Brushstrokes of Power:
The politics of painting the border
Borrando La Frontera, Tijuana, MX (2012). Photo courtesy of Ana Teresa Fernández.
In 2015, I had the privilege of working with artist Ana Teresa Fernández and a coalition of women/femme cultural producers in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands on a project we called the Binational Arts Residency (2015 - ). Together, we organized residencies with women political artists whose work confronted the realities of border politics. That year, we had the unique opportunity to collaborate with Fernández in recasting her Borrando la Frontera project in Nogales, Mexico, where we collectively “erased” the border wall through art.
A decade after that collaboration, I was confronted with an image of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, acting under Trump’s directive, at the border wall, painting the new border wall black with the explicit intention of burning the flesh of undocumented migrants. The bodies of these two women, both standing at the wall with brushes in hand, struck me as uncannily familiar yet radically opposed in purpose. This essay is my attempt to reflect on these two acts of painting the border wall and the competing futures that these gestures aim to produce.
A decade after that collaboration, I was confronted with an image of the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, acting under Trump’s directive, at the border wall, painting the new border wall black with the explicit intention of burning the flesh of undocumented migrants. The bodies of these two women, both standing at the wall with brushes in hand, struck me as uncannily familiar yet radically opposed in purpose. This essay is my attempt to reflect on these two acts of painting the border wall and the competing futures that these gestures aim to produce.
Black border wall. Department of Homeland Security photo by Tia Dufour. Public Domain
At the edge of a nation, the U.S.–Mexico border wall stands as more than a physical barrier. It is a monument, a screen for white nationalist projection, and increasingly, a canvas of contested meaning. Two women, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and artist Ana Teresa Fernández, have taken up the wall not only as a political object but also as a site of political performance. Each paints it with a brush/roller, yet in radically different hues and for opposing reasons. One paints it black to inflict harm, intensify its presence, and reinforce state power. The other paints the wall sky blue to symbolically erase its presence and imagine a world without it. These acts, while formally similar, reflect an ideological chasm. Their contrasting use of color, black and blue, reveals divergent imaginaries: one rooted in carceral nationalism, the other in feminist refusal and decolonial poetics.
On August 19, 2025, Noem led efforts to paint the wall matte black, boasting that the act would deter migration and reinforce national security. The color black, however, is far from neutral. In the United States, it has long been associated with militarism, authoritarianism, and discipline. As Susan Sontag argues, political regimes often aestheticize violence to make it appear orderly, even beautiful (Sontag 22). The black paint does not merely cover the wall; it weaponizes it. In the desert sun, black absorbs and radiates heat, transforming the wall into a punishing surface that burns human skin. This increased heat of the border wall parallels the rapid escalation of violence, torture, and exclusion of undocumented migrants perpetrated under the second Trump Administration.
On August 19, 2025, Noem led efforts to paint the wall matte black, boasting that the act would deter migration and reinforce national security. The color black, however, is far from neutral. In the United States, it has long been associated with militarism, authoritarianism, and discipline. As Susan Sontag argues, political regimes often aestheticize violence to make it appear orderly, even beautiful (Sontag 22). The black paint does not merely cover the wall; it weaponizes it. In the desert sun, black absorbs and radiates heat, transforming the wall into a punishing surface that burns human skin. This increased heat of the border wall parallels the rapid escalation of violence, torture, and exclusion of undocumented migrants perpetrated under the second Trump Administration.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is painting the border black. Department of Homeland Security photo by Tia Dufour. Public Domain
In this sense, Noem’s gesture functions within what Achille Mbembe terms “necropolitics,” the state's power to determine who may live and who must die by controlling space and movement (Mbembe 40). The wall, painted black, becomes an instrument of slow death. Its appearance, temperature, and materiality reinforce the logics of sovereignty (nationhood) through deterrence. Noem enacts a masculinized nationalism, a display of strength through containment and punishment. As Sara Ahmed notes, emotions such as fear and pride “stick” to certain symbols, mobilizing affect in the service of power (Ahmed 11). The wall becomes even more of a symbol of adhesive violence, cloaked in fear and authority.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is painting the border black. Department of Homeland Security photo by Tia Dufour. Public Domain
Conversely, Ana Teresa Fernández’s iterative project Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border) (2012 - ) seeks not to fortify the wall, but to make it disappear both visually and symbolically. She paints sections of the wall sky blue, carefully matching the horizon to create the illusion that the dividing line has vanished. Her intervention is a form of countervisuality, which Nicholas Mirzoeff describes as a refusal to see through the eyes of the state and a practice of seeing [an] otherwise (Mirzoeff 24), or put another way, of seeing an elsewhere. Where Noem paints to amplify the wall’s dominance, Fernández paints to dissolve it. She restores the continuity of sky and land, inviting imagination into a space otherwise marked by surveillance. Crucially, Fernández often invites local residents to join her. This collective act of erasing the border transforms the project into civic resistance, blurring the line between art and protest, and between individual expression and communal solidarity.
Borrando La Frontera, Agua Prieta, MX. (2018). Photo by Jenae Sanchez
The color blue itself resists the material and symbolic weight of black. Where black absorbs heat, blue reflects light. Where black evokes fear and finality, blue suggests calm and continuity. Blue is cooling and restorative. It counters the (literal) burn of militarized presence with softness and breath. As a symbolic force, Fernández’s color palette invokes images of water or air, which are linked to movement and currents, denying the wall’s claim to permanence. Her work gestures toward a different order, one rooted in care and the possibility of erasure, not through denial but through disruption.
Artist Ana Teresa Fernández paints "Borrando La Frontera" (2015), Nogales, MX. Photo by Mary Stephens
This contrast is not only political but gendered. Noem’s act aligns with the militarized regimes of the contemporary right, asserting control through visual dominance. Fernández, as a Latina woman and border artist, works within a decolonial and feminist frame. Her act is ontological, not decorative. As Gloria Anzaldúa writes in Borderlands/La Frontera, the border is not just a line but an open wound, a space of hybridity and possibility (Anzaldúa 25). Fernández’s illusion of disappearance reclaims the wall as a contested site where colonial impositions can be unsettled, however briefly, through imagination and poetics.
The juxtaposition shows how women participate in patriarchal systems. Patriarchy is not sustained by men alone; it relies on (white) women who adopt and enact its logics of control. Noem, though a woman, embodies masculinized nationhood, reinforcing the state through an aesthetic of violence. Her presence demonstrates how women legitimize patriarchal power precisely because they appear to disrupt expectations of authority. In this way, gender inclusion within state power reproduces domination rather than liberation.
Fernández resists by refusing patriarchy’s claim to permanence. Her collective painting practice is a reorientation of power. Patriarchy disciplines both land and bodies, treating them as objects of control. By painting sky over steel, Fernández calls into question what has been naturalized as fixed. Inviting others, especially women and border communities, she redistributes authorship and authority, undermining the hierarchies on which patriarchal and colonial projects depend. In becoming a shared surface of creativity rather than a weapon of exclusion, the wall gestures toward small but vital practices where care, solidarity, and tenderness take shape as forms of resistance. As Chandra Mohanty reminds us, feminist solidarity is built through everyday practices that resist domination and create connections across borders (Mohanty 2003).
The juxtaposition shows how women participate in patriarchal systems. Patriarchy is not sustained by men alone; it relies on (white) women who adopt and enact its logics of control. Noem, though a woman, embodies masculinized nationhood, reinforcing the state through an aesthetic of violence. Her presence demonstrates how women legitimize patriarchal power precisely because they appear to disrupt expectations of authority. In this way, gender inclusion within state power reproduces domination rather than liberation.
Fernández resists by refusing patriarchy’s claim to permanence. Her collective painting practice is a reorientation of power. Patriarchy disciplines both land and bodies, treating them as objects of control. By painting sky over steel, Fernández calls into question what has been naturalized as fixed. Inviting others, especially women and border communities, she redistributes authorship and authority, undermining the hierarchies on which patriarchal and colonial projects depend. In becoming a shared surface of creativity rather than a weapon of exclusion, the wall gestures toward small but vital practices where care, solidarity, and tenderness take shape as forms of resistance. As Chandra Mohanty reminds us, feminist solidarity is built through everyday practices that resist domination and create connections across borders (Mohanty 2003).
Borrando La Frontera, Tijuana, MX (2013). Photo by Unknown (Please email to attribute)
Ultimately, the border wall is more than a structure of steel. It is a surface where competing visions of belonging are staged. Noem paints the wall a darker shade, amplifying its permanence. Fernández paints the wall away, opening space for imagination and solidarity. To paint the wall is to project a vision of the world, whether one rooted in exclusion or one rooted in care.
Yet these gestures are not equivalent. Noem, as a state actor, wields material power to inflict harm on migrant bodies. Her act of painting carries the force of law, surveillance, and militarization. Fernández, by contrast, works in the realm of symbols, where change does not take an immediate form. Her intervention cannot burn flesh or close borders, nor can sky blue, conversely, heal and open them. Instead, Borrando interrupts the supposed permanence of those structures by opening a horizon of possibility. Art operates in the symbolic, and it is precisely in that elsewhere, the discursive site where dominant orders of meaning can be unsettled and reconfigured, that cultural transformation begins. As Michel Foucault observed, “discourse is the power which is to be seized” (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1972), and it is within this reconfiguration of discourse that new subjectivities emerge. All change is seeded in imagination before it takes root in policy and institutions. This is why Fernández’s work, though not equal in scale or force to Noem’s, is essential. It insists that another future can be pictured, even on the most violent of surfaces, and that the act of imagining an otherwise is itself a form of world-making.
Yet these gestures are not equivalent. Noem, as a state actor, wields material power to inflict harm on migrant bodies. Her act of painting carries the force of law, surveillance, and militarization. Fernández, by contrast, works in the realm of symbols, where change does not take an immediate form. Her intervention cannot burn flesh or close borders, nor can sky blue, conversely, heal and open them. Instead, Borrando interrupts the supposed permanence of those structures by opening a horizon of possibility. Art operates in the symbolic, and it is precisely in that elsewhere, the discursive site where dominant orders of meaning can be unsettled and reconfigured, that cultural transformation begins. As Michel Foucault observed, “discourse is the power which is to be seized” (The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1972), and it is within this reconfiguration of discourse that new subjectivities emerge. All change is seeded in imagination before it takes root in policy and institutions. This is why Fernández’s work, though not equal in scale or force to Noem’s, is essential. It insists that another future can be pictured, even on the most violent of surfaces, and that the act of imagining an otherwise is itself a form of world-making.
Borrando La Frontera, Ciudad Juárez, MX (2017). Photo by Nick Oza