Basura Social, by Alice Leora Briggs

“Much of my work is concerned with incongruity,” writes Texas artist Alice Leora Briggs. Using sgraffito on kaolin clay, she offers narratives that both instruct and confuse. She is tender in her renderings of humanity and clear about the inhumane ways people treat and label one another. She is especially drawn to the “narco-battered borderlands” of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, near El Paso, Texas, which for her is suggestive of other kinds of borderlands that humans experience.