The Tresidder Memorial Union ceiling is covered with ornate dresses supported by large pink crosses. Some are simple and dignified. Others are less traditional. One is smeared with red paint — it looks like blood at first glance — asking the question, “What have you done to my baby girl?”

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Mae Ryan

ReDressing Justice, and the exhibit features women's dresses and aims to generate awareness about the murdered women in Juarez, Mexico.

The question resonates starkly as a focal point in an exhibit intended to memorialize the unsolved murders of women in the border city of Juarez, Mexico. “ReDressing Justice,” the visual complement to next week’s conference “Feminicide = Sanctioned Murder: Gender, Race and Violence in Global Context,” opened yesterday and will be on display through the end of June.

Presented by Chicano/a Studies and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, the organizers aim to raise awareness about “violence against women on an epidemic scale,” according to the conference’s Web site. The dramatic display was featured at Sweden’s Museum of World Culture earlier in the year.

“When the exhibit was first created, there were about 400 crosses and dresses, each one of them individually made in honor of the 400 victims from Ciudad Juarez,” said Spanish Prof. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, who organized the event.

Ciudad Juarez is located in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, just over the American border from El Paso, Texas. According to non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International, hundreds of women in the border city — many of them workers in foreign factories — have gone missing in recent years.

In many cases, their bodies are found days after their loved ones report them missing. Often, there is evidence of sexual assault. Many of the cases remain unsolved.

Despite the gravity and seriousness of next week’s conference, which will begin Wednesday and last until Saturday, Yarbro-Bejarano expressed hope that the week’s events would increase awareness about both the atrocities across the border and about gender violence in general.

“We will have films, candle lightings, panel discussions and guest speakers, some of whom are family members of the women who were murdered,” she said. “This conference will help us bring about justice, while examining gender violence through a lens of ethnic and class studies.”