Artists Join Mexican Children to Brighten Up US-Mexico Border Fence Cindy Carcamo - Los Angeles Times
go to original December 23, 2012

Carolyn Toronto touches up a painting on the southern side of the border fence separating Naco, Ariz., from the Mexican city of the same name. Toronto helps lead a group that's painted about 30 panels of the fence. (Wendy Layton/Los Angeles Times)

BISBEE, Ariz. — They can't tear it down, so they decided to do the next best thing. They painted it.

For nearly a year, a contingent of artists from southeastern Arizona has joined forces with Mexican children to paint portions of the 650 miles of border fence separating the United States and Mexico.

Some see the border wall as an obstruction, a political symbol of the chasm between two nations. Others view it as the first line in protection for the nation. These artists, who call themselves the Border Bedazzlers, view the barrier that snakes across the Sonoran Desert as a blank canvas.

So far, a collection of artists, children, a minister and musician turned 30 panels of rusted metal border wall into murals featuring rainbows, hearts and brilliant landscapes alongside declarations of friendship and peace.

They've colored only about a mile of the wall. Still, Bisbee artists Gretchen Baer and Carolyn Toronto say the effort has a profound result — building community between two nations that share a contentious and anxious relationship, fueled by calls to fortify the border from a raging drug war and mass migration.

"The wall that was built to keep us apart is bringing us together," Baer said of the four painting sessions they've held at the Mexican side of the fence in Naco, which abuts an Arizona town with the same name.

She hopes others who live along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico frontier will notice and take a paint brush to their local border wall, too.

"The goal is to just keep it going as long as we can," Baer said, driving to Naco on a recent day. Cans of paint bounced in the trunk of her car as she negotiated the desert highway, whizzing by green-and-white Border Patrol vehicles on the watch.

"There are hundreds of miles of border wall, which is like hundreds of miles of empty canvas," she said.

The idea came to Baer two years ago. The 49-year-old native of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, a 20-year resident of the eclectic desert town of Old Bisbee, is known for vibrant oil paintings. Baer thought it would be a good idea to bring art to what she called an ugly border wall. She created a couple of dozen shirts inscribed with the name Border Bedazzlers, but the effort didn't get off the ground until this year.

This spring, Toronto teamed up with Seth Polley, minister for St. John's Episcopal Church in Bisbee, to paint one panel of the border fence in Naco, Mexico. He provided the paint, she the manpower. The result is an image of two doves lifting up the Mexican and American flags, revealing a sunny desert road that appears to split the fence, toward a grinning sun.

"Wow, I have a lot of paint left over," Toronto told Baer after the project. "Let's keep doing it."

Read more at The Los Angeles Times

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