SANTA MONICA, CA.- The Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana/Extraño Nuevo Mundo: Arte y diseño desde Tijuana, on view through April 7, 2007. Strange New World: Art and Design from Tijuana/Extraño Nuevo Mundo: Arte y diseño desde Tijuana is the first major traveling exhibition to explore and celebrate the vibrant interdisciplinary art scene in Tijuana, Mexico, one of the world’s leading crucibles of cultural innovation. The exhibition will feature over fifty works by twenty of Tijuana’s most important contemporary artists, architects, designers, and filmmakers. Their bold, cutting-edge work embodies the powerful creative energy of a city transformed by crosscurrents of globalization, media, and issues of migration and identity.

Whether as the subject or the actual physical source of the materials used to create works of art, the City of Tijuana is at the core of everything in Strange New World/Extraño Nuevo Mundo. Situated at the most heavily trafficked international border in the world, Tijuana lies almost directly adjacent to San Diego, forming a metropolitan region with a population exceeding 5 million people. Tijuana’s newfound wealth, rapid growth, and haphazard expansion inspires the broad range of artistic production represented in the exhibition - from painting to conceptually-driven installations; from street-level digital video to ambitious photo-documentation, filmmaking, and political work; from sophisticated architectural proposals to product design. The city has also emerged as the center of the internationally renowned "Nortec" musical movement. Both in homage and as critique, the artists in Strange New World/Extraño Nuevo Mundo have discovered new visual, verbal, and audio forms to manifest their experience of the rapidly changing interconnected realities of the local urban and global environments.