Frieze Los Angeles makes a good show of caring about the city’s besieged immigrants by hanging Patrick Martinez’s neon signs, reading “Deport Ice” and “Nobody is illegal”, outside the exhibition tent. But it has alienated—and marginalised—its own border-oriented, non-profit partner Ambos.
“We were supposed to be Frieze’s special guests. And we feel like we’re being censored, racially profiled and discriminated against,” says the Ambos founder and artist Tanya Aguiñiga. Having worked with the fair for five years, she says she will not continue beyond this weekend.
According to published maps of the fair, Ambos was supposed to be located in a small space in between the Sprüth Magers and Anthony Meier stands. On Wednesday (25 February), it was relocated to a spot away from the gallery stands, across from the coat check before the official entrance to the fair. “We’re now outside the security checkpoint—we’re the Tijuana of the tent,” Aguiñiga says.
The artist Nancy Baker Cahill underscored that point by posting a photo of the Ambos display behind heavy bars on Instagram. The bar imagery, publicly available through her 4th Wall augmented-reality app, comes from a 2022 border-wall project she did with Aguiñiga. “While [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids continue to terrorise LA communities, while immigrants and Black and Brown folks walk around with new levels of fear and anxiety, [here is] another border drawn by the affluent and unaccountable,” Baker Cahill wrote.
Nancy Baker Cahill, Border Wall, Tanya Aguiñiga (2022), via the 4th Wall augmented-reality app Nancy Baker Cahill
Frieze’s director for the Americas Christine Messineo declined to comment, sending the following statement via a spokesperson: “As with any large-scale live event, layouts can evolve during installation for operational reasons. We don’t comment on on-site decisions during setup, but we value Ambos’s participation in the fair and are pleased to be presenting Botánica Ambos as part of this year’s programme.”
Ambos was alerted to its relocation the day before the fair opened. Volunteers had been preparing to install a leafy botánica, or spiritual healing shop, selling such items as votive candles, anti-Ice sweatshirts and “queer milagros”—amulets made by LGBTQ refugees and asylum-seekers in Ambos ceramics workshops in Tijuana. But first the volunteers, mainly women of colour, sat down for their take-out lunch from Taco Bell and, Aguiñiga says, saw their gallerist neighbours pointing at them and laughing. Soon after that, Messineo spoke to her about finding a new site for Ambos.
Sales impacted
“You cannot do this to people of colour, queer and Jewish folks and not expect it to be felt deeply within our bodies. You’re replicating what’s happening within this country,” Aguiñiga says. She adds that art-fair staff made matters worse by insisting the installation in the new site occupy one shelf “‘to look minimal and clean’, which was triggering for everybody, because it insinuated our stuff was dirty”. Aguiñiga pushed back and created a fuller, though not complete, display.
The move has already had financial consequences, the Ambos founder says, who does not pay or receive any money for the space. “[Thursday] we saw $6,000 in sales; last year, we were at $17,000 for the same day.”
Ambos’s plan, to establish a scholarship for undocumented art students in community colleges, is now in danger according to Aguiñiga. “I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s looking like we might just make back what we invested.”