DAVIS, California — San Francisco-based artist Julio César Morales was born on the US/Mexico border in Zona Norte, the red-light district of Tijuana, Mexico. When he was 10, his family moved to San Ysidro, the southernmost community of San Diego County — just a block away from his birthplace, yet in a different country and adjacent to one of the busiest checkpoints in the world.
This Baja California edge-land, the arbitrary and contested frontier, has been a lifelong obsession for Morales, a transdisciplinary artist who has been exploring the border’s violent and complex realities in poetic form for over 30 years.
“OJO” Julio César Morales is a survey of more than 50 works, including 10 pieces created for the occasion, representing his sophisticated hybrid practice of music, performance, video, drawing, photography, and film. A playlist as sonic narrative, curated and annotated by the artist, accompanies the show. This element deepens the emotional and thematic landscape with what Morales calls a “third-space rhythm,” an eclectic sound of mixing cultures.
The exhibition derives its title from a detail Morales discovered in a Dorothea Lange photograph from 1938: a hand painted wood sign, or rotulo, common to border culture, that reads “OJO” Los Extranjeros. Morales’s recreation of the sign hangs alongside a three-print series of the original photograph behind blue-, yellow-, and red-tinted plexiglass.
“Ojo” directly translates from Spanish to English as “eye,” but it is also a colloquial expression of warning: Open your eyes! Look out! Cuidado! “Extranjeros” translates to “strangers” — for whom is it a warning? Those arriving or those already there? This series and the exhibition as a whole point to this underlying paradox of the immigrant experience.
The show crescendoes in the final gallery, which features three of the artist’s most powerful works (all from 2025), created in response to the 1982 film The Border, Hollywood’s first dramatization of the US-Mexico border. A series of ghostly black cut-out movie poster silhouettes populate the back wall of the gallery as two videos play face à face, alternating sequentially.
In his re-imagining of the movie, “The Border (Los Pollos vs. La Migra)” (2025), Morales amends cinematic history to center the immigrant’s viewpoint. “Los pollos vs. la migra” refers to a border version of the game Cops and Robbers, where los pollos are immigrants who have been killed and strung like slaughtered chickens by la migra, short for immigration and slang for ICE. Morales uses a filter that splits the original screen to edit out the main characters and allow an up-close and personal look at those in the background.
The video “We Don’t See” (2025) reimagines The Border again, this time from the perspective of Francisco Cantú, the artist’s friend and a former Border Patrol agent. Cantú’s own conflicted internal dialogue as a Mexican migra is overlaid in all yellow bold caps over drone footage of the Sonoran Desert: “We see none of his screaming, none of his conflicted emotions, none of his compensation, none of his moral outrage, none of his complexity.”
Two neon works are central to “OJO” Julio César Morales. One is “Las Lineas, 2028/2022/1845/1640,” which radiates red-hot Tijuana Avenida Revolución neon. It’s electric, searing, and illuminating.The installation consists of four lines each denoting a period of Mexico’s shifting border history: A future the artist imagines following a civil war in the US, after which California and New Mexico become independent states with open borders to the south; the actual border in 2022; an 1845 border based on the year prior to the Mexican-American War, when territorial boundaries shifted significantly; and an original boundary of of 1640, before the arrival of Europeans, spanning from the Cocopah Indian Tribe in present-day California to the Karankawa people in present-day New Mexico.
The other is a public commission installed within the museum’s public plaza. The sign, built on humble wooden scaffolds, reads in Gothic neon letters, “tomorrow is for those who can hear it coming” — a riff on the slogan David Bowie coined to promote his album Heroes. This burnished multivalent message sets up the potent through line of “OJO” Julio César Morales: In today’s social climate, who has the privilege of having a future and who does not?
