FRONT COVER: Miguel Gandert, Futuros Mariacheros/Mariachi Futures, 2013, pigment print from negative, 17 x 22 inches BACK COVER: Billy Joe Miller & collaborators, Writha, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable
At Home in the World February 6 – April 16, 2016
516 ARTS 516 Central Avenue SW Downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico www.516arts.org
516 ARTS is an independent, nonprofit contemporary arts organization, operating a museum-style gallery in Downtown Albuquerque. We offer programs that inspire curiosity, dialogue, risk-taking and creative experimentation, showcasing a mix of established, emerging, local, national and international artists from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Our mission is to forge connections between art and audiences, and our vision is to be an active partner in developing the cultural landscape of Albuquerque and New Mexico. Our values are inquiry, diversity, collaboration and accessibility. BOARD OF DIRECTORS
ADVISORY BOARD
Danny Lopez, Chair Suzanne Sbarge, President/Founder Clint Wells, Vice President Juan Abeyta, Treasurer Jenny McMath, Secretary Craig Eaves Kymberly Pinder Arturo Sandoval Paula Smith-Hawkins
Hakim Bellamy Michael Berman Sherri Brueggemann Diane Burke Christopher Burmeister David Campbell Andrew Connors Debi Dodge Idris Goodwin Tom Guralnick Deborah Jojola Jane Kennedy Arif Khan Elsa MenĂŠndez Henry Rael Mary Anne Redding Rick Rennie Augustine Romero Rob Strell Laurie Tarbell Randy Trask Marta Weber Will K. Wilkins Robert Wilson
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how NEA grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.
Contents Introduction
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by Suzanne Sbarge
Un Mundo Donde Quepan Muchos Mundos 6 (A World Where There is Room for Many Worlds) by Arturo Sandoval
Artists’ Work
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Artists’ Biographies
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Credits
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Introduction A
t the center of At Home in the World is the idea that arts and culture bring us together and make a place home. Arturo Sandoval’s eloquent catalog essay, titled Un Mundo Donde Quepan Muchos Mundos (A World Where There is Room for Many Worlds), highlights the meaning of our particular place in time both geographically and culturally in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The artists in this exhibition deal with various points on the spectrum of cultural dislocation, exclusion and injustice. While many of the featured artists address issues of the U.S. - Mexico border and the North-South axis of cultural exchange, others examine layers of meaning around home, belonging and migration from other geographical and cultural perspectives. Latin America and the southern border of the United States are highlighted by Colombian artists Felipe Castelblanco in his work Anthem and Gonzalo Fuenmayor in his series of drawings, which examine issues of nationalism and symbolic territory through music and the film industry. Alex Rivera’s film The Border Trilogy tells three small stories to illuminate a much larger one: the contradictions of a world order in which products freely cross borders that people may not. It is a succinct and powerful meditation on the contradictions of U.S. border policy. Juna Rosales Muller works with clothing cast off by migrants crossing the U.S. - Mexico border to explore themes of inclusion, identity, nationalism and community. And Selene’s Dream from Detention Nation by the collective Sin Huellas is designed to give insights into the immigrant detention industry and call attention to the children, adults and families who are incarcerated without due process. Some of the artists work with literal structures or concepts of the house as a home. Miguel Gandert’s photographs from the series Hotel Mariachi illustrate how community and home build around art, as Mariachi musicians from Mexico organically gathered to inhabit a crumbling hotel in Los Angeles that became their livelihood. Matthew Mazzotta’s public art project in York, Alabama, titled Open House, shows how a run-down house could be transformed into a living sculpture and gathering place through art, community process and performance. And Rontherin Ratliff’s Things That Float delves into the visual 4
language of loss he experienced in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina, from the drowning of a house to the destruction of family history that came from generations of inhabiting a place. Childhood dislocation, race and economics are explored by Kameelah Janan Rasheed, an African-American Muslim artist who spent much of her childhood homeless. She enlists archival as well as archaeological traditions in her installation No Instructions for Assembly, exploring collective memory and family narratives through found images, material objects, original photography and book arts. Photographer Tarrah Krajnak delves into her origins in Peru, from where she was adopted, and her experience of returning there as an adult. Judy Shintani’s sculptures honor the Japanese Americans who were interned after World War II, highlighting the children who grew up behind barbed wire in internment camps in the United States. Mohawk artist Margaret Jacobs uses steel and pewter as a metaphor for cultural resiliency, resistance and adaptability of Native Americans. And Polish artist Josef Schulz photographs abandoned border checkpoints in Europe, depicting a world where these frontiers have lost their power over people. He says, “Borders were lines, drawn not only across territories but also through our heads.” In the entrance to the exhibition, Billy Joe Miller’s installation titled Writha is a new work based on stories of belonging inspired by his living and working in Albuquerque’s International District, which has the highest percentage of foreign-born and refugees in the city. Using local, natural and found materials evocative of both Albuquerque and the high desert of New Mexico, his wreath sculptures evoke the connections between place, culture and well-being. At Home in the World was curated through a group process by the staff of 516 ARTS, involving both an open call for proposals as well as research and invitations. I would like to thank all of the artists and my colleagues Claude Smith, Teresa Buscemi and Rhiannon Mercer for their collaboration in the journey of creating this exhibition, as well as all of the generous Board members and funders who have helped to make it possible. Organizing this exhibition has been an especially meaningful process for me, as my immediate family came to this country as Jewish refugees from Europe and Russia. And even though I am not from here, New Mexico is my home more than any other place has ever been. – Suzanne Sbarge Executive Director, 516 ARTS 5
Un Mundo Donde Quepan Muchos Mundos (A World Where There is Room for Many Worlds) By Arturo Sandoval
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was raised in northern New Mexico by my parents, by my older siblings, by my tios y tias, by my teachers, by my vecinos. But I was raised as well by my “place”—my Tierra Sagrada. I was hugged each night by the huge red-faced sun—embarrassed because he tired before I did-—setting over my playground in the West. I was greeted each morning by the cu-cu-ru-cu-coo from the gallinero. Western breezes tickled me. Birds talked to me. Trees danced with me. Brujos prowled through my neighborhood at night, disguised as snakes and owls. “Place” dirtied my clothes, wrung sweat out of my boy’s body, made me late for supper, waited up all night for me, and made me whole. Whenever I wasn’t running through the open piñon hills on Santa Clara Pueblo land, I would explore the bosque along the Rio Grande. There, I knew I was sitting alongside a river that had already seen countless generations of people live and die along its banks. What the Rio Grande did for me was show that people in our region had a historical tie to a north-south flow of peoples and history. Starting in the Rocky Mountains of southern Colorado, the Rio Grande cuts right through the heart of New Mexico as it meanders 450 miles from north to south and exits the state at El Paso del Norte. Like the Rio Grande, there has existed in the Southwestern United States a deep imprint of knowledge and commerce and human interaction that has tied us to the peoples and cultures of Mexico and Latin America since time immemorial along this north-south axis. For thousands of years, First Americans took to the trails in the name of the harvest, the hunt, commerce and celebration. They may have helped forge trails at least as far back as eight or 6
“...we have lived through time and space in New Mexico under many different regimes, countries and flags. Apaches, Commanches, and Tewa, Tiwa, Towa and Keres peoples all have inhabited and dominated what we currently call New Mexico.”
nine millennia ago. They forged thousands of miles of trails from central México to Ohkay Owingeh, in the Española Valley, my homelands. All of these trails were along a north-south axis and all of these trails linked Central America, Mexico and North America together. After Spanish conquest of the Americas, the Spaniards used existing First American trails as the basis of the Caminos Reales—the Royal Roads—that emanated from Mexico City throughout Mexico and what is now the southwestern United States. The 1,500 mile road that connected New Mexico to Mexico City was called “el Camino Real de Tierra Adentro” also known as the Silver Road or Road to Santa Fe. Including its branches, the Camino Real extends for nearly 2000 miles. In the late Spanish Colonial period and through the Mexican period, the northernmost part of the Camino Real between Santa Fe and Chihuahua became a significant commercial route, especially since the Camino Real connected in Santa Fe with the Santa Fe Trail from Missouri. In New Mexico, we are the inheritors of what these First American and Spanish Colonial trails brought with them. Similarly, we have lived through time and space in New Mexico under many different regimes, countries and flags. Apaches, Comanches, and Tewa, Tiwa, Towa and Keres peoples all have inhabited and dominated what we currently call New Mexico. New Mexico was one of New Spain’s provinces called La Nueva Mexico throughout the Spanish Colonial period that lasted here for 250 years. It flew the Mexican flag for a short period between Mexican Independence in 1821 and American Conquest in 1848. In New Mexico, borders have crossed and crisscrossed communities for centuries. We have all struggled with the borders of belonging, including race, language and culture.
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“We are privileged now to have artists from across the Americas and beyond join us to share deeply personal but universal themes about belonging, dislocation, alienation and the real and imagined barriers we erect in our minds, hearts and landscapes...”
The current political debate about citizenship, borders, class and privilege around the world—but especially in the .U.S—serve to remind us that the human inclination to see others of our species as “aliens” seems to be deeply imbedded in our DNA. It is a battle that has kept us divided in New Mexico since time immemorial. This undercurrent of conflicting historical claims to place and identity caused New Mexico Territorial Governor Lew Wallace to say, “Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico.” We are privileged now to have artists from across the Americas and beyond join us to share deeply personal but universal themes about belonging, dislocation, alienation and the real and imagined barriers we erect in our minds, hearts and landscapes to keep “others” at bay. At Home in the World challenges us to question our own conceptions about nationality and belonging, about the identities we all assume from clans, tribes, political parties, income or gender. In a global community where technology has made it possible for us to communicate directly with almost anyone else on the planet, we still fall into the mud and darkness of sectarianism, hate, fear, and regional and clan divisions—a host of human-created barriers that prevent the growth of healthy community. The irony is that our super-tech communications tools have given us more access to data, but less access to the warmth of human interaction. Like the builders at the Tower of Babel, we toss more and more images and words across the digital divide but learn less and less about communal strength and the power of a handshake. At the end of the day, we still seek to dehumanize “others” primarily so we can exploit them. Artists in At Home in the World are already global citizens, living and working in their states and countries of origin, but also sharing their visions across regional and national boundaries. Like profetas, they see both the dangers of 8
“At Home in the World challenges us to question our own conceptions about nationality and belonging, about the identities we all assume from clans, tribes, political parties, income or gender.“
nationalism and sectarianism, while offering glimpses of a future where Earthlings will be the only passport ever issued and where border fences, border guards, border dogs and checkpoints are relegated to the recycle bin of bad dreams. Take artist Felipe Castelblanco, for example. He lives and works in London and BogotĂĄ and his work is shown across the world. His work Anthem is an interactive installation that explores nationalism as a symbolic territory, while envisioning alternative ways of interacting with sound and analog musical objects. Or artist Gonzalo Fuenmayor, born in Barranquilla who also resides in Miami. His work speaks to the history and the lasting influence of colonialism on both North American and Latin American societies. This exhibition asks us to journey deep into our own identity and question those self-images we use to define our place in the world and perhaps change, so we can more ably embrace those not swimming in our particular political, class and national pool. What these artists say to us is that we need to learn how to celebrate our roots and culture and still cross our individual cultural boundaries in hopes of building successful collaborations. They show us that we all want healthy peoples and communities; we all want good health care; we all want a good education for our children; we all want decent housing; we all want justice and peace in our lives. They suggest that for all of us to meet across real and perceived borders, we all have to examine our own practices and beliefs. They urge us to root out those negative behaviors that limit our capacity to grow and to give; and request that we give light to the positive values that permit us to embrace each other despite our fears and biases. As I get older, I am ever more aware that the journey that matters most to me is not the external trip of belongings I have accumulated; or cars I have parked in my garage; or what the neighbors might think of me. For me, the journey 9
“What these artists say to us is that we need to learn how to celebrate our roots and culture and still cross our individual cultural boundaries in hopes of building successful collaborations.”
that counts the most is that inner journey of the spirit and of the soul—our inexhaustible human quest for joy and peace and harmony. It is this journey— which is each of our journeys—that At Home in the World addresses. At Home in the World challenges us to create a communal vision of what our place—this sacred, fragile, vulnerable Earth—should be: a vibrant, living organism that we sustain so that in turn, we can be sustained. This exhibit provides us the energy and spirit to fight against a vision of our homelands that seeks short-term gain over long-term viability. At Home in the World expects that we will reach out across those seemingly high barriers we think divide us: rural against urban, Indigenous against European, Brown against White—and find that common vision of a sacred place. ¡Abrazos! Arturo Sandoval Chihuahua, México & Albuquerque, New Mexico January 2016
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Arturo Sandoval is a native New Mexican who has worked on civil rights, arts and culture, and environmental issues for more than 50 years. He is founder and Executive Director of the Center of Southwest Culture. He is also a founding Board member of 516 ARTS.
Felipe Castelblanco London, UK/Bogotá, Colombia
“Anthem is a sound-based interactive installation that explores nationalism as a symbolic territory, while envisioning alternative ways of interacting with sound and analog musical objects. Traditional turntables have been transformed into reactive devices that rotate according to the viewer’s motion through the installation, creating a sonic landscape shaped by overlapping layers of music. This piece defines a contentious space for the performance of nationalism and location-based identities: embodying the fragility, paradoxes and contradictions of the current geopolitical landscape. The collection of records includes the national anthems from the United States, Iran, Israel, Egypt, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, the former Soviet Union and even the galaxies (sound tracks from Sci-fi TV series including Star Wars and Star Trek, among others).”
Felipe Castelblanco, Anthem, 2012, multimedia installation, dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and MOTE Gallery
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Gonzalo Fuenmayor Barranquilla, Colombia/Miami, Florida)
A native of Barranquilla, Colombia and a practicing artist in Miami, Gonzalo Fuenmayor has a personal stake in the dialogue of transnationalism in the 21st century. He is well versed in topics of identity, language, culture, commerce, financial interdependence, immigration and the growing emergence and influence of Latino culture in the United States. Through his skillful manipulation of charcoal, Fuenmayor momentarily convinces the viewer that his representations are faithful copies of their source images. He uses text to refer to the imprenetrable effect of cultural influence and to relate geographic tensions. In the works in this exhibition, he references the colonial appropriation of the movie industry, challenges the notion of American exceptionalism and complicates the meaning of the American dream. One can ask “What is America?� The response depends on the respondent.
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Gonzalo Fuenmayor, Going Bananas, 2015, charcoal on paper, 22 x 30 inches Courtesy of Dot Fiftyone Gallery, Miami
Miguel Gandert Albuquerque, New Mexico
Miguel Gandert’s work in this exhibition is from Hotel Mariachi: Urban Space and Cultural Heritage in Los Angeles, a book of photographs and essays depicting the mariachi musicians of East Los Angeles and the 80-year-old mariachi culture centered in the 1889 hotel on Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights. In her Introduction, Evangeline Ordaz-Molina writes that documentary art photographer Miguel Gandert “joyously and heartbreakingly captures this dichotomy of a regal band at play and the harsh reality of the struggle for work.” Hotel Mariachi provides insight into the challenging lives of mariachi musicians. It is also a story of valiant efforts to preserve the cultural heritage of the mariachis and the historic hotel, built by great-grandparents of author Catherine Kurland, whose efforts to save the building led to the discovery of her family’s role in the birth of Los Angeles.
Miguel Gandert, Madre de los Mariachis/Mother of Mariachis, 2013, pigment print from negative, 17 x 22 inches
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Margaret Jacobs Enfield, New Hampshire
Margaret Jacobs is a member of Mohawk, St. Regis Akwesasne. Her work makes use of alloyed materials—primarily steel and pewter—as a metaphor for cultural resiliency, resistance and adaptability, and to pay homage to the famed Mohawk Ironworkers. Jacobs’ abstract metal sculptures are emotive and sharp, edged with knowledge and heavy with history. She uses contemporary alloyed materials to question how cultures adapt to the art world. This use of steel is particularly layered with meaning, referencing strength and resistance, as well as the weight of culture and the history of the Mohawk Ironworkers. When asked about the way her work reflects the relationship between Natives and the United States, Jacobs says, “There is such a complex relationship between Natives and the United States, and I think that for survival we have to figure out how to adapt to a contemporary world without losing the essence of culture and meaning. This is one of the major ideas that I am exploring in my work.”
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Margaret Jacobs, You’ll Have and I’ll Hold, 2013, steel, wood and graphite, 24 x 34 x 7 inches
Tarrah Krajnak Los Angeles, California
“In the summer of 2013 I returned to Peru, from where I was adopted, and rented a small studio in a crumbling mansion which had a rich history of its own. Once a symbol of wealth and modernity, it too had changed along with the city. I used the materials at hand to investigate the place of my origin. The cracked marble flooring became a surface to conduct my re-photographic experiments. I roamed the streets of Lima collecting photographs, printed materials and other ephemera, which I then photographed in ensembles of objects, texts and images. At first I focused only on material from Lima circa 1979 (the year I was born), and then I looked for other clues—specifically photographs of mixed race women—who might resemble me or even one another. Finding a pair, a twin or forcing the double became an important element in the final series. I set out not to recover some stable, ‘authentic’ identity hidden by the circumstances of my birth and adoption, but rather to pull together archival materials, found photographs, untold narratives and disparate images in an effort to patch together, reclaim and invent something like a psychic history of that year, and locate myself within it.” Tarrah Krajnak, Twins, 2014, pigment print, 28 x 42 inches
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Matthew Mazzotta New York, New York
Matthew Mazzotta, the Coleman Center for the Arts and the people of York, Alabama teamed up to transform a blighted property into a new public art project. Through open conversations, hard work and planning, they developed a project that uses the materials from an abandoned house as well as the land it sits on to build a new smaller house on the footprint of the old house. However this new house has a secret: Open House physically transforms from the shape of a house into a free, open air theater that seats 100 people by having its walls and roof fold down. The work of Matthew Mazzotta evolves from his interest in exploring the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. His practice is conceptual and manifests as participatory public interventions that aim at bringing criticality and a sense of openness to the places we live. The objects, situations and spaces he creates as community projects ask us to relate to ourselves and to each other in unfamiliar ways, in the hope of finding new perspectives on how we see ourselves in this world.
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Matthew Mazzotta, Open House, 2013, pigment prints, 30 x 40 inches each, Courtesy of Coleman Center for the Arts, York, Alabama and Central Features Contemporary Art, Albuquerque
Billy Joe Miller Albuquerque, New Mexico
Billy Joe Miller created the collaborative piece Writha based on stories of belonging inspired by living and working in Albuquerque’s International District, which has the highest percentage of foreign-born and refugees in the city. Using local natural and found materials evocative of both Albuquerque and the high desert of New Mexico, Miller worked with International District residents Bbi Mah, Farshad, Mershad and Fattah Ahmadi, Keiko Beers, Juan Cardiel, John Dietrich, Patrick Fairbanks, Bryan Henry, Karen Kathy, Bich-Hanh Thi Nguyen and Thien-Tin Nguyen. His collaborators include a mix of refugees from Afghanistan and Vietnam, and participants of Japanese, Filipino and Diné heritage. Other participants include Jen DePaolo, Sarah Haak, Aryon Hopkins, Michelle Montjoy, Mitchell Olsen and especially Cameron Crow. Miller says, “Wreaths have been placed on thresholds throughout history and have been a symbol of pride, abundance and place for many cultures. Constructed in community and made into artifacts, transformed found objects become representations of home.” Writha is dedicated to the residents of the International District. Billy Joe Miller & collaborators, Writha, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable
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Juna Rosales Muller Ojai, California
This exhibition features Juna Rosales Muller’s solo and collaborative quilts made from migrants’ discarded clothes. She says, “Mending Patriotism takes the form of an old-fashioned sewing bee, in which participants sew a quilt made from clothing cast off by migrants crossing Mexico’s Sonoran desert towards the U.S. - Mexico border. This project provides a space for learning and exchange around issues of border-crossing, human migration and national identity. Quilts have historically been used to signify safe houses, most notably on the Underground Railroad (or so the story goes). In our modern day, how do people seeking refuge identify allies? In what ways can we as individuals participate in nation-wide concerns? What is our collective vision of the future of patriotism and national identity?”
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Juna Rosales Muller, Falda Folklorica #1/American Sister, 2014, clothes left behind by migrants crossing the U.S. - Mexico border, 8.3 feet diameter
Kameelah Janan Rasheed New York, New York
An artist-archivist, Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s work reckons with the complexity of memory, ritual, historiography and archival practices as they relate to the construction of both personal and social histories. Having been displaced from her home as a child, Rasheed grounds her personal experience of displacement into her commutable archive, No Instruction for Assembly. In its serial construction and iterative presentation, No Instructions for Assembly makes use of found and personal photographs as well as ephemeral and other material culture to reconstruct a family’s archive. Installed in the gallery space, the grids of images and material culture seek to create a discursive space for narratives of ordinary Black people who may not otherwise have space to share their family’s histories.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed, No Instructions for Assembly, IX (detail), 2016, installation, dimensions variable
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Rontherin Ratliff New Orleans, Louisiana
Rontherin Ratliff’s piece Things That Float is inspired by his experience of Hurricane Katrina, during which he chose not to evacuate and to go exploring by bicycle and then in an inflatable boat. His curiosity led him to his neighborhood, the Ninth Ward, and to the devastation of his grandmother’s house and the family history it carried. He says, “By using elements from discarded building materials, dismantled furniture and salvaged family photographs, my goal is to share a memorable moment from my Katrina experience. Things That Float represents what it looks like to feel and know loss, to certain degrees of gravity, both of the mass-proportionate force of attraction among matter and of the serious critical nature of the situation.”
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Rontherin Ratliff, Things That Float, 2010, mixed media, 32 x 36 x 48 inches
Alex Rivera Los Angeles, California
Alex Rivera’s film The Borders Trilogy tells three small stories to illuminate a much larger one: the contradictions of a world order in which products freely cross borders that people may not. The first story is set at the border beach where the Pacific Ocean meets the United States and Mexico. In the shadow of a surreal metal wall which separates the two countries, a few families separated by immigration policy reunite through the wall, in effect having a transnational picnic. The second story is set in an entirely different border town: Newark, New Jersey. Here, border crossers are taking over. And these border-crossers are fifty-feet long. They are the metal containers that bring products to the United States from factories around the world. This story invokes one of the dysfunctions of globalization, and it demonstrates a visible consequence of an open-border for trade. The final story dwells on a single, haunting, x-ray image that shows the way twenty-first century immigrants are responding to borders that are open to the products they might produce in the third world, but that are not open to them. The Borders Trilogy is a succinct and powerful meditation on the contradictions of U.S. border policy. Alex Rivera, The Borders Trilogy, 2003, three part video
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Josef Schulz Düsseldorf, Germany
The work by Josef Shulz in this exhibition is from his Übergang series, which examines former border stations at inner-European frontiers. He says “In the past, national borders were divisive by character. In some cases their purpose was to delineate between political, legal, fiscal and monetary systems, in others between linguistic and cultural differences. Borders were lines, drawn not only across territories but also through our heads…border posts are much easier to abolish than mental barriers… My interest in these past places of border-line experience can be traced back to the story of my own life. I grew up in Poland, a country whose territory was repeatedly redefined in the course of history. The border police have now disappeared from our frontiers, and the border stations seem quite harmless today – but they will continue to conjure up unsettling images in our minds for many years to come.”
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Josef Shultz, spfr08, 2005, C-print, 22 x 25 inches
Judy Shintani Half Moon Bay, California
Judy Shintani’s pieces in the exhibition focus on the internment of Japanese Americans that occurred during World War II, many of whom spent a substantial part of their childhoods behind barbed wire in America. In The Remembrance Shrine, she uses written memories from parents, aunts, uncles and cousins to honor their dignity and resilience. In Quiet American Hero, Shintani honors a young clerical worker who sued the federal government in 1942 to challenge imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps. It was her appeal that finally persuaded the justices to contradict their three earlier positions and declare the internment of loyal Americans to be unconstitutional after all. And in Pearls Left Behind, viewer responses to The Remembrance Shrine are used to create a conversation about war, peace, imprisonment, democracy and Japanese American internment. Shintani says, “It is my wish that those who were imprisoned be able to read the many apologies and thoughts that are usually never spoken or heard.” Judy Shintani, Pearls Left Behind, 2010, mixed media, 10 x 8 x 2 feet
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Sin Huellas Collective Multiple locations including Albuquerque, New Mexico
Detention Nation is an exhibition by the collective Sin Huellas (Albuquerquebased Delilah Montoya with Orlando Lara, Deyadira Trevino, Brenda CruzWolf, Hope Sanford, Selene C., Carlos Carrasco), which is designed to give insights into the immigrant detention industry and call attention to the children, adults and families who are incarcerated without due process. Selene’s Dream, the portion of Detention Nation on view in this exhibition, tells the story of a young woman named Selene who was held in the San Diego Detention Facility for 49 days. Letters to her family and photographic and video documentation depict the dire circumstances and injustice she and so many others have experienced. Selene grew up in the United States as an American, was the valedictorian of her high school class and was newly accepted to college when she found herself one of thousands of young people who were processed in makeshift detention centers and incarcerated in large warehouses. With drugged water and low temperatures, these detention centers were designed to make refugees feel sleepy, docile and unwelcome.
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Sin Huellas Collective, Selene’s Dream, 2015, cyanotype on fabric & mixed media, 40 x 90 inches
Artists’ Biographies FELIPE CASTELBLANCO earned an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and has exhibited internationally, including at the San Diego Museum of Art; Fundação Nacional de Artes, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; FIVAC festival in Camaguey Cuba; PRACTICE Gallery in Philadelphia; the Valenzuela Klenner Gallery in Bogotá, Colombia, and in storefronts and street corners throughout the United States. He was the recipient of the 2013 John Fergus Post MFA Fellowship at Ohio State University; the 2014 Starr Fellowship at the Royal Academy in London and most recently commissioned in 2015 by the U.S. Department of Education and Zero1 to develop a participatory project in the Philippines through the American Arts Incubator exchange program. GONZALO FUENMAYOR, born in Colombia, earned a BFA from the School of Visual
Arts, NY and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco; Dot Fiftyone Gallery, Miami; and Galeria Mundo, Bogotá, Colombia, and has been featured in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lima, Peru and Nube Gallery, Santa Cruz, Bolivia. His work is held in collections of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston and the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, among others. He lives and works in Miami. MIGUEL A. GANDERT was born in Española, New Mexico and grew up in Santa Fe.
His work has been shown in galleries and museums internationally, including in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, and is in many public collections, including the Smithsonian Museum of American History and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. He has collaborated with renowned scholars, most recently on In the Company of Empty Crosses with Arturo Madrid and The Plazas of New Mexico with Chris Wilson. Gandert is a Distinguished Professor and Director of Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media at UNM. MARGARET JACOBS received her BA in Studio Art from Dartmouth College. She has
held several artist residencies including at the Vermont Studio Center where she received a Native American Fellowship through the Harpo Foundation. Jacobs has exhibited throughout New England including at SPA in Barre, VT; Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH; and ArtisTree Gallery in South Pomfret, VT. She currently works as the Exhibition Coordinator at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, NH. TARRAH KRAJNAK was born in Lima, Peru and received her MFA from the University of Notre Dame. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at Art13 London, Art Basel Miami, National Museum of Women in the Arts and Columbus Museum of Art, among others. She has received grants from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Vermont Council for the Arts, Vermont Community Foundation and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work has appeared in both print and online magazines
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including Nueva Luz, Camerawork and F-Stop Magazine. Krajnak is currently Assistant Professor of Photography at Pitzer College. MATTHEW MAZZOTTA is an artist focusing on large-scale public art projects. His
work evolves from an interest in exploring the relationship between people and their environments, as well as between each other. His practice is conceptual and manifests as participatory public interventions that aim at bringing criticality and a sense of openness to the places we live. His work has been recognized nationally and internationally through exhibitions, projects, awards and print and online features. Mazzotta is a graduate of the School of Art Institute of Chicago and received a Masters of Science in Visual Studies in 2009 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. BILLY JOE MILLER creates multimedia, interactive installations that are often in nontraditional locations, are collaborative and invite participants to go inward and consider their own relationship with nature and their surroundings. Miller grew up in San Diego and studied painting and installation with William Feeney. In 2006, he moved to New Mexico and began working in hospice as a nursing assistant. This proximity to death influenced his art practice, leading to an interest in storytelling, sacred space, last rites and similar rituals created around death. His recent work experiments with ritual performances and artifacts as a way to creatively re-envision spiritual expression. JUNA ROSALES MULLER is a fabric artist, printmaker, outdoor educator and agricultural
worker. In her work with clothing cast-off by migrants crossing the border, she explores themes of inclusion, identity, nationalism and community. These themes are expanded through collaborative workshops in the tradition of American quilting bees, where dialogue and storytelling play a key role. She received her BA in Southwest Studies with a focus in Political Ecology and has exhibited her work nationally. She currently practices art, educates kids about their local watershed and works in the citrus industry in her hometown of Ojai, California. KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED is a research-based conceptual artist, writer and educator
who works in the space between visual arts and literary arts. She is widely exhibited and is the recipient of numerous residencies, fellowships and honors. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Art 21, Wall Street Journal, ArtSlant and Hyperallergic. Currently, she is the Arts Editor for SPOOK Magazine and a contributing editor at The New Inquiry. A 2006 Amy Biehl U.S. Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, Rasheed holds an Ed.M in Secondary Education from Stanford University (2008) as well as a BA in Public Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College (2006). RONTHERIN RATLIFF is known for creating textural assemblages and sculptural work
that examines contemporary society. In 2014 he was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Center Artist-In-Residence Program in New Orleans. Now he works out of a studio in New Orleans’ business district with five other artists where they have co-founded Level Artist Collective. It is the result of an organic formation of painters, sculptors 26
and writers who merge their creative resources to promote, support and sustain their collective voice and vision. ALEX RIVERA is a filmmaker who for over fifteen years has been telling new, urgent,
and visually adventurous Latino stories. His first feature film, Sleep Dealer, won multiple awards at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival. He is a Sundance Fellow, Rockefeller Fellow, USA Artist Fellow, Creative Capital grantee, was The Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University, and was named one the “10 Directors to Watch” by Variety Magazine. In 2015 Rivera was awarded major support from the Surdna Foundation for his film-in-progress, The Infiltrators, and he received an Art & Technology Lab Grant from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for an upcoming project in virtual reality with Virtual Reality pioneer Nonny de la Peña. JOSEF SCHULZ was born in Bischofsburg, Poland and has exhibited widely throughout
Europe. He studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Bernd Becher and Thomas Ruff. He has received the European Architectural Photography Prize, the Kodak and Large Format Inkjet Award, the db architekturbild of the European Architectural Photography Prize, and the Prix Voies Off at the Rencontres d’Arles Festival. His work is held in public collections, including: the Museum for Contemporary Art | ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; the Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus, Denmark; the UBS Art Collection, Switzerland; and the Deutscher Bundestag, Germany. He lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany and is a Co-Founder of Project Space Spam-Contemporary. JUDY SHINTANI focuses on remembrance, connection and storytelling in her
role as a narrator of culture. She works with whatever best expresses the story— organic and recycled materials, textiles, ethnic remnants, paint and video. Shintani often collaborates with communities in the making of art. She received her MA in Transformative Art from John F. Kennedy University in Berkeley and a BA in Graphic Design from San Jose State. She has exhibited extensively in the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and the Southwest. Shintani is a 2015 Santa Fe Art Institute artist-inresidence alumni and a 2016 artist-in-residence at Creativity Explored for Disabled Adults in San Francisco. SIN HUELLAS (Without Fingerprints) is an artist collective composed of Mexican,
Chicana/o and American artists and activists formed to explore issues of borders, migration, detention and deportation in the United States. The phrase, sin huellas or without a trace, refers to the practice of erasing one’s fingerprints with acid, fire or other surgical procedures in order to evade detection by ICE or other authorities after deportation. As a collective, Sin Huellas makes the effort to bring the vision of artists and activists into dialogue with the raw expressive products of detainees and their families. Sin Huellas members are Delilah Montoya, Carlos Carrasco, Selene Cortez, Brenda Cruz-Wolf, Orlando Lara, Hope Sanford and Deyadira Treviño.
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FUNDERS
STAFF & CONSULTANTS
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Bernalillo County Commissioner Maggie Hart-Stebbins City of Albuquerque Mayor Richard J. Berry & City Council Cultural Services Department Urban Enhancement Trust Fund The FUNd of Albuquerque Community Foundation McCune Charitable Foundation The National Endowment for the Arts NPN/Visual Arts Network
Suzanne Sbarge Executive Director Rhiannon Mercer Associate Director Teresa Buscemi Programs & New Media Manager Claude Smith Education & Exhibitions Manager Isabella Caporuscio UNM Arts Management Intern Eve Picher UNM Fine Arts Intern Jane Kennedy Development Associate Janice Fowler Bookkeeper Kathy Garrett Numbercrunchers, Accountant Melody Mock Website Designer
DONORS Anonymous Diane Burke Reid Cramer, in honor of Sonya Cohen Cramer New Mexico Orthopaedics Rick Rennie & Sandy Hill OmniSleep Solutions Strell Design David Vogel & Marietta Patricia Leis Clint Wells Dr. Dean Yannias Emily Zambello
MEDIA PARTNERS Albuquerque Journal, Lead Media Partner KUNM Radio 89.9 FM Pyragraph
SPECIAL THANKS Albuquerque Art Business Association ABQ Convention & Visitors Bureau City Councilor Isaac Benton Full Circle Solutions Green Joe Coffee Truck Historic District Improvement Company Hotel Blue Don Mickey Designs Morningside Antiques Stubblefield Screenprint Company
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Juna Rosales Muller’s Artist Residency made possible in part through support from the National Performance Network’s Visual Artists Network. Major contributors are the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
© 2016, 516 ARTS Catalog published by 516 ARTS, 516 Central Ave. SW, Albuquerque, NM, 87102 tel. 505-242-1445, www.516arts.org Design: Suzanne Sbarge • Printing: Don Mickey Designs