New Mexico Museum of Art Past Present: Grace Notes Get Online https://vimeo.com/mnmf In March and April, the first months of the COVID-19 museum shutdown, New Mexico Museum of Art photography curator Katherine Ware selected a group of images from social media that reflect a pandemicinduced shift in perspective. If you missed Grace Notes the first time, you can still view it online. The photographers focus on slight, seemingly everyday gestures and surreal glances that show the weight of each moment at home. In Eirik Johnson’s What day is it again?, the camera looms down on a child’s abundant “quarantine hair.” Aziza Murray’s Thank you to whoever did this sweet thing, dated March 31, frames the simple elegance of a chalk rainbow on a weedy sidewalk.
The Art of Sharing Managing our Times Online
Brad Trone assembled ten Trader Joe’s shopping bags into a robot figure. Rosemary Meza-DesPlas sewed gray strands of human hair onto black twill fabric and called it Twelve Angry Women. And Keith Boadwee painted a bright oil on canvas depicting a goldfish in a bowl smoking a cigarette. What do these artists have in common? They all posted their creations to Instagram with the hashtag #NMAWhatsInside. By doing so, their work was featured in What’s Inside, a crowd-sourced digital exhibition organized by Merry Scully, the New Mexico Museum of Art’s head of curatorial affairs. “Protracted time inside allows for extended observation of our surroundings and seems to encourage more frequent, and uninterrupted, internal dialogues,” Scully writes in the introduction. “Odd Rosemary Meza-DesPlas (@rosemarymezadesplas), Twelve Angry Women, 2018. Hand-sewn human gray hair on black twill fabric.
“Whether created on a windowsill, on a walk, or in an artist’s studio,” Ware writes, “these images capture the subdued quality of this worrisome time, when we are newly awakened to our immediate surroundings and the quiet moments of beauty and grace in our busy lives.”
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