Alejandro Cartagena has spent a lot of time in photographic archives. He is a master of locating great images that he sequences in books for poetic and insightful juxtapositions. VSW invited Alejandro to be our 2017 Rick McKee Hock Artist-in-Residence. We wanted to support his work and we were curious what he, as a Mexican artist, thought of throngs of people in the USA voting for the idea of building a border wall between our countries. His generous and pointed response, A Small Make Believe Neighborhood, is a multi-generational story with a child’s sense of wonder and acceptance of all kinds of people and ideas. It makes a direct invitation to the reader to join in the colorful, playful, endlessly diverse neighborhood of the world. - Visual Studies Workshop
