Common Ground Gets a Makeover

What’s New in Common Ground

The permanent collection gets a makeover and an online presence.

IN 2016, ALBUQUERQUE MUSEUM CURATORS EMBARKED on an ambitious re-envisioning of Common Ground, the showcase exhibition of the permanent collection. Their shared effort went beyond simply rearranging artwork to a fundamental change in themes and the overarching narrative exploring what New Mexico art is and how it speaks to us. Common Ground is now organized around themed areas: Real New Mexico— landscape, cityscape and other depictions of the local environment; Real New Mexicans—portraiture of New Mexicans from a range of backgrounds, experiences and cultures; Whose Culture?—cultural influences on New Mexicans; and Visual Experiments—provocative new approaches to image-making in an aesthetically awe-inspiring land.

Five years after that redesign, curators are once again revisiting Common Ground while also seeking to build a robust online exhibition. One element influencing this change was a demographic analysis of the collection performed last summer. The collections team aggregated artist info based on identified gender and race, and then compared that data with the demographics of Albuquerque, the theory being that the collection must reflect the people of the city.

“Part of our thinking about Common Ground was how can we use this process [of demographic analysis] to assess what’s in the collection and what we want to collect in the future,” says Curator of Art Josie Lopez, Ph.D. “How are we representing and reaching our broader communities?”

At the same time, it’s become clear that online exhibitions are here to stay. While there is no substitute for seeing the work in person, an online version of Common Ground will bring the collection to a wider audience. It also allows curators to exhibit works on paper that can’t stay in the gallery for a long time due to their fragility, as well as very large works that won’t fit in a physical space.

The team gained some insight and experience from Trinity, Reflections on

ON VIEW

COMMON GROUND

cabq.gov/common-ground

the Bomb, and Seven Generations of Red Power, exclusively online exhibitions that the Museum and City of Albuquerque team built as an interim solution when the Museum was closed last spring. These exhibitions reached people all over the country and the world, many of whom accessed the exhibitions for research purposes. “One of the things we learned during COVID-19 was that this could be an added value to the mission of the Museum,” says Denise Crouse, director of communications. “We can’t put every exhibition online, nor do we want to … but we can leverage what we have and make our works more accessible over a longer period of time to a wider audience.”

An online exhibition requires curators to think somewhat differently as they create a narrative for a collection. Foremost, curators have to envision how people visit museum websites (rather than physical spaces) and what they do once they get there. In a museum, if a visitor doesn’t like an exhibition, they generally just move on to another gallery. With a website, losing a visitor’s interest means clicking away from the website to somewhere else. Common Ground creators considered how people tend to navigate from artwork to artwork, and how they interact with each piece. Moving forward, the online exhibition will also include a way to send messages to curators, ask a question, and download educational or art activities related to an artwork or a theme.

Both the gallery and online exhibitions are getting an infusion of new work, including a section designed for recent acquisitions. The first installation of this area includes works by AnaMaria Samaniego, Charles "Chaz" Bojorquez, Rufino Tamayo, Lydia Madrid, Gronk, and Eddie Dominguez. And curators aren’t shying away from difficult topics in Albuquerque’s history. Additions to the exhibition include Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's The CourtHouse Steps which is about the controversy in the late 1980s over development of a road in the Petroglyph National Monument. Karsten Creightney’s large painting and collage titled Black Hills features a collaged landscape with images from the western United States including a tiny picture of Mt. Rushmore. In the painting, Creightney explores land sovereignty and the legacy of colonization. Other works include paintings by Josef Albers and Gustave Baumann as well as small sculptures by Roxanne Swentzell and Bob Haozous.

Above: Bob Haozous, Warm Spring Chiricahua Apache, born 1943, Los Angeles, California; lives Santa Fe, New Mexico. El Piloto, 1990, nickel-plated steel, 16 x 10 x 7 ½ in., gift of the J. Daniel Boley Collection, gift of Katherine Hauth, PC2019.51.12

Bottom left: Roxanne Swentzell, Santa Clara Pueblo, born 1962 Santa Clara, New Mexico; lives Santa Clara, New Mexico. Bathing Beauty, ca. 2000, bronze 8 1/4 × 10 × 16 1/4 in., gift in honor of Judith Lackner PC2019.54.5

Opposite: Karsten Creightney, born 1976, Albuquerque; lives Albuquerque. Black Hills, 2018, collage, watercolor, acrylic, oil, and wax on wood 64 x 78 x 2 in., museum purchase, PC2020.18.1

COMMON GROUND ARTIST DEMOGRAPHICS

140 artworks 121 (identified) artists

NUMBER OF ARTISTS (NOT INDIVIDUAL WORKS) BY DEMOGRAPHIC CATEGORY

Women: 34 Native: 18 Black: 2 Latino/a: 35 Asian: 2