collection of over 45 museums and he is represented by Alexander Gray Associates, New York. He was the Pedagogical Curator of 6thBienal de Mercosur (2007), Porto Alegre; and Curator of the Viewing Program, the Drawing Center NY. In 1999 he co-organized the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin at the Queens Museum, NY, together with Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss. Among his books are New Art of Cuba (1994), Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (2007), and On Art, Artists, Latin America, and Other Utopias (2010), all University of Texas Press, De la Coca-Cola al Arte Boludo, (2009), Metales Pesados, and One Number is Worth One Word, (2020), Sternberg Press / e-flux Journal. In_Utilidad: Arte como educación, Centro del Carmen, Valencia/Cruce, Buenos Aires, 2024, Más allá de la inteligencia, Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, 2026

Insha Rahman became the sixth president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice and Vera Action in May 2026, its sister 501(c)(4) organization, and the first woman and immigrant to lead Vera in its 65-year history. Her passion for criminal justice reform began as a participant in Vassar College's Green Haven Program, where college and incarcerated students took classes together in a maximum-security prison. After law school, she served as a public defender at The Bronx Defenders before joining the Vera Institute. At Vera, she led the organization's work in New York, including advocating for the passage of a historic bail reform law and to close the Rikers Island jail complex, and launched the advocacy department and sister (c)(4). She is known as a leading political strategist and criminal justice expert, especially on tackling the politics of crime. She holds a bachelor's degree in Africana Studies from Vassar College and a JD from the City University of New York School of Law.

Abraham Paulos is a nationally recognized human rights advocate, communications strategist, and writer who has spent over two decades driving the movement for human rights and immigrant justice. His work centrally focuses on the complex intersection of immigration, race, and criminalization, with a specific emphasis on the unique challenges faced by Black migrants.

His career features influential leadership roles. Abraham currently serves as the Deputy Director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI). His background spans grassroots organizing, policy, and research—having served as Executive Director of Families for Freedom, Director for Life of Hope, and a researcher for Human Rights First —alongside years teaching ESL in low-income Black and Brown communities.

A powerful voice in public discourse, Abraham has highlighted systemic issues within the U.S. deportation system through his writing for outlets like Foreign Policy Association, Huffington Post, Public Books, and City Limits. He has also been featured on major news platforms such as the NY Daily News, the New York Times, Democracy Now!, Al Jazeera, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Vice, Axios, ABC News, and NBC News.

Abraham is a Stateless Eritrean refugee born in Sudan and raised in Chicago. He holds an associate’s degree from Harold Washington College, a bachelor's degree from George Washington University, and a master's degree from The New School.

Juana Valdés is an Afro-Caribbean Latinx artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores migration, race, gender, and labor through printmaking, ceramics, photography, and installation. Grounded in archival research and material culture, her practice interrogates postcolonial histories and diasporic identity. Her work examines race, migration, transnationalism, gender, labor, and material culture through the lens of postcolonial history and diasporic memory.

Her recent and current exhibitions include Revelation: A Journey into Abstraction at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture; Imagining an Archipelago at the Colby Museum of Art; and Museum and Améfrica: Diasporic Connections in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, curated by Hélio Menezes at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Spain. Valdés is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2022 Latinx Artist Fellowship recipient, and a 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant.

Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez is a multidisciplinary international artist who works at the intersection of contemporary art, graffiti, street art, sculpture, design, and art activism. With paintings, murals, installations, mix-media pieces, and private commissions for major brands, his robust palette blends elements of street and pop culture with Mexican and Indigenous aesthetics—a signature look the artist has coined “Neo Indigenous.” Marka27’s work has become part of graffiti and street art history, but he has flourished as a product designer, gallery artist, toy designer, and more. Marka27 has emerged as one of the most sought-after muralists in the world, mastering his craft since before “street art” was even a term. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY where he and his wife and creative partner, Liza, run their award-winning creative agency, “Street Theory Gallery”.

Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) is a soloist musician, artist, composer, and vibrant collaborator. She creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, filmic and artistic soundtracks. Ortman has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Okkyung Lee, Caroline Monnet, Jeffery Gibson, Tanya Lukin Linklater, New Red Order, Susan Alcorn, Loren Connors, among others. An inquisitive and exquisite amplified violinist, she is also versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and often sings through a megaphone and is a producer of capacious field recordings.

She has performed at the Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim, and MOMA, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Socrates Sculpture Park, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of the American Indian, Dia Foundation, and CBGB's in New York, La Biennale di Venezia 2024 in Italy, Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, as well as countless established and DIY venues and festivals across North America and Europe. In 2008, she founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Indigenous orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’ In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Indigenous cast. The Coast Orchestra premiered at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Ortman has lived in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn since 1997.