NMSU Art student Citlali Delgado, whose work is currently featured in the Border Art Biennial Exhibition at the El Paso Museum of Art, had a write up in the January 2024 edition of the Texas Monthly. 

The article reads, “Another seemingly life-affirming oil painting by another El Pasoan, Citlali Delgado, hangs prominently at the center of the exhibition’s back wall, facing out onto the rest of the space. A small, dark-haired boy with big, anxious eyes is surrounded by bubbles; a dog is nuzzling his shoulder, gazing up at him. But a closer look reveals a tension that is emblematic of the entire exhibition, and indeed of the border today. The dog at the boy’s side is a Xoloitzcuintli—commonly known as a Mexican hairless dog—which the Aztecs believed was created by the god of lightning and death to protect the living and guide the souls of the dead through the underworld (the dogs were ritually sacrificed and buried with their companions). Is the Xolo here protecting life, or guiding a lost soul? The boy’s eyes are fixed on one bubble, which seems to show a reflection of a skull.

In Delgado’s painting, as in the exhibition overall, the close intermingling of life and death, of beauty and ugliness, captures the character of the border today. Sometimes art can be justifiably accused of taking the comprehensible and rendering it incomprehensibly abstract. Here, the art is doing the opposite for the border, and for the lives it has defined.”