Postcards from the Border: Paintings by Susan Lyman
Welcome to this digital gallery of collage painting to reckon with and reimagine landscapes in the U.S. borderlands.
By Todd Miller (Border Chronicle)
HAVANA TIMES – From high up in a helicopter, Border Patrol agents scour the ground below, looking for “something that looks out of place.” So said Keith Kincannon, supervisory agent of the CBP’s Office of Air and Marine Operations, in a 2022 interview with Cronkite News. “You know,” he continued, “right angles or colors you wouldn’t see out in a natural environment. It takes a lot of practice, even with all this technology.” This struck artist and wood sculptor Susan Lyman as “ridiculous,” she tells me, so she “tried to visually imagine such a thing.”
The result was Border Surveillance in the Grasslands, a painting in which superimposes a brightly colored quilt, with lots of right angles, on the high desert grasslands near the twin border towns of Sasabe. Three migrants, resembling the desert landscape itself, hide in the quilt’s folds. The painting is part of Lyman’s exhibit, Postcards from the Border, at the Tohono Chul Gallery in Tucson until February 23.
“I am documenting my visceral reaction,” the longtime artist says, “to the environmental destruction, death, inhumanity, and militarization at the border.”
Poet and Essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming describes her art in the essay Pleasure & Danger: On the Sculpture of Susan Lyman*: “Lyman gathers the misshapen, the castaway, the washashore, the scraps in the tree dump. She poses, shapes, sands, burnishes, colorizes, dots with burn marks, disassembles, reassembles—an improvisatory process transforming dead wood into objects animated by emotion and the quest for meaning.”
Although Deming is describing Lyman’s sculpture, there is the same spirit in her paintings from Postcards from the Border which she started in 2020 when she witnessed, up close, the “environmental devastation and weaponization” of the borderlands. She says that “tribal lands and scant water sources were desecrated, 150-year-old saguaros were toppled, animal migration was interrupted, and asylum seekers were forced to give up their meager belongings.”
Susan Lyman at the Postcards from the Border exhibit in the Tohono Chul Gallery in Tucson on January 29. (Photo by Todd Miller)
In the paintings of Postcards from the Border, she uses the method of collage to examine how “different eyes look at the same story” and to explore the areas where her observations intersect with the stories of dedicated photographers and journalists. “I painstakingly painted the photographs,” Lyman explained, “some from newsprint without much detail, and worked to make the landscape convincing.”
The 20 paintings in the exhibit capture the border’s absurdity, tragedy, and spirit, often all at the same time. Maybe it was just a coincidence that it opened right before the inauguration of Donald Trump, but it couldn’t have come at a better time. Not only do these paintings offer multiple layers to think about the border philosophically, politically, even spiritually, they ask us to reimagine this landscape, and perhaps even to see it alive again with its vibrant vegetation, massive mountains, and beautiful song.
Susan Lyman, Life and Death at the Border Wall, 2 (diptych), 2020, oil on board, 12 x 36. Based on a photo by Laiken Jordan.
Deming describes Life and Death at the Border Wall: “A heap of slaughtered saguaros lies near border wall construction. It’s a fibrous bundle of botanical corpses, their guts exposed. Impossible not to feel the vulnerability of these plant beings who have made the hard journey of adaptation to the desert’s demands.”
Susan Lyman, Crossing, 2024, oil on board, 12 x 12 in. Based on a photo by Laiken Jordahl.
In Crossing, a deer lies dead at the bottom of the border wall in southern Arizona. In times of climate turmoil, freedom of movement is more important than ever. Above hovers the hope of water.
Susan Lyman, Sentinel, 2023, oil on board, 12× 12in. Based on photos by Susan Lyman and Laiken Jordahl.
In Sentinel, slaughtered saguaros, the border road, and vehicle barriers are juxtaposed with a map that, with red dots, indicates where the remains of people migrating have been found.
Susan Lyman, El corredor de la muerte, 2022, oil on board, 12 × 12 in. Based on a photo by Nick Osa, USA Today.
Here, in El corredor de la muerte (The corridor of death), the end of the border wall is superimposed by the death map that hovers above the otherwise gorgeous landscape like an ominous cloud. That cloud reflects the 30 years—and the thousands upon thousands of deaths that have occurred—under the border deterrence strategy.
Susan Lyman, Hoodie, 2023, oil on board, 12 × 12 in. Based on photos by Susan Lyman and John Darwin Kurc.
In this painting, titled Hoodie, a sweat jacket snared on the border wall is juxtaposed with a massive dynamite explosion for wall construction that happened during the first Trump administration.
Susan Lyman, Drop All Belongings and Get in Line, 2022, oil on board, 12×12 in. Based on photos by John Darwin Kurc and Melissa del Bosque in The Border Chronicle.
Alison Hawthorne Deming: Drop All Belongings and Get in Line “foregrounds a red plastic bin overflowing with discarded garments of migrants, a strip of denuded land stretches into the distance, a scar marking the border’s incision through the green. Spilling out of the bin, each rumpled t-shirt is the keeper of an untold human story of desperation, vulnerability, and the courage to try for a better life. The landscape stretches out in silent indifference, suggesting that it’s up to us to care.”
* Alison Hawthorne Deming’s essay will appear in the catalog of Susan Lyman’s solo exhibition in March 2025, The Cadence of Uncertainty, at Provincetown Art Association and Museum (MA).
For more on the US-Mexico borderland and related issues visit: The Border Chronicle