This thesis explores various modes of experiencing art through the realms of the traditional museum and alternative museums/art organizations. The history of the museum is deeply entrenched in segregated and colonialist pasts, particularly in private and public displays of looted objects from around the world. In addition, museums have historically spotlighted and catered to white, European-based, male artists and audiences. These legacies have created a divide within the art world, particularly in how these traditional structures have excluded and alienated communities that have been marginalized (women, people of color, queer, etc.). Through explorations within the traditional and alternative museums/organizations in the United States and abroad, interviews, bell hooks’ theorizations and personal narratives, this thesis explores how cultural workers are restoring these severed bridges between Black, Indigenous, and other people of color’s (BIPOC) communities and the art world. Many museum workers are renovating the traditionalist museum from the inside, diversifying the artwork shown, creating more outreach and inclusion programs, and calling for the support/reorganization of the board and trustees. Alongside these efforts, alternative organizations to the museum are doing the work that oftentimes cannot be done within the traditionalist structures due to their more rigid internal structuring -- giving them greater opportunities to work in tandem with the diverse communities that they represent. Though their foundations vary, both traditional and alternative art organizations have created strong bridges between the artworld and BIPOC communities by prioritizing paid fellowships for artists/art workers, studio space, education on navigating the art world, and accessibility for the community to join and see the art on display. Ultimately, the necessity for variance within art spaces, how they’re structured, who they cater to, and what they have on display is necessary in order to accurately represent the vast, diverse field of art.

The complexity of the U.S.-Mexico border is rooted in a fixation on establishing a clear separation of land that is unsafe and safe, between them and us. Chicana cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa states, “A border is a dividing line, a narrow string along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition” (Anzaldúa 1987, 3). In her 1987 semi-autobiographical work, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she examines the U.S.-Mexico borderland as an in-between space that allows for physical, emotional, and creative transformation through the lens of nepantla, a Nahuatl term for the “space between, in the middle of, or in the midst of.” Recognizing that collective landscapes, specifically that of the U.S.-Mexico border, are separated through policy and physical barriers, filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu (b. 1963, Mexico City, Mexico) explores the permeability of the U.S.-Mexico border desert landscape through his mixed reality immersive installation, Carne y Arena (Virtualmente Presente, Fisicamente Invisible) (Flesh and Sand: Virtually Present, Physically Invisible) (2017). This thesis analyzes the use of virtual reality technologies as immersive storytelling tools in Carne y Arena through a social history of art and scholar Gloria Anzaldúa's reinterpretation of the concept of nepantla as a liminal space of transformation. González Iñárritu’s Carne y Arena makes visible the perils Latin American migrants face when crossing the Southwest desert in an experiential presentation. Through a socially conscious lens, he depicts real-life individuals and their stories with humanity and empathy. Carne y Arena draws attention to the dehumanization of Latin American migrants and transforms the U.S.-Mexico border landscape into a political theater of imagination, empathy, and memory.

Cuban abstract artist Dolores “Loló” Soldevilla was one of many artists in the mid-twentieth century grappling with the global Cultural Cold War’s heightened polemic of abstraction versus figuration. For Soldevilla, the battle to prove abstraction’s modern social relevancy would reach its peak in the sociopolitical context of Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. With mounting critical and revolutionary rhetoric against an abstract visual language, Castro’s Cuba all but required figurative art with pro-revolutionary content. Soldevilla returns to this stifling environment after a formative experience within the dynamic artist community of 1950s Paris. It is there, amongst both European and Latin American peers, that Soldevilla cemented the socially transformative abstraction she would confidently bring back to the island and apply to Cuba’s new revolutionary demands. Through a combination of her undeniably singular abstract aesthetic, her ability to showcase abstraction’s multiplicity, and a strategic presentation of her abstract productions post-1959, Soldevilla managed to persevere in a post-revolutionary climate determined to exclude her and remained steadfast in her belief of abstraction’s social relevance. This research establishes Soldevilla’s legacy of resilience and rightfully positions her as a pivotal figure of modern abstraction across Europe, Latin America, and Cuba.