Releases | New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs

Gallery of Conscience Exhibit opening: Community through Making From Peru to New Mexico

November 28th, 2018

(Santa Fe, New Mexico) – The Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe is hosting an opening reception for a new exhibition in the Gallery of Conscience entitled Community through Making. The public opening Sunday, January 6, 2019 from 1-4 p.m. will feature artists talking about their work from 1-2 p.m.; an Artists’ Pop up Art market from 2-4 p.m.; and art making activities related to the exhibit from 2 -4 p.m. The public opening is a free event occurring on the first Sunday of the month.

Community through Making brings together local and Peruvian artists to explore how art shapes healthy and vibrant communities, and experiments with community curation, filling the gallery with video, stories, and artworks as created and told by museum program participants over the course of the spring and summer of 2018. The installation is a conversation across borders, highlighting three collaborative projects that paired local artists and artists from Peru for 10-day residencies in conjunction with the exhibition Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru.

The first collaboration, called Places of Memory, brings together members of two Indigenous women-led organizations: Tewa Women United/TWU (Española, New Mexico) and the National Association of the Families of the Abducted, Detained, and Disappeared of Peru/ANFASEP (Ayacucho, Peru) to explore the culturally specific ways they use art to heal community and individual trauma. While the violence experienced in these distant communities takes on different faces, participants contend that the common thread is the disconnection that occurs in societies that focus on “I” instead of “We.” They encourage visitors to practice kindness and forge connection with fellow humans and with the natural world.

Participants include: Beverly Billie, Community Wellbeing Coordinator at TWU; Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez, Environmental Health and Justice Program Manager at TWU; Wayland Sanchez, potter from San Ildefonso Pueblo; Adelina Garcia Mendoza, former president of ANFASEP; Rosalia Tineo Torres, potter from Ayacucho, Peru; Wari Zarate Gutierrez, artist from Ayacucho, Peru.

The second collaboration, Street Art and Activism, is a convening of muralists, printers, and painters whose work engages contemporary social issues with a focus on public visibility. Carol Fernandez and Fernando Castro, founders of the Lima-based art collective Amapolay Manufacturas Autonomas use screen printing as a form of popular protest and to encourage youth to celebrate their native roots. Together with alumni and faculty of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), the Alas de Agua Art Collective, and artists whose work supported the Water Protectors at Standing Rock/NoDAPL protest, they designed a series of screen prints that address borders and our connections to each other. They encourage visitors to create and support art in their own communities.

Participants include: Jamison Chās Banks, multi-disciplinary artist and faculty at IAIA; Heidi K Brandow, multi-disciplinary artist and IAIA alumna; Legun Coriz, independent artist and activist; Moira Garcia, mixed media artist, founding member of Art for Change and IAIA alumna; John Paul Granillo, Chicano multi-disciplinary artist and member of Alas de Agua; Juan Lira, painter, muralist, and member of Alas de Agua; Manuel Ramirez, printmaker and IAIA Alumnus.

The third collaboration pairs sculptors Aymar Ccopacatty (Aymara) and Nora Naranjo Morse (Santa Clara) with the theme Rivers of Plastic. Both artists utilize non-biodegradable trash with art traditions learned through their families; textiles for Ccopacatty and clay for Naranjo Morse. Both see their home landscapes being transformed by plastic waste and use sculpture to open conversations about this intrusive and persistent material. The exhibition will display a large loom and woven textile created by Ccopacatty with plastic discarded by local businesses, museum staff, and the International Folk Art Market. Ccopacatty and Naranjo Morse also collaborated on a sculpture using plastic, clay, and found metal that will be on view.

Throughout the course of the exhibition, Alas de Agua Collective will be creating a mural for the title wall of the Gallery of Conscience. MOIFA is very excited to partner with Alas de Agua and host this mural inside our walls, which was commissioned to explore themes of relatedness across borders. Uniting local artists and providing a creative outlet for Santa Fe youth, Alas de Agua paints culturally resonant public murals across the town, working to beautify and strengthen the Santa Fe community. Come see their mural in progress outside the Gallery of Conscience exhibit and meet these incredible artists.

The Museum of International Folk Art is a proud member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. As a member site, we are committed to addressing social issues related to the arts and the communities we serve.

What Is the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience? 

It is a global network of historic sites, museums and memory initiatives that connect past struggles to today’s movements for human rights; the only worldwide network dedicated to transforming places that preserve the past into spaces that promote civic action. This conscious effort to connect past to present and memory to action is the hallmark of the Sites of Conscience movement. As a network of more than 250 Sites of Conscience in 65 countries, the Coalition engages tens of millions of people every year in using the lessons of history to take action on challenges to democracy and human rights today.

About the Museum of International Folk Art: http://www.internationalfolkart.org/

Founded in 1953 by Florence Dibell Bartlett, the Museum of International Folk Art’s mission is to foster understanding of the traditional arts to illuminate human creativity and shape a humane world. The museum holds the world’s largest international folk art collection of more than 150,000 objects from six continents and over 150 nations, representing a broad range of global artists whose artistic expressions make Santa Fe an international crossroads of culture. For many visitors, fascination with folk art begins upon seeing the whimsical toys and traditional objects within the Girard Collection. For others, the international textiles, ceramics, carvings and other cultural treasures in the Neutrogena Collection provide the allure.  The museum’s historic and contemporary Latino and Hispano folk art collections, spanning the Spanish Colonial period to modern-day New Mexico, reflect how artists respond to their time and place in ways both delightful and sobering. In 2010, the museum opened the Mark Naylor and Dale Gunn Gallery of Conscience, where exhibitions encourage visitors to exchange ideas on complex issues of human rights and social justice. A division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. 706 Camino Lejo, on Museum Hill in Santa Fe, NM 87505. (505) 476-1200. Hours: 10 am to 5 pm daily, May through October; closed Mondays November through April, closed Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Events, news releases and images about activities at the Museum of International Folk Art and other divisions in the Department of Cultural Affairs can be accessed at www.media.newmexicoculture.org

 

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2-MOIFA-Gallery of Conscience:  File Name: Fernando1.jpg  People / Object shown in image: Fernando Castro of Amapolay at the Street Art and Activism screen printing workshop at MOIFA, June 26th, 2018   Photographer: Chloe Accardi

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