Labor: Motherhood & Art in 2020, co-curated by NMSU Art Museum director Marisa Sage and artist Laurel Nakadate, aimed to expand and enrich the compelling conversations regarding motherhood in today’s socio-political climate. Through video, painting, installation, sculpture, film and photographic works, a diverse group of artists explored themes of empowerment, empathy, intimacy, selflessness, vulnerability, failure, anxiety, and choice.
Labor: Motherhood & Art in 2020 featured the work of artists Tracey Baran, María Berrío, Patty Chang, Lenka Clayton, Amy Cutler, Joey Fauerso, Tierney Gearon, Kate Gilmore, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Mary Kelly, Justine Kurland, Marilyn Minter, Laurel Nakadate, Hương Ngô & Hồng- Ân Trương, Yoko Ono, Catherine Opie, Laurie Simmons, Wendy Red Star, and Mickalene Thomas.
Many of the artists in Labor openly addressed the choice of becoming mothers, initiating crucial conversations in the arts regarding childlessness and the invisibility of parenting, and reproductive choice, while looking to their own mothers’ lives for insight into the mercurial experience of mothering. Many of the works reframed motherhood within the context of artistic practice, using it as a source of inspiration, creation and collaboration. Other works spoke to motherhood as a political act which seeks institutional support in sparking diversity, equality in compensation and recognition.
This exhibition created a space of inclusivity and support that offered opportunities not only for internationally-celebrated artists, but also for the regional community, through local programming and the exhibition of work by New Mexico-based artists that speak to their own experiences surrounding motherhood.
Jenny Morgan: A HIGHER GROUND, was a mid-career survey exhibition that included 34 paintings and one video, marking a seminal time in Morgan’s practice. On view from July 26 through September 21, 2018, A HIGHER GROUND tracked the development of Morgan’s work, starting from graduate school at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, to her more recent paintings exploring the individual through high-definition glimmering layered portraits that tackle the real and surreal.
Exploring deep psychological and spiritual themes, including the metaphysical, life, death, and the otherworldly, Morgan’s vulnerable portraits ask the viewer to suspend certain aspects of reality to transcend the ordinary way of viewing the body. Morgan bathes her subjects in fields of color, bringing features in and out of focus, pushing the boundaries of familiarity and perception, to create an opening for deeper psychological responses and explorations. Through masterful additive and subtractive techniques of layering paint, Morgan sands, blurs, and glazes as a way to explore varying metaphors, removing the “skin” of her muses and grinding backwards through time to complex worlds and multi-dimensional frameworks. Morgan deeply values the relationships she builds with her subjects and explores those personal connections using the canvas as a visual map to understand the human condition.
GEOMAGIC: Art, Science and the Zuhl Collection was an interdisciplinary exhibition that created a visual laboratory and educational space out of the New Mexico State University Art Gallery. Unifying contemporary visual art, geology, and other natural sciences into a hypothetical space, GEOMAGIC created a platform to explore ontological responses to spirituality, technology, and anthropogenic geological concerns of preservation in relation to the natural environment. Co-curated with Tiffany Santos, GEOMAGIC paired works from the Zuhl collection, a Wunderkammer-like collection of over 1,800 specimens of petrified wood,fossils and minerals on the campus of New Mexico State University, with contemporary artists, who within their practice, utilize various mediums that resemble, echo, and mimic the geological to explore our ever-evolving scientific and technological landscape.
Featured artists included: Christine Gray, Jason Middlebrook, Megan Harrison, Amy Brener, Laura Moriarty, Katie Paterson, Emily Nachison, Christine Nguyen, Andrew Yang and Ryan Thompson.
The University Art Gallery at New Mexico State University received an Art Works award from The National Endowment for the Arts for this interdisciplinary exhibition. To support GEOMAGIC: Art, Science and the Zuhl Collection, the UAG was selected from more than 1,700 applicants to receive funding as part of an $82 million grant from the NEA to fund local arts projects and partnerships nationwide.
At a timely, but currently rare moment in Southern New Mexico’s climate, Water! What is it Good for?, curated by Marisa Sage at New Mexico State University Art Gallery, opened January 21, 2016, during the three month marker of post-drought and healthy rainfall in Las Cruces. Water! What is it Good for? featured works by Florida-based artist Bethany Taylor and Texas-based artist Brenda Perry. Taylor and Perry create critical spaces for viewers to engage with multifaceted local, regional, and national environmental concerns. Through their art, Taylor and Perry ask viewers to consider meanings and practices of sustainability, water rights, renewable natural resources, and environmental consciousness. Through complex, installation based practices Taylor and Perry, both provided separate applications, to mount this two-person exhibition that grapples with complex environmental issues.
For this exhibition, Bethany Taylor, an interdisciplinary artist from Gainesville, Florida and Assistant Professor of Drawing at the University of Florida, used the medium of string to “draw” figurative artworks that were installed directly on the UAG’s walls. Some of Taylor’s compositions incorporate the negative space on the walls, while others will be opaque tapestries. Taylor’s works can be understood as contemporary allegories with a twist; the artist’s narratives are open-ended rather than conclusive. These woven stories combine cross-cultural mythology and symbols with modern-day imagery and concerns for the longevity of our environment. Taylor states that, “if conscious conservation, innovation and planning isn’t made a priority, New Mexico, like many other places in the world, may not have enough water to meet future demand.”
Brenda Perry, an El Paso, TX native, works across media and focuses on the Rio Grande river as the central theme of her work. Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, Perry has a life-long emotional tie to the river. She sees the Rio Grande as a threshold between communities that needs to be reconsidered from combined social and environmental perspectives. In this exhibition, Perry’s installation artwork, Waiting for Rain, combines photography and video with Rio Grande river clay vessels and sand also sourced from the river. In this work, like others that will be on display, Perry bridges the logic between contemporary virtual and physical landscapes and transforms this juxtaposition into a ritualistic art performance of “giving back” to the earth. Waiting for Rain demonstrates Perry’s belief that- “environmental climate change is inherently entwined to the social climate of our time.”
In this two-person exhibition, nationally renowned artists Paul Turounet and Terri Warpinski grapple with the socio-political construct of international borders as negotiated through a visual arts lens, reflecting both physical and psychological obstacles faced by migrants. Both artists’ work confronts the complexities and controversies surrounding borders as junctions that designate the present and future for many migrants in transition, as well as the effects of these built boundaries on existing communities in border regions.
In his Estamos Buscando A installation, Paul Turounet creates a border wall, constructed in the gallery space from actual pieces of the border salvaged at Border State Park between San Diego, CA, and Tijuana, Mexico. The wall is comprised of commemorative aluminum portraits of migrants who have attempted the journey of leaving Mexico to enter the United States. Turounet’s aluminum depictions are modeled after retablos, which are votive paintings on tin, and for inclusion in this exhibition, the artist will curate a selection of three retablos from the NMSU Art Gallery’s world-renowned collection.
Oregon-based artist Terri Warpinski explores the border not only at the threshold of the United States and Mexico, but also the border in occupied Palestinian territories. Warpinski explores the abuse of power and consequences when national desires for security dominate social and geopolitical concerns. In 2009, with the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Warpinski considered the fact that while others were celebrating this liberation, other walls were being constructed around the world. The U.S. was rapidly working to complete construction of the U.S./Mexico border between El Paso, TX, and San Diego, CA, and Israel was constructing a wall to deter Palestinian violence and attacks against Israeli civilians. Taking into account the current gravity of these walls, Warpinski considers the increased surveillance at borders as a sign of the escalation of international security standards.
With our close geographic proximity to the U.S./Mexico border, understanding immigration issues is essential to gaining a broader understanding of our area and our neighbors. As a country comprised of immigrants, what does the continuous erection of a geo-political border mean to us in 2015? Are the arts capable of answering important questions related to the border, sparking critical thinking and problem solving for border issues, and igniting critical conversation in this area?
The University Art Gallery received a grant from the Southwest and Border Cultures Institute (SBCI) of NMSU to assist with the production of this show. The mission of the SBCI is to fund on- and off-campus public programs that relate to the issues in southwestern culture around the state of New Mexico. In addition to the exhibition opening Sept. 3, there will be a number of events happening in conjunction with this exhibition, all of which are free and open to the public:
Re:Visioning the West, curated by Marisa Sage, was a group exhibition juried by the UAG Exhibition Review Board from more than 100 international applicants who applied for an open call made by the UAG for exhibition proposals.
The UAG Exhibition Review Board is a committee made up of community members, nationally recognized arts professionals and NMSU art faculty. In “Re:Visioning the West,” the University Art Gallery challenged the audience to consider our beloved West in a new light. We asked our viewers to examine the clichés and nostalgic visions of the “Old” West as myth, and consider these contemporary artists’ views of the West as telling a layered story of our complex relationship with the tenet of Manifest Destiny.
The artists featured in this exhibition were Jeffrey DaCosta, Felice House, Dana Younger, Kathleen Scott and Millee Tibbs. Jeffrey DaCosta connects historical symbolism to contemporary meaning; his work examines resource development and exchange through the context of material and iconography. Jeffrey DaCosta’s mixed media work asked “how do we live within the land, how do we value that integration, and what do we sacrifice?” Felice House and Dana Younger asked their audiences to reevaluate the typical archetypes and cultural mythos of the West. By painting strong and fierce women in place of the stereotypical male hero in the Hollywood version of the West, Felice House deals directly with the limited access of women to power in the western genre. Dana Younger focuses his mostly sculptural work on the cost of Western expansion; juxtaposing established Western conventions with historical figures to spotlight the damage associated with westward expansion. A stop-motion film by Kathleen Scott addresses the beauty, vastness…and the inherent loneliness the great American western landscape evokes. Millee Tibbs explores the tumultuous relationship between viewing a landscape in situ versus viewing a landscape through photography. Tibbs believes in both cases that the viewer is presented with an expansive yet inaccessible vista and that “it is in this space between the land and its viewer that the fantasy of the American West was constructed.”
In epic paintings, triumphant books, and perhaps most famously, projected in full Technicolor onto the silver screen, the West has inspired various artistic media throughout the history of the United States. Through the various media reflected in this exhibition, the University Art Gallery guided it's visitors to leave the space with a newfound perspective of the West and its typical connotations.
SIGHTsite|HEARhere #1: Ode to the West was a special project/performance commissioned in support of the exhibition, Re-Visioning the West
For this inaugural performance of SIGHTsite|HEARhere, Tara and David Gladden travel to New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, where they visited White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Organ Mountains and the Gila Cliff Dwellings. While in these places, they hiked the great trails and explore the beauty, mystery, and wonder of the West. Over the week residency they documented their adventures and encounters in each place. At the end of each adventure they upload and catalog the visual and sonic material collected and constructed an audiovisual performance in the University Art Gallery from the media.
Re:Visioning the West included lectures, performances, artist workshops, and guided tours pictured here.
For Las Cruces creates Director Marisa Sage visited the studios of 21 contemporary practice artists all over the city of Las Cruces, NM. A studio is often a private place for many of these artists: a place of research, discovery, failure, success, method and, above all else, creation. In essence, when visiting artists in their studio you are entering into their intimate world of conception and construction. On these visits Sage discovered artists creating visceral works, which uniquely express the experience of a studio practice in the Las Cruces area. Works range from large interactive installations, to multi-dimensional abstractions, to compositions with poetic visions of the everyday. Rules of process became blueprints for understanding these works, and an invented lexicon of symbols became systems for producing them; image making – often contemplative, repetitive and, in some cases, obsessive – express the accumulation of time and memory in material form.
Las Cruces Creates includes works by Chris Bardey, Nancy Begin, Karen Bucher, Sharbani Das Gupta, Greg Decker, Carlos Estrada-Vega, John Garrett, Stephen Hansen, Amanda Jaffe, Suzanne Kane, Robin Labe, Rosemary McLoughlin, Brack Morrow, Louis Ocepek, Mary Robertson, Joshua Rose, Jesse Reinhard, Jacklyn St. Aubyn, Isadora Stowe, Jean Reece Wilkey, and Mary Wolf.
As part of Las Cruces Creates the artist John Garrett created a project entitled “Community Weave”, which invites all Las Cruces residents to donate an article of clothing over the course of the month, which were constructed into a large woven tapestry now permanently displayed on the campus of NMSU.
Las Cruces Creates included a panel on community engagement with Chris Bardey, a workshop that taught the community how to create collaborate works with their children with artist Isadora Stowe, and Las Cruces Connects: a weekend of art exhibits, art based events, and performances which took place February 6-8, 2015. Las Cruces Connects created an experience based connection between the University Art Gallery, Las Cruces Museum of Art, and all the various art galleries and arts organizations within our community.
“Off the Wall", was an exhibition inspired by the minimal wall drawings and sculptures of Sol LeWitt. This two-part exhibition traced the history of Sol LeWitt’s relationship with New Mexico State University (NMSU) from his first visit to Las Cruces in 1979, to the extent of his influence on a new generation of artists from across the world who use the surface of the wall as their canvas. Starting on August 29, 2014, the community members of Las Cruces, regional artists, gallery assistants and NMSU students began a collaborative public installation process (à la LeWitt's wall drawings) – creating works constructed directly onto the gallery walls. Part performance, part exploration into social practice and exhibition design, this group show created a conversation revealing the intricate actions employed when creating a minimal art work.
In addition to two drawings graciously loaned by The Sol LeWitt Estate and NMSU University Art Collection holdings of LeWitt's work , “Off the Wall” featured the work of Allie Rex, Judith Braun, Christie Blizard and Nathan Green- four contemporary artists from across the country who’ve traded traditional supportive mediums such as the canvas, panel, and paper for the challenge of working directly on the wall. Manipulating perspective and generating large-scale optical illusions, each of these artists use various methods to challenge the viewers understanding of the existing architecture within the gallery space.
Allie Rex (Brooklyn, NY) creates her work by merging the techniques of painting, drawing, collage, installation and performance. Rex handpaints mylar and pins her carefully cut shapes, lines, units and grids directly onto the wall. She experiments with bold, vivid, and saturated color – producing abstract and universal symbols, which exposes intricate visual metaphors and layers of meaning. Her compositions are structured like flat paintings liberated from their two-dimensionality, yet delicately oscillating between two and three dimensions.
Judith Braun’s (New York, NY) drawings are created with a strict set of rules: Symmetry, Abstraction, Carbon medium. From these three seemingly simple rules Braun has created an infinite visual language that she spells out on gallery walls. Fingering, involves Braun carefully dipping her fingertips in charcoal and then using her fingers as brushes to sketch, brush, paint, and draw stunning large-scale complex symmetrical works. As can be expected, the notion of spirituality, energy, and geometry take a major role in Braun’s work. Through her repetitive mark making a driving pulse of movement and energy is discovered- generating a sensory explosion of light and vibration.
Christie Blizard (San Antonio, TX) states in regard to her work: “I am intrigued by the connective tissues between painting and performance, public and private and the spectacle and the hidden.” Blizard’s glow paintings explore collaborative practice as she worked together with NMSU students to make a room size drawing with tape. Blizard’s tape based installations combine her influences of videogame design and traditional textile design with her interest in spirituality, social practice, and fragmentation. Often reminiscent of tribal or shamanistic drawings, Her work pulsates from the walls and ground due in part to her use of Blacklight and her neon pink, hot teal, and dayglo purple color palette.
Nathan Green’s (Dallas, TX) paintings, sculptures, and installations coexist in the austere world of modernist abstraction and the more playful world of craft. Creating sculptures out of walls painted with luminescent beams of light, geometric patterning, and trompe-l’oeil techniques, Green forms his work intuitively with paint rollers and premixed Home Depot paints. For his site-specific works at NMSU Green’s sent the Las Cruse community an instructional video and a map for them to trace and recreate his painted gradient-based lexicon of shapes.
Curated by Marisa Sage for the Salisbury University Art Galleries, TXTED explored the ever-evolving conversation between art and language. This text-based group exhibition included paintings, photographs, drawings, sculpture and installation, all utilizing text to gain a greater understanding of conceptual metaphors, visual insights and complex narratives. It presented a humorous perspective on current political climates and complex societies. Artists included in the exhibition were: Sol LeWitt, Alex Gingrow, Iviva Olenick, Jayson Musson, Michael Scoggins, Meg Hitchcock, John Salvest, David Rathman, William Powhida, Kim Rugg, Daniel Oglander, Nate Larsen and Marnie Shindleman.
Commissioned as part of TXTED: GEOLOCATION: EASTERN SHORE //Nate Larsen and Marnie Shindleman used publicly available GPS metadata in Twitter posts to track and photograph the locations. Geolocation, traces Twitter posts to the point of origin and makes a photograph to mark the location in the real world, probing the expectations of privacy surrounding social networks.
It’s often at the dinner table that we discuss the most difficult topics of our time. Food is a neutral vehicle spawning intense debates surrounding gender, race, culture, and other current political topics.
As another form of muse, food has been the passion of internationally renowned artists throughout the ages who have used it to celebrate life within their paintings, sculptures, photographs and videos.
In Palette, curated by Marisa Sage, Salisbury University Art Galleries exhibited artworks by artists who use food as subject, material or content. From carefully contrived still-life paintings, to slow time based videos of ice sculptures melting, we invited artists to show us that our stomachs are not the limit.
In conjunction with Palette, the Salisbury University Art Galleries invited local chefs to create artworks out of food to explore the art and culture of the foods we eat.
The tasting event was a one night only event, with proceeds funding the local chefs and the SU Art Galleries.
Palette artists included: Andi Fink, Betsy Frahm, Kira Greene, Anna Garner, Alyssa Hayes, Susan Holt, Jan Kirsh, Annell Livingston, Benjamin Madeska, Tim McCourt, Stacy Swinderski, Denise Stewart-Sanabria, Sarah Swist, David Willison, and Lea Wise-Surguy.
Since the early 1990s, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy have explored art through technology, using various methods from extensive categorization, to reenactment, to miniaturization. "Marisa's Office" was a commissioned piece, which utilized a work from the Salisbury University Art Galleries Collection as part of their curated solo exhibition "Jennifer and Kevin McCoy" in the Electronic Gallery at Salisbury University. Extending from their curatorial practice, which involves the use of live internet-enabled cameras to film artwork in situ, the McCoys created Marisa's Office. This site specific, live video feed shows two images in split screen. One image results from a camera in the office of gallery manager Marisa Sage. The camera shows a 1982 portrait of Jane Fonda taken by Andy Warhol. The second image was a live feed from the McCoys' studio; revealing a small television playing the Jean-Luc Godard/ Jean-Pierre Gorin film Letter to Jane. Letter to Jane, made ten years before the portrait, served as a cinematic essay that deconstructs news photographs taken from Fonda's famous trip to Vietnam. In comparing the two images (one photo, one film transferred to video, all projected in the gallery through real time data feeds), the McCoys examined the speed and immediacy of the contemporary image and its capacity to spark critique in the era of the 24-hour news cycle.
Electro Kinetic Grammar, was a work commissioned by Marisa Sage for the Electronic Art Gallery at Salisbury University by the artists Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere. Electro Kinetic Grammar combined scientific methods with artistic practice. In this performance turned installation, the artist’s/drummer’s body was the vehicle to explore the relationship between the musician/artist mind-body complex, repetition, drumming styles, and how this physical activity can be translated through the use of monitoring mechanisms into data, diagrams, spectral images, and other visual forms.
The performative portion of Electro Kinetic Grammar revealed Nevarez as subject, being monitored for 30 minutes as he drummed continually on a drum kit containing snare, bass, floor tom, hi-hat, crash cymbal, and ride cymbal. While Nevarez drummed- Tevere along with the help of Salisbury University Grad research students monitored Angel with scientific instruments such as- an electrocardiogram (EKG), an electroencephalography (EEG), and an electromyography (EMG). The findings from these “experiments”, in video, printed, and other mediums- were then integrated into Angel & Valerie’s final installation one view as of August 26th, 2013 in The Electronic Gallery.
