Diana Tuite, Katz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Colby College Museum of Art, offers this introduction to Miracles on the Border: Retablos of Mexican Migrants to the United States, on view February 11, through April 25, 2021.

The votives on view in this exhibition—spanning the entirety of the twentieth century—were offered as thank you notes to the heavens by Mexican migrants and their families to commemorate the dangers of crossing the border and living in the United States. Filled with emotive detail, they eloquently express subjects of greatest concern to the migrants, such as the difficulty of finding work or falling sick in a foreign land and the relief of returning home. The word “retablo,” from the Latin retro tabulum (behind the altar table), originally referred to devotional paintings hung in Catholic churches in Europe. In Mexico, reflecting traditions embedded in local cultures by Spanish conquest beginning in the sixteenth century, retablo came to denote a small oil painting on metal placed on the wall of a shrine or church. Usually commissioned from local artists working anonymously, retablos feature both a written and a pictorial narrative. First-person vignettes, dated and inscribed with the supplicants’ names, draw on a traditional vocabulary such as “doy infinitas gracias’’ (I give infinite thanks). In the luminous illustrations, earthly figures share space with holy images and a dreamlike representation of the miracle. As they accumulate on church walls, both in Mexico and the United States, these votives become public records of private faith, fears, and familial attachments.

The exhibition is organized by the Princeton University Art Museum.