Artists in Mexico Are Remembering a Murdered Activist With Murals—and Raising Money for the Family She Left Behind

The murder of Isabel
Cabanillas de la Torre, the young Mexican artist and feminist
activist who was killed in Ciudad Juárez last month, has already
sparked demonstrations along the US–Mexico Border, as well as in
the capital, Mexico City.

Now, her friends, while continuing to protest her death and the
spate of femicides in Juárez, are celebrating her life
and pulling together to support the son she left behind.

“Isabel
Cabanillas was an artist from Juárez, she was our colleague, our
friend, and she was part of our family,” says
Arón Venegas, the
cofounder and project director of Puro Borde (Pure Borders), which
works across the border in Juárez and El Paso.

For a group exhibition that
turned into an impromptu memorial for the young
artist, Venegas made a work to raise funds
to help support her
orphaned son.

“I
decided to remember her with an image of her bike with a pot with a
sunflower on the back,” Venegas says. He printed the work on the
street outside the venue for the show, a bakery called Panaderia
Rezizte.

“Donations will be going directly to a savings
account for her son, Alfredito,” he explains. “This is a way to say
to him and the family that we are there to help as an artists’
community.” 

The late artist was a member of
the feminist collective Hijas de su Maquilera Madre, which plans to
create an edition of its publication, La Hilacha,
dedicated to Cabanillas.  Other artists are
remembering the women’s rights activist through murals.

“We are sure she would have done
the same for any of us,” Venegas says. Cabanillas’s bike now hangs
above the bakery.

Cabanillas was reported missing
by friends on social media after she failed to return home from a
night out. She was found shot to death on a sidewalk next to her
bicycle on January 18. Police stated that two bullet wounds were
found in her body, and that the motive for the attack is
unclear.

Cabanillas’s death, which has been described as
a femicide by activists, sparked a mass demonstration in Ciudad
Juárez, and a protest in the Mexican capital last
month.

In
Juárez, hundreds marched to the US-Mexico border bridge chanting,
“Ni una mas” (not one more). Some sprayed the slogan on walls. A
group also staged a die-in with a pool of fake blood.

Meanwhile, in Mexico
City, masked protesters
poured red paint onto a statue and threw a flaming projectile at a
monument of Christopher Columbus on the city’s Reforma Avenue, the
Associated Press reported.

According to the campaign group
National Citizens Observatory on Femicide, less than a third of the
hundreds of violent deaths of women every year in Mexico are
investigated specifically as femicides.

The post Artists in Mexico Are Remembering a Murdered
Activist With Murals—and Raising Money for the Family She Left
Behind appeared first on artnet News.