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NEW MEXICO MUSEUM OF ART
Past Present: Grace Notes
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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.
“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.”
New Mexico Museum of Art
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.
Brad Trone (@bradtrone), Untitled (Grocery Bags), 2020.
things are amplified, meanings are changed and perspectives are altered.” What’s Inside is one of a deluge of virtual initiatives conceived by curators after last spring’s COVID-19 closure of the art museum. These online innovations include:
Digital exhibitions like The Solitary Figure, featuring 20 th century works from the collection that depict isolation and introspection, and Grace Notes, which used Instagram crowd-sourcing to compile images of beauty and grace.
In Gallery Conversation, interviews with the five New Mexico artists featured in Alcoves 20/20 on the museum’s YouTube channel.
#NMTwinning, a social media-based community art competition with cash prizes for reinterpretations of online collection artworks. Sponsored by Vital Spaces, the project drew participation from six Santa Fe museums. Scully served as a juror. Five winners were announced weekly in May, with three overall winners chosen at month’s end.
According to Scully, the overarching idea behind every project has been to keep visitors engaged with the museum and its collections during the pandemic. Her team members were extraordinarily nimble in implementing online initiatives. For example, within the first week of staff working from home, assistant curator Jana Gottschalk began soliciting submissions for Now!, a crowd-sourced show of immediate responses to the pandemic.
The Museum of New Mexico Foundation has sponsored most of these online projects, but funding opportunities remain. The museum has need of a professional videographer to help elevate production values, as well as more advanced audiovisual and computer equipment.
Currently, staff members are using their own phones, home wifi connections, free Zoom accounts and personal computers to mount Web-based projects.
Museum work during COVID-19 has highlighted “what a good team I work with,” says Scully. “We were able to adapt pretty quickly and to be agile about trying to find solutions.”
Even after reopening, the museum will continue to focus on digital exhibitions and education. This fall, art lovers can look forward to two new exhibitions: A Fiery Light: Will Shuster’s New Mexico and For America: The Art of the National Academy. “We want to stay on people’s radars however we can,” Scully says. “So much of what we do is about sharing.”
Plans for future exhibitions, though current as of July 31 press time, are subject to change.
