UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

For four decades, the wilds of the American West have served as a key source of inspiration for renowned Dallas-based documentary photographer Laura Wilson (b. 1939). Her images of the people living and working “out west” (“out” meaning removed from modern American life) on ranches, Native American reservations, rodeos, and rural high schools are intimate yet distant. Indeed, as ever, the West is populated with characters defined by their distance, by their landscapes and lifeways that stand in sharp contrast to the familiar claustrophobia of urban and suburban America. There is, likewise, a kind of otherworldliness to Wilson’s West; it is a marginal (if nested) place. Her images reside “on the edge,” to paraphrase the renowned historian of medieval art Michael Camille, and we imagine the person behind the lens herself straddling the boundary between outsider and insider in a foreign land.

The challenge, of course, is how to define a much-mythologized American West that has forever been emphatically heterogenous, fiercely independent, and rife with the complexities of frontier life. For most of its history, the West (loosely defined as the land west of the Great Plains) was, moreover, not part of the United States. Lines on maps made by politicians as far away culturally as they are geographically have shaped conflict and coexistence in the region for centuries. And even the most powerful lines prove permeable. For over two hundred years, the most dramatic example of this has been the Mexico–United States border, which extends nearly two thousand miles between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. No wonder that the ranchers, fire-breathers, and children of this liminal zone captured Wilson’s attention from her very first visit to Laredo and Nuevo Laredo in the early 1990s.

For Laura Wilson, Mexico has always been a key chapter of this story. While her early published work focused on life along the Mexico–U.S. border, this exhibition will introduce viewers to a more comprehensive if deeply personal vision of our southern neighbor. It brings together over thirty years’ worth of images documenting Wilson’s sojourns across Mexico and areas just beyond its northern border. Some work she created as recently as this year and especially for this exhibition. The nearly eighty photographs, which will also be presented in an accompanying catalogue, offer a unique perspective of a multifaceted Mexico seen through Wilson’s eyes. They capture colorful festivals, traditional farms, and the poetry of everyday life. The viewer is therefore presented not with one Mexico—defined, for example, by its northern border, its religiosity, or rural populations—but with a nuanced, often contradictory view of a land of dynamic contrasts.

This exhibition has been organized by the Meadows Museum and is funded by a generous gift from The Meadows Foundation.