Rivers can be borders, lifelines and repositories of memory. For University of Arizona School of Art Associate Professor Nicole Antebi, they are all three.
Her upcoming exhibition “Rebel Waters / Aguas Rebeldes” in St. Augustine, Florida, uses animation and sculpture to explore the histories and changing landscapes of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo and the Santa Cruz River in Southern Arizona — a journey that will bring together Antebi and fellow faculty member Jennifer Saracino for a public conversation later this month.
The exhibition, presented by Crisp-Ellert Art Museum and Flagler College, features Antebi’s moving-image, sculptural and animation work exploring the history and transformation of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo and the Santa Cruz. An opening reception is scheduled for Friday evening, Sept. 4, with Antebi leading an exhibition walkthrough.
On Sept. 28, Antebi will join Saracino in Flagler’s Ringhaver Student Center for a public conversation about the exhibition and its themes. Saracino previously taught in Flagler College’s Department of Visual Arts before joining the UA faculty, and she also contributed an essay to the publication accompanying Antebi’s exhibition.
For Antebi, whose work is deeply connected to the El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, region where she grew up, the Rio Grande become a way to examine environmental, social, political and economic forces that have shaped the borderlands for more than a century. The river is a vital water source for seven U.S. and Mexican states and becomes the border between Texas and the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.
Meanwhile, the Santa Cruz starts in the San Rafael Valley, flows south into Mexico, makes a U-turn, and then flows north past Green Valley, through the Tohono O’odham Nation, through Tucson and up past Marana.
Antebi moves between animation and sculpture, incorporating materials and imagery tied to the landscapes she explores. Her work has included found cottonwood from areas surrounding the Santa Cruz River and papel de amate, or Jonote bark paper, from Northern Puebla, Mexico. Text and mapping also recur throughout her time-based and sculptural works. The result is work that asks viewers to think about memory, place and the ways histories remain present.
Antebi’s connection to the Crisp-Ellert exhibition goes back several years.
Julie Dickover, director of exhibitions and college collections at Crisp-Ellert, said Antebi first came onto the museum’s radar through connections within the experimental film and animation community. Patrick Moser, a professor at Flagler, had encountered Antebi’s work at a film festival, and the museum later included her work in its Finger Mullet Film Festival, an event created to highlight experimental video and animation.
“I’ve always liked Nicole’s work, and so last year we invited her to have an exhibition this fall,” Dickover said.
Saracino, an assistant professor of Art History, was a natural choice to help extend the exhibition’s conversation on Sept. 28. Her research focuses on Indigenous cartographic traditions of Central Mexico, cross-cultural interactions between mendicant friars and Indigenous communities, and the impact of these exchanges on the visual culture of early colonial Mexico.
“We make a small publication to go along with each exhibition, and I always commission an essay from an arts writer or art historian,” Dickover said. “I think both Nicole and I immediately identified Jen as a candidate to write the essay because there are so many overlapping themes in their work.”
Antebi has exhibited and screened her work throughout the United States and internationally, including at the Houston Center for Photography, Union Docs in Brooklyn, the Irish National College of Art and Design, Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, El Paso Museum of Art, the MexiCali Biennial and Tucson Museum of Art.
Earlier this year, she received a MacDowell Fellowship to work on an animated essay that explores “the hug” — both visually and textually as a gesture that “is as complex as it is political,” she said. Her work focused on four consequential hugs that took place in El Paso, Texas, from 2019 to 2025, “which demonstrate the restorative love of a border city perpetually traumatized by federal policies,” Antebi said.
In 2025, she was a visiting professor at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, Mexico, and was named an Early Career Scholar Award recipient by the University of Arizona for her cross-cultural work that centers on animation as a form of community-engaged storytelling. Antebi is co-director of the Wonder Studio at Biosphere 2, which serves as an animation, data visualization and film production laboratory dedicated to developing solutions for environmental change.
