Exhibits & Events

The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College is pleased to introduce Enrique Bostelmann: Apertures and Borderscapes this summer and fall, running June 18 to December 15. The multifaceted project presents new scholarship on the Mexican photographer Enrique Bostelmann and his legacy of artistic experimentation.

Enrique Bostelmann (1939-2003) is distinctive for his striking and experimental photography. Over his forty-year career, Bostelmann fused modernist formal elegance, social documentary, conceptualism, and humor with experimental vision. His work is critically acclaimed across Latin America and internationally, initially for America: un viaje a través de la injusticia (1970), one of the first photobooks and a groundbreaking document in protest photography at a time of political upheaval.

Despite his powerful body of work, Bostelmann remains largely unknown in the United States. The Berman Museum of Art has brought his work to the Greater Philadelphia Area to celebrate and boost public awareness of his contributions to the field of photography.

The resulting exhibition, Enrique Bostelmann: Apertures and Borderscapes, takes boundaries—literal, figurative, and fluid—as the organizing principle for an exhibition of selected works by the genre-bending photographer. The exhibition opens with images of fencing along the U.S./Mexico border and transitions into the conceptual boundaries Bostelmann explored throughout his career. His transgressive practice disrupts perceived margins between justice and injustice, indigenous and colonial, rural and urban, and two- and three-dimensional.

Apertures and Borderscapes is the first solo exhibition of Bostelmann’s work since 2013 (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and the most comprehensive to be shown in the U.S. to date.