This week on State of the Arts, a stirring look at what's lost and what's found at the U.S.-Mexico border.

An artist reimagines the saints for the modern day.

And a ceramicist pushes past her own boundaries.

These stories coming up on State of the Arts.

Hello, I'm Mary Paul.

Welcome to this week's show, where we bring you art stories from around the country.

We begin with an art installation based out of the southern Arizona borderlands.

We often hear about artists finding their voice.

After being confronted with the realities of loss and death faced by border crossers, two Arizona artists became determined to lend their voices to those who've been silenced.

El Sueno Americano, The American Dream, is a photographic essay of the items and belongings that were carried by migrant and asylum seekers that were confiscated when they were apprehended and taken to a border patrol facility.

I was the janitor there for 11 years.

I asked and was given permission to recover the food.

When I started doing that, I immediately encountered what was also being confiscated and discarded by the government.

Bibles, rosaries, family photographs.

So my project is documenting all the items that I personally found in the trash when I was working at the station.

This is the largest exhibition of this work and the first time that I invited another artist, Elizabeth Z. Pineda.

Her work, I just came across a couple years ago and when I was introduced to it, I was floored.

I got the opportunity to meet Tom in person and then Tom went through the gallery space and I remember to this day how shaken he was.

He kept saying, Elizabeth, I had no idea.

Elizabeth, I had no idea.

Within moments, it's like, my God, this is like the Vietnam Memorial Wall by Maya Lin.

I mean, it's just that powerful.

Tom called me the very next day and he said, we have to do something together.

I just knew in my gut that we have to exhibit together.

We have to bring our two bodies of work to further complete the experience.

I'm originally from Mexico City.

My parents brought me to the U.S.

when I was a child, 10 years old.

Children being separated at the border had a big impact on me.

Even though this had been my home for many years, I always felt like I couldn't call it home.

There was a part of me that had that sense of not belonging.

I started making work about my own experience, about the immigrant story.

So these issues have been at the heart of some things that I'm really in a profound way trying to give voice to and find reasons why it's happening and perhaps inform others.

Thinking about migrants who've perished in the desert has been a theme that became the heart of my work.

I was researching trying to source immigrant documents, much like there are documents of migrants at Ellis Island.

I came upon the website Humane Borders that has compiled a database of known migrant deaths in Arizona since the early 80s.

Part of what they do is they produce what is known as the Arizona Migrant Death Map, which is in essence a map of Arizona with many red dots along the landscape where people have died in the desert.

They're meant to inform people to let them know not to attempt the trek because eventually people will die.

I sat staring at my screen horrified.

I scrolled and wept.

I scrolled and wept and never got to even a third of the entirety of the document.

Then I began exploring ways that I could give voice to the document, a document that is a living document of people who no longer have life.

What I've done is I've printed the document in its entirety on silk.

I leave them mounded on the floor thinking of the collapsing of the body, that collapsing mound that can probably speak to what happens in those last moments.

I print them on silk thinking of the fragile substrate that it is, thinking also as we move around them they move with you.

It is almost like they're breathing, which is something that they no longer have.

My mom is from Oaxaca, Mexico and in Oaxaca the people consider corn as a gift from the gods.

In Mexico there's a saying, "Sin Maíz, No Hay País."

"Without corn there is no country."

And so I'm thinking of the different ways in which corn is significant.

I also think about it in terms of food as something that's being very accepted.

We all love Mexican food, but maybe not all love Mexican people.

My documents were deemed invalid when I applied for my passport for the first time in 2019.

So issues of belonging, issues of identity and erasure all flooded me at one point and I had to prove my identity.

I had been thinking about paper and documents and the validity of papers or the weight of papers.

And when I saw corn husks I knew immediately I was going to make cyanotype prints of these documents that were deemed invalid to give them back what was taken from them when they were deemed not valid.

My hope is that this experience allows the viewer to tap into their own sense of humanity, what that is, and how we treat each other with dignity and respect, to have people to tap into their better self.

Chills ran up and down my spine.

I'm a grandson of immigrants.

Fortunately they didn't have to come through the desert.

It's a beautiful exhibit.

It's a heartbreaking exhibit.

I feel like I need to go home and cry for an hour.

It's just a very heavy moving tragic reflection of the United States of America right now and our inhumanity to migrants.

I've been really moved already by the reaction of people.

And I can see already the sense of humanity and the care for another human being has really already been present and I'm really grateful for that.

New Mexico artist Vince Campos recreates traditional Catholic iconography with a modern spin, painting the saints as if they lived in today's world.

It's a technique he hopes will encourage his audience to find divine in the everyday.

What drew you to creating retablos?

Retablos were always kind of present in my life.

You see them in churches, you see them in restaurants, you see them in hotels, and you see these holy images and often if you're not familiar with that saint or practice the faith then you don't really know what they're about.

So I took an interest in the stories of the saints and I wanted to tell the story in a different way.

Talking about the stories of your pieces, this piece is titled San Lorenzo.

Can you tell me the story behind the imagery used in this one?

San Lorenzo is a saint and what I did was he was actually burned upon a grill for his faith.

So what I did was I took traditional imagery and I kind of did a modern twist on it.

So I like to think of saints as if they were here present today, the saints are all around us, they're here today, would you recognize a saint because they're not out there in their saint garb.

So I thought, hey, like San Lorenzo, it could be a hibachi chef.

So what I did was I took the flames as tattoos on his wrists and his martyr's palm and kind of put it on the grill and the flame to represent his story.

And it's told that he said, turn me over, I'm not done yet as he was being martyred.

That's why it says "Turn Me Over Grill."

Yeah, "Turn Me Over Grill," yes.

Are a lot of the pieces like based on real people that you meet in your life?

Yeah, so I like to think of it.

I try to look out for, look out knowing the stories of the saints and I try to relate them to people that I see anywhere.

This one is titled San Francisco.

Yes.

And it says like Santa Fe on his hat.

What's going on in this one?

This is San Francisco de Assisi and Saint Francis is a patron saint of Santa Fe and patron saint of animals, people in poverty.

So there's a story of him.

There was this wolf that was attacking the town of a small village next to where he was at.

And what he did was he let the people know, hey, I'm going to go talk to this vicious animal.

And he was able to reason with the animal through his relationship with animals.

So he came back to the village with the wolf by his side and the people really saw the miracles that he worked.

So in this image, what I did was I took the traditional image of him with the wolf behind him, but I wanted to add some modernization to the saint.

So how would you know this was Saint Francis, right?

If you saw him in today's world?

So what I did is I kind of made him like someone I know, like a buddy of mine with his tattoo sleeves.

And if you look closely, you'll see that he has the Santa Fe Cathedral on his shoulder and the birds that he's often depicted with.

So again, just telling the story in a different way.

I have a friend of mine.

He just like, he's obsessed with his dog and it's like, I think it's like an Alaskan Husky or something like that.

So I was like, dude, he looked just like this guy.

Oh, that's awesome.

I can understand being obsessed with your dog.

[laughter] [music] This is San Raphael, yes.

So he's often depicted with his, you know, holding his fish.

He's a patron saint of travelers.

So again, a buddy of mine that loves fishing, that's what he does.

It's, you know, summer, winter, he's out there fishing.

So I thought, how can I depict him in a modern world?

I kept to his same colors that you traditionally see.

And on his tattoos, you can see a Jesus fish.

You can see the mountains of New Mexico and he's holding a rainbow trout from northern New Mexico often seen.

So I found a connection to it.

That personal connection.

[music] So retablos are really steeped in like tradition and history.

How do you honor those traditions and the history while also taking like a very personal and modern approach?

So what I like to do is, of course I do a lot of research on the saints.

And I take those images and I find how they told the story to that particular piece and I try to retell it in a modern world.

So I look out for things that I relate to.

So northern New Mexico, what does your average northern New Mexico person look like?

Does he look like you and I?

He looks like your friends.

So I take those images and find things that relate to them.

And I retell the story to provoke the person viewing the retablo to ask them, "Hey, who is this guy?

Why does he have tattoos like that?"

I'm like, "Oh, well let me tell you the story."

And now they've learned.

And often enough, it catches a new kind of viewer.

It's a younger person that may not have known who these people were or have seen the images but didn't know what they meant.

So now they do.

They have an idea of the story and they have an appreciation of the saint and appreciation of the art form because, you know, this art form is indigenous to New Mexico.

So it's a way of keeping it alive and moving the art form forward as opposed to just the same traditional image that you don't question and you don't understand.

This type of take on traditional retablos is not to take away anything from traditional images that live on in New Mexico.

I think there will always be a place for traditional imagery, traditional retablos.

This is just simply helping the art form evolve.

And I hope that, you know, people are a lot more open to it as these retablos keep progressing.

Amy Sanders de Melo is an artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

As someone with visual impairments, she finds strength, peace and purpose in creating ceramic works.

Up next, we meet Amy and see her creations and techniques, including how she incorporates braille on porcelain.

[music] It's really important for me to ground myself.

I don't have solutions for many problems in our society and world and I think about those problems.

It just feels so hard and heavy sometimes.

If I focus on here and now, that at least for me is really important as a human being, is just feeling purposeful and feeling capable.

[sound of shaping clay] Ceramics is kind of an intensive process.

I learned early on not to get attached.

I literally had a professor from day one tell us not to get attached to our work because things go wrong at every step.

[music] I'm going to shape it now.

And it's pretty thin so it might collapse, but I'll see if I can avoid it.

I'm Amy Sanders de Melo.

I am a ceramic artist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Wheel throwing just involves the pottery wheel.

That's where I create my functional work.

So cups and bowls, faces.

I really appreciate that time just because it gets me a little bit out of my head and into my body and into this piece that I'm making that I can kind of just get lost in the physics of it.

[music] I know where it's looking.

I don't really like it.

[laughs] I tend to work in batches.

So I try to create between four to ten pieces at a time.

Right now I'm centering which this is the hardest part for most people.

I grew up on a farm so it was very active and very much about problem solving and there's always this appeal about manual labor to me just knowing that you can kind of create something for yourself or for your loved one.

I'm kind of a maniac because I like really thin walls which can be my downfall sometimes.

Just going to do that.

But those textures will just leave like spaces where the glaze can pool and in some cases like it's just a really nice variation like for where you can hold up use.

And then I do this, I don't think the smartest way but it works for me.

After I've thrown my piece on the wheel I let it kind of sit to the side for a couple days so it becomes leather hard.

Then you can flip your piece over and trim the foot on the bottom.

My least favorite part but it's the necessary part.

I just hold it in place by putting these little lugs of clay on the side.

Do the middle first.

Yeah it's kind of satisfying to watch the little shaving.

And then I'm writing in Braille on those pieces.

When people first meet me they can't tell that I have hearing loss and I lip read a lot or that I have severe vision loss.

So this was a nice way for me to kind of put that on display and say like hey disability looks different for everyone and blindness is a spectrum.

The reason that I began using Braille on ceramics is because of my vision loss which is a result of Usher Syndrome which is this genetic disorder that I have.

That's what's causing my hearing loss and then that's what's causing my vision loss.

So very slowly I'm just losing my peripheral vision and it's kind of tunneling in.

So I think right now I have between 10 and 15 degrees of vision left.

You're just going to have 180.

That just forces you to adapt and kind of modify how you live your life continually.

So when I initially started writing on my work it was an exploration of all the feelings, all the negative feelings, all the fear, the anger, the frustration and then an exploration of all the good things that I've learned from having this disease.

Now it's kind of morphed more into meditation so a lot of the phrases that I use are phrases that maybe people have said to me or things that I want to embody more of.

Like this one says look for beauty in the world.

Those reminders I think helped me.

Once I've written a Braille on it then it goes through its first firing.

Basically that just hardens the clay a bit more.

It becomes like a porous ceramic vessel and then I glaze the piece.

Red Heat is a community clay studio with a two-fold kind of purpose.

One for professional ceramic artists to find community and to collaborate.

And the second just as an outreach to the general community of Tulsa for people to pursue ceramic arts.

We started just with a few members and now we have over 40, 45 members and a really close community of people that support each other inside the studio and outside the studio.

I do feel really lucky because I have a community space where I have access to all kinds of people from all walks of life.

So there are a lot of really dynamic conversations that happen there and we talk about anything.

So that is a really wonderful way to stay connected and to feel human and to still feel connected to the words that I'm making.

And then it goes through its second firing and I like to use the gas kiln.

It's a bit more atmospheric than our electric kiln.

There's something going on inside the kiln that's unpredictable.

Sometimes that can lead to failure but it can also lead to something that's really magical.

Amy is a member here in the studio but she also teaches classes which has been really wonderful.

All right so now I will start the kiln.

She's also one of my staff members hired to fire kilns, help mix glazes.

So she's very active in a variety of ways.

It's really important to have someone like Amy because Amy is an emerging artist and is showing her work on a national level.

I had the opportunity to be a visiting artist at Pottery Northwest in Seattle.

It was my first time ever doing something like this.

I spent a few days in Seattle, installed my exhibition, gave an artist talk, I led a lot of workshop live there.

It was brief and fast and a lot of work but it was really wonderful.

After the piece had gone through the gas firing, I'm adding gold luster to the surface of the braille and it goes through one final third firing.

On this level I have all the little tiny guys.

They're just so little and people love tiny things.

Some of these I put like right on the edge of the shelf so that the flame will touch it and it will give it that like flash of purple.

But typically it would look like this without that purple.

Some of them are my favorite because of the color variations that happen in the kiln and I don't think I can ever achieve that again.

So again that kind of reminds me of life.

Like there are moments when everything's aligned just right for you to just experience the most perfect little moment and that stays with you.

And then this one's kind of fun because I wasn't expecting that.

So it's just a little, just a little surprise inside your cup.

I try to maintain like a good work-life balance between the studio and being at home.

When there's deadlines that kind of goes off the window a little bit but I've really been working on gardening a lot.

That's kind of been my big side project this past year.

I think it's just a continuation of like my desire to have my hands doing things and working with the natural world around me, you know, going back to clay, like why I like working with clay.

I think a lot about my own childhood.

I didn't see other kids with disabilities.

I didn't see adults with disabilities.

I didn't see a lot of people of color.

I didn't see a lot of immigrants like my mom.

I felt kind of different.

Like I felt like I didn't quite belong here.

And I guess my hope is that other children and families seeing work made by a blind and technically a deaf blind artist.

Maybe they can feel comfort knowing that they could be artists or that they could pursue something that is kind of against the norm.

Thank you for joining us this week on State of the Arts.

I'm your host Mary Paul.

We'll see you again next time.