Where We Stand

Medium Photo’s

2026 Juried Photo Exhibition

On view at the

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

March 27 to April 11, 2026

Where We Stand examines the political and geographic realities of life in the San Diego-Tijuana border region, a timely exploration of place, policy, and perspective through contemporary photography.

The exhibition runs from March 27 to April 11 at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) in La Jolla, CA

This exhibition is in conjunction with the 2026 Medium Festival of Photography

Exhibition Award

We offer a Juror’s Award based on work in the final exhibition. The award will be presented during the opening reception on Saturday, March 28, 2026

Exhibition Jurors

We are proud to welcome Alessandra Moctezuma and Patricio A. Chávez as the 2026 exhibition jurors.

Alessandra Moctezuma is Gallery Director and Professor of Fine Art at San Diego Mesa College, where she leads the Museum Studies program and teaches Chicano Art. She earned Bachelor of Art and Master of Fine Arts degrees from UCLA. Ms. Moctezuma has extensive experience as a curator, instructor, as an artist and as public art administrator. She has curated exhibitions for art spaces including the Oceanside Museum of Art (Twenty Women: NOW, 2021, Borderless Dreams, 2005 and Through a Lens Sharply, 2006 and unDocumenta, 2017,as part of the Getty’s initiative Pacific Standard Time LA/LA). More recently she co-curated a retrospective of Chicana artist Judith F. Baca, Memorias de Nuestra Tierra, for the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach (2021-22). In 2025 she was appointed Chair of the San Diego Arts Commission and represents District 3.

Patricio A. Chávez is a photographer, curator, and educator dedicated to advancing Chicano and Indigenous arts in the Southwest. After working in New Mexico's arts community—including as Program Director for the New Mexico Art Division, where he increased participation of people of color—he moved to San Diego in 1989 to become Visual Arts Curator at the Centro Cultural de la Raza. He holds degrees from the University of New Mexico (BA in Chicano Studies and Art/Photography) and UC San Diego (MFA). As Centro Curator, he organized nationally and internationally touring exhibitions including *La Frontera: Art About the U.S.-Mexico Border* and *La Reconquista* for the Istanbul Biennale. He has taught Photography, Photo History, and Chicano Art at multiple San Diego community colleges, USD, and UCSD Extension. His artistic practice and teaching focus on visual literacy, social justice, identity, and the exploration of Chicano and Indigenous communities' histories in the U.S.-Mexico border region.

Curatorial Theme

In a border city where policy becomes personal and headlines become lived experience; photographers turn their lenses toward the urgent question of our moment: where do we stand? This exhibition brings together artists working in the San Diego-Tijuana region to document, question, and reflect on the physical and political landscapes we inhabit. The border is not an abstraction here. It shapes daily life, divides communities, and defines how we move through the world. These photographs ask us to consider our literal ground, the place beneath our feet where two nations meet, and our figurative ground, the values, and beliefs we hold as neighbors, citizens, and witnesses to change. At a time when immigration policy dominates national discourse and enforcement reshapes border communities, "Where We Stand" offers a visual meditation on location, conviction, and the distance between rhetoric and reality. Through diverse photographic approaches, such as documentary, conceptual, landscape, and portraiture, we invite artists to chart the territory between policy and humanity, revealing what it means to live, work, and create in a region where the personal and political are inseparable.