Hello! It has been awhile since I last posted. I have been painting and have completed my art and history installation for the University of New Mexico’s Information Technology Department — Can You Hear IT? (to see images of that work, navigate to my art portfolio page on this site).
The project is in a rather narrow hallway with a down-slope and a dropped ceiling. This is my very clumsy attempt at a panoramic stitching of all the moments of the mural.
This project is done, except for the final protective coating which can only be applied once the paint is thoroughly dried. The technical aspects of producing this 400 square foot project have been fascinating (and stressful!) and I will be writing a post in the future that will tell the story of how I made this project: the techniques and tricks I discovered in the course of producing this large piece, as well as the community-based method from which I developed the content. Working with the IT community was a new and very rewarding experience!
Part of the story I tell will include the long contract drafting and negotiations. Thank to Americans for the Arts, I was able to produce a detailed contract with my funder, which protected me, my work, and my client. This will be particularly useful for other artists who are interested in entering the public sphere.
However, for this post, I want to (finally) share with you the fruits of a discussion I had with a group of very talented art historians for the 2020 Western History Association Annual Meeting, which was held virtually in the month of October. Along with Doug Sackman and others, I organized a panel entitled “Muralizing Western American History” to explore how history-based visual art functions in and serves (or doesn’t serve) the public interest. The panel was made up of experienced professionals as well as graduate students, and we had a fun and wide-ranging exchange that is germane to ongoing political actions around the decommissioning of monuments, art in educational institutions, and the trauma of the U. S.- Mexico border.
Here is a link for a video of the entire session if you are interested in diving deeper into these amazing scholars’ works. We were indebted to Miss Amy Scott of the Autry Museum for moderating our discussion.
Kendall Lovely started us out and offered a powerful paper about the role that classicism has played in legitimizing certain racist tropes in the public art of settler societies. She makes an important distinction, and one well worth repeating in my opinion: classic European art historical modes and frameworks do not mean the same thing in the context of settler colonial societies. Nevertheless, art historians and artists often give themselves a pass (or are given a pass) in the name of various ideals such as objectivity, preservation, connoisseurship, and individuality.
For example, Lovely explains how La Jornada, a monument which until recently was in front of Albuquerque’s Art Museum, embodied both the Tri-Cultural Myth and the falsity of that myth at the level of its three makers. Lovely: “The Alcade statue’s sculptor, Reynaldo “Sonny” Rivera, Betty Sabo, and Santa Clara artist Nora Naranjo-Morse were selected to represent this mythology, with all three of the artists being commissioned to create together a work to commemorate the cuatro centenario for Albuquerque’s Public Art Program. However, the piece met with controversy and the artists’ contributions split into two separate works, Numbe Whageh and La Jornada. Nora Naranjo-Morse’s landwork represented the continuity of Pueblo peoples, while Rivera and Sabo depicted Spanish settlers in the form of bronze sculpture. Naranjo-Morse, in her contribution, emphasized place and identity and Pueblo worldview in connectivity to the land.”
Lovely has a keen and nuanced eye for important details such as this, and also like, for example, that Cliff Fragua’s deployment of Po’pay as “a stand in for the collective work of many community members [including] . . . women” served as a another form of erasure or overlay. I really like that she is seeking to find the concrete usages for important indigenous theoretical insights such as Vizenor’s survivance (I will be using this idea in a future publication as well).
The question I had for Lovely was this: if “confronting the Classical legacy” is a necessary step for creating a more equitable and representative public art, and I agree that it is, why did not she include art historians and art critics in her paper? It seems to me that some of the most egregious defenders of imperialist art are the art intellectuals: historians, critics, and curators. In the name of preservation, connoisseurship, and with an objectivity principle, they facilitate and perpetuate the erasures Lovely is highlighting with her paper. These mid-level elites have an enormous amount of influence and propagating particular tropes such as the triumphalism of Oñate. Mightn’t they be a good place to start in forcing a confrontation?
Brooke Hadley begins her trenchant examination of Dartmouth University’s Hovey Murals with two great questions. “How do the Hovey murals fit into this narrative [of] cultural debates surrounding censorship and historical memory? How do we weigh offensive art as a learning opportunity against the lived experiences of trauma that depictions like this can cause marginalized peoples?” While I think these are important questions, it seems to me that her paper actually brings to light the role that institutions play in allowing to be legitimized, propagating, and condoning certain racist and colonial tropes.
Hadley’s paper helped me to crystallize two thoughts about visual art, history, and institutions. First, who are the people who commission, fund, approve, and install (or decommission) public works of art? We tend to be dazzled by the images and the image-makers, and forget there is an entire superstructure and economy around public arts. Second, how does formalism undermine or contribute to content? The materials artists choose are deeply thought through, and thus provide evidence of the their intentions, particularly about the chronologies they imagine in their creations. In Hadley’s case, that Dartmouth was willing to invest in Orozco’s use of fresco, the longest-lived visual art medium humans have yet discovered, is significant. As history has learned about and embraced an enormous amount of the specialized knowledge of other disciplines as it grows and evolves, it should also become conversant in the materiality of art making and practice.
At the end of her paper, Hadley arrives at a very interesting and provocative place: the role of silence by those in power in responding to very vocal and public calls for amendments to racist memorializations. The same thing happened with the La Jornada. Quietly, sneakily even, power removed the offensive images. What are the implications of this? I would like Hadley to explore this more fully in her final draft of this paper which remained largely in a narrative space for this presentation. Presumably power presented these works of art to the public with a fanfare. It is significant to me that they remove them silently.
Dylan McDonald appears to be calling for just the kind of confrontation that Lovely advocates (and which Dartmouth avoided): “I think it necessary,” he writes “that the library and university should examine what role [that Tom Lea’s] the Conquistadores mural plays in furthering student education at NMSU, a land-grant institution serving a minority-majority student body.” I agree wholeheartedly and bravo and kudos to him for taking such an activist stance. Yet, here much of the focus is on a biography of the artist, Tom Lea, rather than the institutions who condoned and facilitated his art.
In this particular case, the powers at NMSU actually removed and then reinstalled Lea’s controversial murals in 1996. This seems significant to me. What kind of public records are available that might reveal discussions about redeploying these antiquated depictions of the New Mexico-Texas borderlands in a minority serving institution? What was the justification for this? Answering these questions I think the powerful place to begin the discussion the McDonald calls for. He states: “I believe it is important to make sure their story is uncovered, their context preserved, and that it not be lost to future generations.” I am not quite sure exactly what he means by this and so I encourage him to try to be more clear about whether the value of having such a public discussion outweighs the trauma potentially (as Hadley points out) that might result from unearthing the justifications around deploying such images.
Finally, I do not think McDonald needs to worry about impugning the reputation of Tom Lea. Inevitably, the institution who supported the creation of these works as well as their redeployment carry the responsibility for them. I wonder what other groups on campus might also find these murals problematic? Is there a historical record of questions about these murals, as has taken place, for example, with the Adams’ Murals at UNM?
UPDATE: Dylan has written to tell me that NMSU has formed an ad hoc committee to address concerns with the Lea murals, to help gather documentation and “create didactics for each artwork.” The proposed solution appears to be labeling rather than decommissioning.
Doug Sackman’s delicious writing lies somewhere between art criticism, history, and journalism. His work resonated for me on a very personal and emotional level for I too have found journeying along the “open wound” of the U. S.-Mexico border to be a deeply transformative experience. The overarching subject of his writing here is artist Ana Teresa Hernández, and particularly her mural Borrando La Frontera – erasing the border – which comprises an ongoing project of painting out the border with colors that simulate the land and skyscape so as to give the appearance of erasure.
In a sense, Sackman’s contribution here ties all the other papers together by exploring the tension between erasure and mark-making. In the case of Hernandez’s work, muralizing means erasing the wall itself. This is territory I am somewhat familiar with as I created three projects with the Slovenian sculptor Marjetica Potrc, where she built walls on which I made marks, and which she subsequently destroyed. I also saw my largest public art project, Radio Tower, installed on the 91st floor of World Trade Tower 1, come down in September of 2001. Sackman’s exploration of Hernandes’s work highlights the significance of the temporal quality of mark-making on walls and what that space between commission/funding and execution represents.
I love Sackman’s writing. His parallelisms, rhetorical whorls, and subtle breadcrumbing are so rich it would take an entire paper just to appreciate them. I strongly encourage other historians to push the boundaries of the rhetoric they use to analyze and narrativize Western American history. My appetite was thoroughly wetted for the final piece Sackman will no doubt produce, and I hope it finds a wide audience.
My question for Sackman and perhaps it is really just a challenge is this: can he see in the continuation of this work really destabilizing the authorial gaze so as to more deeply problem and ties the act of mark making on walls so that Muralizing or de-Muralizing take on multiple, in some cases mysterious meanings?
These are all innovative and important interdisciplinary interventions, and I look forward to seeing where they get to. It is hard for me to not think about my dear friend, the muralist and activist Noel V. Marquez, of Artesia, New Mexico, who died December 23, 2020, and who have loved and actively engaged in this discussion. Noel worked in the out-of-door community-based mural tradition to increase awareness about the environmental destruction of the extractive industries. What a tragic loss! My next blog post will be a kind of memorial for my cherished fresco buddy. I hope you will tune in then.