Christina Barrera’s “Revolutionary Festival”

Christina Barrera. Portrait by Berto Santana. Courtesy of the artist.

There is a pile of numbered zines on the floor of the MAMA Projects Gallery. “Take it, it’s free”, says Christina Barrera, “I love to have freebies or something very cheap for people to take from a show.” She has printed and bound them for her exhibition Para Todos Todo, Free in the Open Air, using white paper with red, green, and black ink. “Palestine will be free!” reads at the back of my 17/80 copy.

Inside the zine is a conversation between curator Daniela Mayer and the artist, as well as a bold statement: “My artistic catharsis is about political thoughts. I don’t really make artwork that is distantly connected to the political, it is always at the forefront of my practice. Even if I think it’s important, I can’t bring myself to make work that deals exclusively with beauty and poetry because it makes me feel like I’m ignoring reality.”

Installation of Para Todos Todo, Free in the Open Air by Christina Barrera, curated by Daniela Mayer. Photo by Adam Reich, courtesy of MAMA Projects.

For Christina, arts and politics go hand in hand, both rooted in a strong family heritage. Her parents migrated from Colombia to the US in 1982, and she was born in Florida seven years later. Her dad was, in her own words, “very politically savvy” – “a disappointed intellectual / failed union organizer who became many kinds of laborer after immigrating.” She remembers rolling her eyes a lot at his dad’s discourse, only to eventually realize how much it had influenced her vision as well. Her mum was an elementary school art teacher, so from a very young age, Christina would stay at an art club after school waiting for her mum to finish work. As a teenager, she would also help her run the summer camp.

“[My parents] were very hugely influential and very supportive”, she admits, “what they couldn’t give me in [terms of] material support, I received in the fact that no one ever told me that art wasn’t a real career or that it didn’t matter.” 

She went to a public middle school and high school of the arts and attended the Maryland Institute College of Art on a full scholarship. “I think being at those schools also shaped my political education,” she says, “and then with my mom being a public school teacher, I was very aware of the inner workings of the district and at my high school.” She continues: “We were constantly campaigning every year to save the schools of the arts because there was never enough funding. My whole life has been in schools in some way.”

Christina Barrera. Sin Dios y Sin Ley (Without God and Without Law), 2024. Pastel and charcoal on paper. Courtesy of MAMA Projects and the artist.

Barrera worked in pre-college programs, later as an admissions counselor for SVA (School of Visual Arts), and now she works at Hunter College, where she got her MFA. “I really wanted to be a teacher at the university level ... but it’s so exploitative and so awful that I think I would become a union leader and then I will never make any art,” she admits.

Knowing her background and her strong political conviction, the space at her first solo exhibition in New York deserves a deeper, much closer second look.

Welcoming us to the gallery, there is an activist march of pastel and charcoal coquí(frog)-esque figures that parade in a full circle surrounding the room. Barrera’s apparently cheerful, vibrant, and somehow “cute” characters are not marching against anything, they are marching in favor. “I think of them as already free people. They’re moving without borders,” she explains, “I wanted it to be less about protests and more about ritual and festival. Imagine a different kind of reality, like in autonomous zones or encampments, where people build something else for a short period of time.”

Christina Barrera. Nada Menos! (Nothing Less/None Other), 2024. Pastel, charcoal, ink on paper. Courtesy of MAMA Projects.

This series titled The Procession imbues protests that are socially and politically engaged by nature with a festive meaning. Barrera calls them “a Revolutionary Festival.”

And it looks indeed like a different, more hopeful reality. The processioners are autonomous, walking in their personalized costumes where weapons (if any) are mere accessories. “One of them is carrying this weapon, but it’s a ceremonial weapon,” she says. “I have a ceremonial sword from my grandfather who was in the military in Colombia, for example, and it’s blunt, not real.” They carry flags with declarative phrases, both in Spanish and in English, as Christina goes back and forth between languages as it suits her: “You know, some things are untranslatable and I’m like ‘this one has to be in Spanish,’” she says.

By following them, visitors become processioners themselves, encountering other symbols on their way. Daniela Mayer, curator of the exhibition, explains that the positioning of every artwork in the show is very intentional, created to be in conversation with one another.

Looking up at the wall, we see a representation of a liberated, festive world; looking down at the ground reminds us of a very different, harsh reality. In I Build With Bricks Laid Down Before I Was Born, a collection of 30 rusted, steel hands of different sizes are placed around the gallery floor. The piece is informed by the recent images coming out of Gaza, but it doesn’t purport to be a direct reproduction or representation of these images per se: “It’s about a feeling, I don’t want to capitalize on a moment or someone’s suffering,” she says. “It stems from seeing images of people being crushed by rubble every day or flattened by tanks, but it’s also reminiscent of all the people who have been crumpled working towards liberation throughout history, actually and metaphorically.”

Christina Barrera. I Build With Bricks Laid Down Before I Was Born, 2024. Steel. Fabrication assistance by Michael Clayton. Courtesy of MAMA Projects.

The fragility of the hands is mirrored by a delicate fence structure that slices across the gallery space. The precarious steel sculpture I Hope the Fences We’ve Mended Fall Down Beneath Their Own Weight (2022) is, in Mayer’s words, a thoughtful obstacle. When the room is more crowded, you’re encouraged to move around it, as a reminder of the things that separate us; the ideas and physical borders meant to divide people. According to Barrera, the piece, whose title is borrowed from the lyrics of the song “No Children” by The Mountain Goats, speaks to an industrial infrastructure that is crumbling under broken systems and unjust status quos: “It’s this idea of fences that have been mended but are falling down under their own weight because they haven’t been properly maintained, how we don’t build our society anymore or build anything that serves society,” she explains. 

Christina Barrera. I Hope the Fences We’ve Mended Fall Down Beneath Their Own Weight, 2022. Steel hardware cloth, paper pulp, cotton mason line, ink, charred cedar planks, steel. Photo by Cary Whittier, courtesy of the artist.

Breaking the flow of the procession around the space, Barrera has also covered the gallery’s columns by creating community boards, a tribute to this key tool used by grassroots movements. The installation titled I’m Not Looking For Work But I Wanna Talk to You is a collection of one-of-a-kind inkjet and risograph prints, featuring a thorough amalgam of images. We see business cards without any contact details: “Not looking for a job. No phone. No address. No business. No money. No income. No worries. No job. No prospects. No connections. No liabilities. No taxes. No debts.” We see quotes from tarot cards, or a mini-zine from artist Emory Ris that reads: "I'm Looking For a New Job." There is also a photocopy of pages from the zine Zapatistas in Their Own Words, in which the slogan "Para Todos Todo, Para Nosotros Nada" (For Everyone Everything, For Us Nothing) inspired the title of this exhibition. The second part of the title comes from Barrera's own poetry, Libre en Pleno Aire (Free in the Open Air), which evokes a kindred craving for autonomy and freedom.

Christina Barrera. I’m Not Looking For Work But I Wanna Talk to You, 2024. Inkjet prints, Risograph prints, unique photo copies. Courtesy of MAMA Projects.

The more you look around the room, the more details you will be able to find. Directly overhead are many eye stickers, evoking surveillance cameras. "They're inspired by the Neighborhood Watch logo," says Mayer. "They’re strategically placed to underscore the ongoing surveillance of marginalized bodies and the current use of drone footage by police to track protestors."

Installation view. Photo by Adam Reich, courtesy of MAMA Projects.

Barrera explains that she is not making calls for any particular kind of revolution, but at the same time, she doesn’t want to create completely utopic works. For her, it is about imagining an alternative future without thinking that there’s a state of pure perfection. “It’s possible to imagine something else. We’re not forsaken. It’s not a done deal,” she says. “We need to imagine what the future looks like in order to start moving towards there.”

Christina Barrera: Para Todos Todo, Free in the Open Air curated by Daniela Mayer is on view until August 17th at MAMA Projects, NY.

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