About the Event

Join us for a unique artist conversation and workshop featuring artists Carolina Aranibar-Fernández and Gloria Martinez Granados in collaboration with Borderlands Restoration Network. The artists come together to share the importance of materiality in their artistic practice, highlighting how oral storytelling, record-keeping, and ritualistic practice interweave with important global concerns in their artwork. Following the conversation, Borderlands Restoration Network’s native plant rogram manager, Perin McNelis, will give a brief introduction to the organization’s efforts to conserve and restore native plant populations in southeastern Arizona and then lead participants in a seed-sowing activity. Participation will support a milkweed propagation project aimed at enhancing habitat for monarch butterflies and other at-risk insect pollinators along their migratory routes through the Arizona/Sonora borderlands. 

Carolina Aranibar-Fernández is a Bolivian-born interdisciplinary artist, educator, and arts administrator. Integrating art with social change for the past 10 years, Aranibar-Fernández has worked with artists, curated and co-developed public projects, and documented the stories of communities and organizations. Aranibar-Fernández’s art and praxis address concerns of displacement, privatization of land, environmental issues, and the invisible-exploited labor that supplies global trade. Her professional career as an artist includes numerous national and international exhibitions, including works featured at the National Museum of Art in Bolivia, the U.S./Mexico border fence, and the Kathmandu Triennale in Nepal and in New York, Los Angeles, Arizona, and Qatar.   

Gloria Martinez-Granados is a Phoenix-based artist, originally from Guanajuato, Mexico. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is inspired by her experiences, particularly those growing up undocumented in the United States and Indigenous practices of beading and textile work. Her practice blends printmaking, assemblage, installation, beadwork, weaving, and performance to develop themes around identity, futurity, place, home, and land. A member of the local Latina artist collective The Phoenix Fridas, Martinez-Granados earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in printmaking from Arizona State University in 2019. She has recently exhibited work at the Phoenix Art Museum as a Sally and Richard Lehmann Emerging Artists Awards Exhibition recipient, and currently her artwork is included in Son de Alla, Son de Aca, a group exhibition at Chicano Park Museum. 

The Borderlands Restoration Network Native Plant Program was founded in 2012 when a group of restoration practitioners identified and responded to the need for locally produced native plants. Native plants have spent centuries developing distinct adaptations to regional conditions, held deep in the plants’ genomes and expressed as increased drought-tolerance, cold-tolerance, and high-nectar quantities for local pollinators. The network’s mission is to promote and protect biodiversity by providing individuals, communities, and land managers access to restoration-quality plant materials and guidance for effective use. Borderlands Restoration Network offers organically grown plants and seeds specific to the Madrean Archipelago’s semi-arid highlands, focusing on those with high habitat value and in-situ survival rates.  

For further information about the Borderlands Restoration Network Native Plant Program, please visit the following. 

Borderlands Restoration Network Native Plant Program Website: BorderlandsPlants.org

Instagram: @BorderlandsPlants 

Facebook: @BorderlandsPlants