Join the Zolberg Institute in welcoming photographer Ada Trillo and her exhibit La Caravana to the University on March 26 at 6:30pm for an opening panel and reception.
Mar, a member of the migrant caravan from Honduras, participates in an LGBTQ wedding in Tijuana, Mexico. Gay marriage is illegal in Honduras.
In October 2018, Ada Trillo flew to Ciudad Hidalgo on the border of Guatemala, where the Caravan of Migrants was entering Mexico. Over the course of the following weeks, she traveled 2,600 miles to the U.S. border in Tijuana with 7,000 refugees, including 2,700 children, fleeing poverty and gang violence in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Through photography, video and interviews, she presents La Caravana not just as a political issue but primarily a humanitarian crisis. Trillo positions her images as a mirror to fake words, making visible the narratives that are missing from public consciousness. Many in her photographs are young women disguising themselves as men to avoid rape, many are persons with disabilities, many – LGBT people.
This is her first solo exhibition in New York.
“The people that I have met are not the criminals depicted by Donald Trump. I intend to tell their stories of bravery, strength and perseverance, that defy generalizations that intend to divide. I show what hope, and the loss of it, looks like for the asylum-seekers of our era.”
Join the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility in welcoming photographer Ada Trillo to The New School and hear a panel of experts discuss the documenting the migrant caravan as they travel seeking safety.
After the panel, enjoy a reception in the University Center Cafe. View the photos on display in the 4th floor Skybridge between 55 W. 11th Street and 66 W. 12th Street from March 26-31, 2020.
About the Photographer
Born in El Paso and brought up in Ciudad Juarez – at one time called the most violent city in the world – Ada Trillo explores in her work human rights crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border. Over the period of four years, Trillo traveled to Juarez to interview and photograph women in local brothels. Her series How Did I Get Here? (2017) exposes the nexus between rape and prostitution, women trafficking, and feminicidios—violent deaths of hundreds of women in Juarez. In La Bestia (2017), she documented perils faced by Central American migrants traveling across Mexico on cargo trains. If Walls Could Speak (2019) presents the challenges facing asylum seekers under the new “Remain in Mexico” policy. Involved directly in the work with affected communities, and donating the proceeds from her work to organizations that help them, Trillo is an artist whose documentary work verges on social practice.
Ada Trillo’s work is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was presented at the international festival of photography Cortona on the Move, Italy; University of The Arts and Saint Joseph’s University – both in Philadelphia (2019); the exhibition The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S., Shiva Gallery, John Jay College CUNY, New York; Passion for Freedom art festival, London; and Photo Meetings, Luxembourg (2018). Her work was featured in The Guardian, British Journal of Photography (UK); Hyperallergic, Smithsonian Magazine, HUFFPOST, CBS Philly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Weekly, Philadelphia Magazine, Philadelphia Gay News, F-Stop Photography Magazine, The Candid Frame (U.S.); Al Dia News, Telemundo 51 (Mexico); Fotomagazin, Photonews (Germany); Le Quotidien, and Wort Luxembourg (Luxembourg).
Ada Trillo is based in Philadelphia, PA, and Juarez, Mexico. She is 2019 fellow at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Philadelphia, and the Leeway’s 2019-2020 Visual Artist-in-Residence at Fleisher Art Memorial. In 2018 she received Leeway Foundation’s Art and Change Grant.
About the Curator
Monika Fabijanska is a New York-based art historian and independent curator who specializes in women’s and feminist art. Her critically acclaimed exhibition, The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S. at Shiva Gallery, John Jay College, was ranked the fifth best NYC art show in 2018 by Hyperallergic, and reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others.