Mexico border fence

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.

A new Black Box space currently serves as a mini-movie theater for a New Orleans-themed 2008 video by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Also new and actually heard throughout the contemporary wing is a sound installation by Susan Philipsz in which she sings a haunting song from the 1961 movie "The Innocents."

There also is a new gallery devoted to temporary exhibits of prints, drawings and photographs. And you can contribute to the wing's aura of newness in a new workshop area in which there are artist talks and hands-on art-making activities.

Although most of the contemporary art installed in the wing's 16 galleries already will be familiar to regular museum-goers, the reinstallation provides juxtapositions to make you consider these familiar pieces anew.

There also are some brand-new pieces especially made for this space, such as two pieces by the 24-year-old Maryland Institute College of Art graduate who goes by the name Gaia. One of his pieces, "12 Portraits of Remington Residents," covers a gallery wall with printed wallpaper depicting a dozen residents of a north Baltimore neighborhood posing against rowhouse facades.

And the reopened contemporary wing also provides a home for somewhat older works of art that recently have been acquired by the BMA.

One of the most impressive pieces currently on view was given as a gift to the BMA in 2011. It's an untitled 1956 acrylic-and-oil painting by the late abstract painter Morris Louis. His trademark style involved pouring and staining paint in thin layers on canvas, but there was a brief period in the mid-1950s when he experimented with other approaches to abstraction.

The exhibited Louis painting has splattered drips and rough-edged zones of black, red, yellow, purple and other colors that are more thickly applied and colorful than one expects from this artist.

Not only is it an exciting painting, but it's a rare one. Louis evidently came to regret this approach and destroyed most of the 300 paintings he made this way. The BMA painting is one of around 12 such paintings that survive.

Lous was among the abstract painters who became prominent in American art in the 1940s and '50s. One of the strengths of the contemporary wing remains its abstract paintings by artists including Clyfford Still, Grace Hartigan, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella.

The contemporary wing also does a fine job of showing how figuration gradually started to work its way back into an art world that had been critically dominated by abstraction. One of the old abstractionists, Philip Guston, turned to bluntly schematic figuration with the light bulb, shoes and one-eyed watchful figure depicted in his pink-hued oil painting "The Oracle" (1974); and hanging nearby is a pink-hued acrylic and tempera painting by a younger artist, Susan Rothenberg's "Siena dos Equis" (1975), whose outlined depiction of a horse is so schematic that it could pass for cave art.

Of course, figuration was a definitional attribute for the pop artists who came on the scene in the 1960s and ironically made abstraction suddenly seem old-fashioned.

Andy Warhol always has claimed more wall space in the contemporary wing than any other artist. The multiple examples demonstrate that he was more versatile than he's sometimes given credit for. Sure, there is an iconic figurative Warhol painting of a "Campbell's Soup Can (Turkey Noodle)" (1962), which remains close to its advertising art origins; but his varied stylistic ventures also include the synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink painting "Camouflage" (1986), whose green and brown pattern evokes both military references and abstract art methods.

Warhol isn't the only artist offering food for thought in the contemporary wing. The numerous stylistic offerings even include an untitled 1999-2000 artwork by Zoe Leonard that she made by letting banana, orange and grapefruit skins shrivel and rot.

Leonard has sewn stitches through each of these fruit skins, as if to remind us that such attempts at stabilization and preservation are doomed to fail. As she observes in an accompanying artist statement: "The very essence of the piece is to decompose."