2 minute read
NEW MEXICO HISTORIC SITES
Silver Lining
There was an unexpected silver lining to last summer’s shutdown of Fort Sumner Historic Site and Bosque Redondo Memorial. The situation delayed the planned June 2020 opening of the reworked permanent exhibition Bosque Redondo: A Place of Suffering, A Place of Survival. It also provided time to add four new temporary outdoor artworks designed to deepen visitor engagement with the site.
The exhibition’s projected June 2021 opening will now dovetail with the unveiling of the newly commissioned artworks. The four environmental installations consider the cultural histories of the area to encourage meaningful dialogue about the history of the site. The project was supported by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs T.I.M.E. NOW project (Temporary Installations Made for the Environment) with funding from a $10,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant that provides $2,500 per installation.
The exhibition coincides with the 31st anniversary of a letter found at the site on June 27, 1990. Written by Diné student visitors, the letter called for a more accurate account of the 1864-1868 forced relocation of the Mescalero Apache and Navajo peoples from Arizona to the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation.
The chosen artists—Miriam and Sarah Diddy, Winoka and Garron Yepa, Paula Castillo, Mark Horst, Amaris Ketcham and Sara Rivera—will install artworks on four designated circles representing the four sacred mountains and cardinal directions for the Navajo Nation.
“Each of the artists had to have some sort of component that brings the people in, has them look a little bit deeper,” says site manager Aaron Roth.
Forgotten Soles, by the all-Native artist team of Miriam and Sarah Diddy and Winoka and Garron Yepa, features a Navajo wedding basket made from the soles of 400 shoes.
“There are so many meanings to that—the soles of shoes, the souls of the people who were forced to walk here. The number 400 is synonymous with 400 miles of walking to get here,” Roth says. “It means so much more when it’s coming from a Navajo or Mescalero Apache artist.”
While Roth says, “We may have had to sit on our hands for a little bit,” the added artworks will enhance the visitor’s experience of the site’s painful cultural history.
“It’s going to be a fantastic opening,” he says. “There will be many connections to be made, both indoors and outdoors.”
A mural inside the Bosque Redondo Memorial at Fort Sumner Historic Site depicts The Long Walk of the Navajo people. Photo courtesy New Mexico Historic Sites.
To support the New Mexico Historic Sites, contact Yvonne Montoya at Yvonne@museumfoundation.org or 505.216.1592.
