PICTURES FROM HELL: ETCHINGS INSPIRED BY JUAREZ DRUG WAR GO ON DISPLAY
AT MUSEUM OF ART

EL PASO -- Artist Alice Leora Briggs has had a fascination with death
most of her life.

She found the perfect inspiration in Juarez.

Briggs examines the human toll of the violence there with the 20 stark,
harsh, sometimes grisly etchings in her forthcoming book with Charles
Bowden, "Dreamland: The Way Out of Juarez." Her exhibit of the same name
opens today at the El Paso Museum of Art.

Briggs has been "preoccupied" with death since her brother died in a
fall at Grand Teton National Park. She was 7. "To me, I know it sounds
morose and macabre and all of those things, but whenever I have
encounters directly with death, (I am) very aware of what it is to be
alive in a very literal sense," she said from Lubbock, punctuating her
explanation with nervous laughter.

Briggs was plenty jittery every time she prepared for one of her 15 or
so trips to Juarez from 2007 to 2009, when the killings escalated.

Among her stops: the city morgue to see execution victims; a notorious
death house; an asylum; and drug rehab centers where massacres later
occurred. Her impressions are recorded in the cathartic etchings she
knifed out of white clay, a process called "sgraffito" that dates back
seven centuries.

Briggs also met people trying to keep the city from totally spinning
out of control, including the late activist Esther Chavez and Jose
Galvan, the priest who runs the asylum Briggs visited.

"This is what attracts me -- people who have this incredible humanity
and people who are utterly depraved," said Briggs, who often ventured
to Juarez during her 10-month stay at the Border Arts Residency in La
Union, N.M.

"The struggle comes down to economics. People talk about the drug war.
That's just the product, and, I think, the very bottom of it is the
economic struggle, people trying to survive. There are people in that
environment (who) would just as soon blow your brains out as look at
you, and there are people who become devoted to preserving the
sanctity of life at great cost to themselves."

Christian Gerstheimer, the museum's curator, said the exhibit is harsh
but riveting. "As an artist, she wants to put herself in a place that
she isn't comfortable, to push herself to the next thing," he said.
"It's not from a tourist's perspective."

Briggs drew some inspiration from words of a Tucson journalist and
author, Charles Bowden, who has covered the border for years. He'd
sent her an unpublished manuscript called "Dreamland" about Guillermo
Eduardo "Lalo" Ramirez Peyro, who allegedly took part in at least two
murders for the Juarez drug cartel while a paid informant for the U.S.
government.

The book also deals with the "House of Death" on Calle Parcioneros,
where a dozen bodies were found in 2003.

Bowden had never heard of Briggs until she sent him a CD of her work
five years ago.

"I punched the disc in the computer, looked at it for 20 minutes and
wrote back and said, 'Yes, I don't know what you're doing, but I'm
interested in whatever these things are,' " he recalled.

Bowden, author of the new book "Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global
Economy's New Killing Fields," provided Briggs with contacts and several
unpublished manuscripts. Briggs liked "Dreamland."

"It's sort of prose, it's nonfiction, but he goes off on these riffs
that are almost like musical compositions, where there are these
different strands of narrative that move apart and are woven back
together," she said. "Despite the fact that some of the subject matter
is pretty tough material, there is a certain poetry to it. He makes it
sort of bearable and engages you enough that you don't put it down and
walk away because you can't."

Their 172-page, 152-image book, which she describes as "an illuminated
manuscript and police blotter," will be published April 30 by the
University of Texas Press. Briggs will sign copies and participate in
a panel discussion June 5 at the museum.

"There isn't a page without art splattered all over," the author said
of Briggs' cathartic work. "I told the designer that my function was
to keep Alice's drawings from banging into each other."

Briggs, 56, isn't afraid of looking at -- or drawing -- dead bodies,
but she was scared of crossing the border when working on the project.

"It's like a high-stakes lotto, you know, every time you walk over the
bridge," she said.

The artist, recently named a Fulbright scholar, is already looking
ahead to her next subject -- Auschwitz. But Juarez remains close to
her heart.

"I'm continually raising my hand," she said, "and saying, 'Hey, this
is happening. Don't ignore this. People are getting killed over here.'