The theme and focus of the conference, “Radiantes Fronteras: Visualizing the Periphery as Core,” invites participants to question and re-envision physical, political, oceanic, cultural, and metaphorical borders. Often framed as precarious sites of division and exclusion, borders are in fact vibrant spaces of artistic production where knowledge, resistance, affirmation, and collective imagination flourish. By centering the periphery as a generative core, the conference seeks to illuminate how artists and cultural workers engage borders as dynamic zones of connection, movement, and possibility. We welcome proposals that acknowledge border realities, challenge dominant narratives, and explore how visual practices reshape understanding of place, identity, and power across local, regional, national, and global contexts.

Located at the heart of the U.S.-Mexico border, where three states (Texas, New Mexico, and Chihuahua) and two countries converge along the Río Grande, the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region – la frontera – offers a unique perspective on the visual arts. This binational landscape fosters artistic practices shaped by ancestral belonging, hybridity, resistance, and cultural dialogue. We are excited to welcome you to our communities, where the visual arts are a conduit for new forms of connection, shared understanding, and collective imagination across borders.

We seek proposals that explore and affirm the cultural and artistic production of people of Latina/o/x ancestry in the United States in the following categories:

1. Movement: Immigration, Emigration, Migration, Detention, and Deportation (including Self-Deportation)
Focuses on artistic representations of movement across borders, including migration, detention, deportation, and return. Presentations examine how artists engage movement as a site of memory, testimony, resilience, and personal as well as collective experience.

2. Diaspora and Community Building
Focuses on how diasporic communities cultivate networks of solidarity, cultural continuity, and belonging. Presentations examine how artistic practices emerge from migration generate new collective identities, forms of cultural exchange, and connections across time and space.

3. Community-based Art
Focuses on community-rooted artistic practices reclaiming public space through murals, graffiti, and sculpture, including alternative cultural venues fostering art projects. Presentations examine collective authorship, participatory processes, and how art shapes civic engagement and broader cultural dialogue.

4. Art Responding to Industrial Expansion
Focuses on artistic responses to industrialization’s social and environmental transformations, including maquiladoras, extraction, militarization, and ecological change. Presentations examine how artists address labor, landscape, and environmental impacts within their communities.

5. Borderland and Diasporic Aesthetics
Focuses on visual languages shaped by transnational exchange and cultural hybridity. Presentations examine how artists develop aesthetic frameworks reflecting layered identities, challenging fixed national, cultural, and geographic boundaries through creative practices.

6. Art as Affirmation and Resistance
Focuses on creative practice as a means of sustaining cultural memory while addressing surveillance, erasure, and marginalization. Presentations examine how artistic expressions function as both affirmation of identity and cultural or political resistance.

7. Museum Studies as Praxis
Focuses on museums, archives, galleries, and cultural centers as sites of inquiry and intervention. Presentations examine strategies that foreground community collaboration, institutional critique, and decolonial approaches to exhibition-making, collections, and public engagement.

8. Art Production from Indigenous, African-descended, Gendered, and LGBTQ Communities
Focuses on artistic practices that interrogate structures of race, gender, and sexuality. Presentations examine works centering embodied knowledge, intersectional perspectives, and alternative frameworks for understanding identity and cultural production.

9. Art Production from Caribbean and South American Diasporas
Focuses on artistic practices emerging from Caribbean and South American diasporas. Presentations examine how these works situate borderland discourse within broader hemispheric histories, cultural exchanges, and transnational artistic networks.

10. Chicana/o/x Art
Focuses on the political, spiritual, and aesthetic traditions of Chicana/o/x artistic production. Presentations examine how artists engage the cultural and symbolic significance of fronteras to reconsider nationhood, belonging, and cultural memory.

11. Digital Media (including AI)
Focuses on how digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, reshape artistic production, intellectual property considerations, and circulation. Presentations examine how artists employ digital tools to question representation, collaboration, and emerging imaginaries of borders and mobility.

12. Latina/o/x Futurism
Focuses on speculative artistic practices that draw on ancestral knowledge and cultural memory to imagine alternative futures. Presentations examine how artists position their communities as sites of possibility, innovation, and transformative cultural expression.

13. Selected Artist Showcases
Focuses on in-depth engagement with individual artists whose practices illuminate key program themes. Presentations examine specific works or bodies of work to deepen discussion of border and diasporic histories, identities, and complex forms of cultural production.

Submission: We invite you to submit a 350-word abstract and a short bio by May 31, 2026, for review by the UTEP Conference Committee. Panel and Roundtable proposals are also welcome and should include an abstract for each presentation (up to 350 words each) and a short bio for each participant. Panels should consist of no more than three presenters and one moderator.

The Conference Program Committee will review all submissions and notify selected presenters via email by July 8, 2026. Accepted presenters must pre-register and pay registration fees via IUPLR website.

Registration Categories:

Early-bird registration: $125.00 until September 30, 2026

Regular registration: $175.00 after September 30, 2026

On-site registration: $200.00

UTEP students: Free but must pre-register

All other students (with ID): $35.00

General Public: $35.00