On the Move: A Century of Crossing Borders

Borders—physical or ideological, fluid and contested—shape the way people experience the world around them. As these boundaries are navigated socially and politically, they also motivate diverse forms of art making. This exhibition shows how themes of transportation and movement have been explored in modern and contemporary art.

In 1913 Sonia Delaunay-Terk and poet Blaise Cendrars pictured the new Trans-Siberian Railway, and in 1927 Mieczyslaw Berman commemorated the first nonstop transatlantic flight—both pioneering modes of transportation that changed the course of international travel. Several works in the exhibition are politically charged, such as Alfred Stieglitz’s view of class divisions and immigration in the 1900s. Working a century later, Tony de los Reyes represents the fraught border between the United States and Mexico, and Chris Burden evokes the dangers of breaching political boundaries. A number of artists pair pictorial and written language to express dialogues across place and time. For instance, Dominic McGill and Ed Ruscha illustrate texts about travel by Beat Generation writers, while Delaunay-Terk and Cendrars present an imaginary journey through Europe and Asia. 

Spanning a century of art-making practices, the works in On the Move explore the complexity of borders as they have been mapped, transgressed, and redrawn.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website