Actions Speak Louder than Talk is a year-long youth art initiative that engages high school students in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez in cross-border conversations about Identity, Community and Action. The title of the exhibition is the text from a mistranslated fortune cookie, and addresses that which is both lost and found in translation between cultures and places. The project creates both real and virtual spaces for communication and interchange and serves as a catalyst for dialogue in a bi-national community that has been torn apart by violence.

The artistic leadership of the project is provided by LA-based Slanguage (Mario Ybarra and Karla Diaz) who draw on their extensive experience with youth to initiate a playful and powerful dialogue using the tools of contemporary art. Ybarra says, “Our studio practice is our work with youth and the experimental relationships, process and products that emerge from this practice is our art.” In this spirit, Ybarra and Diaz are collaborating with eight high schools, four in Juarez and four in El Paso, and with a local artist on either side of the border to create a bi-national youth art exchange that takes place in both real and virtual spaces. Ybarra and Diaz will combine traditional techniques that have their roots in urban and border culture (stickers, screen-prints, lucha libre masks) with an extensive online presence that will include student-generated content, instructional videos by collaborating artists, and media uploads by youth from El Paso and Juarez. The content generated from this exchange will be used as the raw material for installations by Ybarra and Diaz that reflect youth culture on the U.S.-Mexico border at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts and in a second (to be confirmed) site in Ciudad Juárez in May of 2012.


The Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at The University of Texas El Paso is working with a broad bi-national support team that brings together other museum professionals, artists, educators and international aid agencies. The project has financial and logistical support from the U.S. Consulate General in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and is additionally supported by the Paso del Norte Health Foundation.