MARFA — An epic series of photographs artist Zoe Leonard spent five years capturing along the Rio Grande are the subject of a new exhibition Al río / To the River opening at The Chinati Foundation this Saturday.
Several versions of the exhibition have been shown in Europe since 2022, but the Chinati installation marks the first time Leonard has presented an iteration of the work in America, and in such close proximity to where the images were made.
“To bring this back so close to where I made the work — that we’re 50 miles from the river, from the border, that people who live in Marfa have relationships with Ruidosa, with Candelaria, with Ojinaga, this whole region — it’s incredibly special,” Leonard said.
Photographs were created from 2016 to 2021 all the way from Ciudad Juárez and El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting images are meditations on the human-built environment surrounding the border — fences, bridges, surveillance, military operations — and on the rich history of humans in harmony with the river — agriculture, recreation, daily life.
“There are moments of real harmony and peace, and that is also part of what life is like in this region. It’s very quiet. It’s an incredible migratory area for birds. There are people raising cattle and horses,” Leonard said. “I felt like I really wanted to make sure that some of that balance was here and, for the people that live here and that grew up here, to include some of the things that people are proud of and connected to.”
Leonard drifted between both sides of the river, trying to stay as close to the main channel as possible, she said, and assessing the entire riparian corridor, with a focus on larger, systemic situations as opposed to a single subject. The mobile vantage point allowed her to “hint at some of the complexity and some of the ways in which we construct the river from our own vantage point and to try to undo some of what we’ve been taught,” she said.
Leonard is from New York, and has been coming out to the Big Bend region for around 20 years, she estimates. She maintains a home in Marfa as well as a long-standing relationship with The Chinati Foundation, for which she’s been an artist in residence numerous times, once building a camera obscura at the Ice Plant.
She is close friends with Chinati Director Caitlin Murray and poet Tim Johnson, who joined Leonard on trips to photograph the river and edited a publication that accompanies the exhibition. Leonard said she was initially hesitant to accept Murray’s offer to show the work at the foundation out of fear it would seem “nepotistic,” but Murray made a strong case, stating, as Leonard recalls, “I could give you 100 reasons why we need to show Al río here, but also Donald Judd made Chinati as a place to be in dialogue with his friends and his peers,” Leonard said. “Actually being friends isn’t a downside. This is a conversation among friends.”
Leonard sees herself as an observer of the complexity of conditions that make up life along the border, she said, one she connects to due to her mother’s experience living as a World War II refugee for two decades. “Although it’s a very different situation here, I feel some kind of connection to questions of border and identity and how personhood is interpreted by the state and controlled by the state,” Leonard said.
For the exhibition at Chinati, Leonard, selecting from a body of images that constitute a 314-page photobook, pared the work down to fit into three distinct gallery spaces and is viewing the installation as “a work in three acts.”
The prologue, inhabiting a small gallery adjacent to the artillery sheds, is a series of understated Chromogenic prints depicting swirls of opaque, silty water, the body of the river itself, as it moved in the fall of 2017 near Bofecillos Canyon. Leonard got up early to photograph the sunrise but found herself perched on a rock, her camera pointed down into the water. She shot two to three rolls of film.
“I just kept looking at my feet, like what’s happening right here is amazing,” Leonard said.
She said that “just by moving a tiny little bit” she was able to create “always the same picture and always a different picture.” The water appears almost bodily, with erupting fists, mouths and limbs. There’s surface turbulence but not an awareness of what’s causing it.
The repetition is a nod to Judd, and a reminder that seemingly simple things can be complex, like the border itself. It’s an unexpected start by design. “This seemed like a good way to drop all of the expectations of ‘a border project’ or ‘a project about the river,’” Leonard said.
Next viewers will migrate to the U-shaped special exhibitions space, an old Army barracks, where Leonard’s black and white film photographs progressively advance downstream. Each grouping of photographs, not overly large at 20 x 24 inches, Leonard refers to as “passages.”
Throughout the five years photographing the border, Leonard — a conceptual artist, not a trained combat photographer — had to learn how to get around what she calls a “quasi militarized zone” without escalating situations with law enforcement or people crossing.
She consulted a lawyer, went out with assistants, greeted people while holding up her camera and stayed partisan, sticking to the sentiment “be safe.” Still, she often found herself in situations where she was the only one unarmed, she said.
“I would, in trying to get close to the river, find myself in the middle of an operation where no one wanted me there,” Leonard said. “But I wasn’t illegal, I wasn’t trespassing, I wasn’t doing anything wrong. So I would just keep going.”
Leonard was careful not to photograph people’s faces or license plates, as to try not to contribute to further surveillance along the border, she said. An important component of Al río / To the River is the concept of simultaneity — one passage shows families swimming in Juarez near Casa de Adobe, just on the other side of an American dam.
“You have all of these different realities happening at once,” Leonard said. “You have families having their Sunday together, jumping in the water and picnicking, and you have commerce going back and forth on the bridges, and you have a dam that’s separating the water from the American and the Mexican side, and you have fences and gates and bridges and surveillance and policing all at once.”
Images of a nonoperational, blocked-off bridge at La Linda near Black Gap Wildlife Management Area tell a story Leonard said often gets overlooked in mainstream media coverage of the border, one of a “lack of imagination” and “loss of opportunity to connect with our neighbors.”
At one point the defunct bridge, which was built by a chemical company and used to transport mined minerals, was proposed as the starting point of a transnational land reserve including Black Gap, Big Bend National and Ranch State parks and the Maderas del Carmen preserve.
“They could be co-managed by the two countries, and could be a place to preserve over three million acres of Chihuahuan Desert,” Leonard said. “It could be the starting point for an international scientific research jam, with biologists [studying] bats and agave, and instead, this is what’s happened.”
Over the course of five years photographing the river, Leonard witnessed a multitude of ecological and policy changes — the river drying up, border lighting increasing, Greg Abbott’s Operation Lonestar, Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” — layers upon layers of crises, she said.
But images of Matamoros tent encampments and Border Patrol operations are noticeably devoid of human subjects, drawing the viewer’s eye to elements that often get lost in the background of news images. Leonard said she kept in mind the history of photography and wanted to avoid putting the burden of representation on any one person.
“I didn’t want to put the weight on any one particular person’s face, to be like — you are the immigrant, or you are the asylum seeker, or you are the Border Patrol person,” Leonard said. “I think what we have is a larger, systemic, structural situation that bears looking at, that bears closer consideration, and that there’s no one person that can create or avoid these structures.”
In addition to being in dialogue with Judd’s rhythms regarding repetition and placement, Leonard also plays off of the foundation’s past as an active military fort, now situated not too far from a Border Patrol checkpoint on Highway 67.
The final act of the installation is housed in an open-air fort structure with prisoner of war murals that has yet to house other artists’ work since the foundation was established. Cases built to withstand the desert environment, and resident bats, display iPhone photographs of Leonard’s laptop which is tuned into a public livestream of the Paseo Del Norte International Bridge connecting El Paso and Juarez, Mexico.
The .gov website is intended to allow people to see live bridge traffic, but Leonard found it acts as yet another layer of surveillance for people going about their everyday lives run by infrastructure with “no ability to discern.” The screenshots are an attempt to “actually see these people,” Leonard said, through the apparatus of the border, through the barbed wire and barriers.
Her snaps intervene in the existing feed to show kids in uniforms on their way to school as a Border Patrol agent runs drills with a dog mere feet away — a sense of violence and danger simply a part of people’s routine commutes.
“I wanted to introduce this idea of how people, regardless of all the political rhetoric and all of the nonsense and all of the infrastructure that’s happening on this macro level, that people are also just living their life,” Leonard said.
The long history of migration, labor and the deep ties between Mexico and the U.S. are too often left out of current political debates about the border, Leonard said, topics beyond security worth expanding the dialogue for. “The ways in which we are bound — deeply, economically and socially — that’s where I think the conversation needs to start,” she said.
Al río / To the River will be on view at The Chinati Foundation until June 2025.