Picturing the Border Series: Cristina Martínez and Eugenio Salas
Chef Cristina Martínez and Eugenio Salas will collaborate to prepare small bites for guests using Salas’s Communal Griddle (Comal Comunero) outside of the Berman Museum.
Details
Cristina Martínez and Eugenio Salas both work with food as an art form. Martínez is a Mexican chef, a James Beard Foundation Award winner, and an immigration activist. Salas is a Mexican-Canadian artist who carries out participatory performative actions employing media, print and cooking.
Salas, like many immigrants, entered to the food industry after moving to Canada and being unable to pursue his career as a journalist. As a self-taught artist he has crafted an artistic practice wherein the cooking and serving of food visualizes the migrant experience and highlights the ways that food connects us all to pressing social and political issues of the day.
Martínez uses her platform as a celebrated chef to address the rights of migrants in the U.S. and the issues that they face. She started the #Right2Work movement and has recently advocated for the reopening of the Friendship Park along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In this iteration of the “Picturing the Border” Speaker Series, Martínez and Salas will collaborate to prepare small bites for guests using Salas’s Communal Griddle (Comal Comunero) outside of the Berman Museum from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.. Then guests will be invited inside to hear the artists speak about their work. Jovanna Venegas will moderate the talk.
Please register using the form below to ensure we have enough refreshments available. This event is free and open to the public. Please consider adding a donation to your ticket price to support more free events like this at the Berman Museum of Art.
is a Mexican chef and immigration activist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Cristina is a native of Capulhuac, Mexico, and she is an undocumented immigrant who crossed the border from Juárez into the United States.
She found a job in Philadelphia as a pastry chef in an Italian restaurant, where she met and married Benjamin Miller, a U.S. citizen. Cristina was fired from the restaurant when they discovered her undocumented status, and she began cooking food for other Mexican workers in her apartment.
As demand grew for Cristina’s home-made barbacoa, she and Miller began selling tacos from a pushcart on weekends. In 2015, they opened a permanent restaurant, South Philly Barbacoa. In 2016, Bon Appetit magazine named it one of the top ten best new restaurants in America. Cristina and Miller are active in supporting undocumented immigrants in the restaurant industry, establishing an organization, the Popular Alliance for Undocumented Workers’ Rights. In 2017, Univision produced a Spanish-language podcast about Cristina, called Mejor vete, Cristina (You Better Leave, Cristina), which won Mejor Cobertura Multimedia (Best Multimedia Coverage) at the 2018 Ortega y Gasset Awards. Cristina was also featured on an episode of the Netflix series Chef’s Table in 2018. In 2019, Cristina was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic.
Eugenio Salas
is a self-taught Mexican-Canadian artist based in Lënapehòkink, the ancestral homelands of the Lenape peoples, also known as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Disrupting social roles and dynamics and looking to explore the symbolic spaces that unfold, Salas’ practice involves collaborative process-based projects. Salas carries out participatory performative actions employing media, print, and cooking.
Jovanna Venegas
Jovanna Venegas currently serves as curator of SculptureCenter in New York, where she organized Open Process: Alexa West (2024) and has upcoming exhibitions with ASMA and Luana Vitra. From 2017 to 2023, she was at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, ending her tenure as associate curator of contemporary art. During her time there, she curated New Work: Fernando Palma Rodríguez (2023) and Bay Area Walls: Liz Hernández (2021), and co-organized New Work: Wu Tsang Presents Moved by the Motion (2021); Shifting the Silence (2022); the 2022 SECA Art Award; and Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales (2023-2024). Additionally, she served as curatorial advisor for the Whitney Biennial 2022 on the U.S./Mexico border region and has contributed to projects and exhibitions at MUAC (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo) and La Tallera, both in Mexico City. Venegas holds a BA in art history from the University of California at Los Angeles and an MA in curatorial practice from the School of Visual Arts, New York.
About the “Picturing the Border” Speaker Series
With this series we aim to amplify the contemporary work of local artists, activists and scholars who, like Enrique Bostelmann, focused their attention on the U.S.-Mexico border. “Picturing the Border” seeks to address the many ways that individuals represent, imagine, and conceptualize the border beyond its status as a geographic location or a political division. Our speakers come from a variety of professions and backgrounds from which they will speak about the border and its place within their work, while also providing an opportunity to evaluate the work of Enrique Bostelmann (on display in the Berman Museum’s Main Galleries) and recognize the resonances and distinctions between his decades long career and that of local Latinx/é artists.
