On view in the Lower Gallery
June 6, 2017 – November 11, 2017

Curated by Arif Khan, Director, University of New Mexico Art Museum & Subhankar Banerjee, Lannan Foundation Endowed Chair of Land Arts of the American West and Professor of Art & Ecology in the Department of Art at UNM

In a recent essay Subhankar Banerjee coined the term ‘long environmentalism’ to draw attention to environmental justice engagements that last, not merely weeks or years, but decades, and become inter-generational. The exhibition presents a selection of his photographs, writing, lectures, interviews and other activist initiatives over the past sixteen years that collectively continue to contribute to the long environmentalism in Arctic North America. It highlights the resistance movements and coalitional politics to stop destructive fossil fuels development projects in lands and waters in Arctic Alaska, which are home to an incredible chorus of biotic life and have sustained, nutritionally, culturally and spiritually, the Gwich’in and the Iñupiat indigenous communities for millennia. The exhibition also includes a photograph from Siberia that alludes to what anthropologist Piers Vitebsky has called ‘Outliving the Empire’.

Residents of the lower latitude generally consider the Arctic as the ‘Far North’, a place disconnected from their daily lives and concerns. Banerjee’s work urges us to consider the Arctic instead as the ‘Near North’, a place that connects us all in material and intangible ways. The Arctic is the bellwether of climate change as it continues to warm at a rate of at least twice the global average, and yet paradoxically, the Arctic and non-Arctic nation states are pushing hard to exploit its fossil fuels reserves, the burning of which will only exacerbate Arctic warming, and which in turn will affect the whole planet as the top of the Earth is the integrator of our planet’s climate systems. Engaging in ‘long environmentalism’ we may derail this suicidal trajectory.

Subhankar Banerjee is Lannan Foundation Endowed Chair of Land Arts of the American West and Professor of Art & Ecology in the Department of Art at UNM. He is convener of the recent UNM environmental justice public forum “Decolonizing Nature”, and is currently working to establish a new interdisciplinary center at UNM, Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities.

The UNM Art Museum would like to thank the Lannan Foundation for their generous support of this exhibition.

On view in the Main, Van Deren Coke and Clinton Adams Galleries
August 25 – December 2, 2017

Exhibition Opening & Welcome Back Party Friday August 25th, 4:00pm

Curated by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Mexican photographer and photo historian

The University of New Mexico Art Museum presents the international traveling exhibition Frida Kahlo – Her Photos, featuring a rare and extensive selection of Kahlo’s personal photographs. This exhibition was curated from a collection of 6500 images that lay hidden in the Blue House Archive for 50 years, and offers a uniquely intimate glimpse into the life and work of a beloved cultural icon. Frida Kahlo – Her Photos contains over two hundred previously unseen images, including work by Kahlo, as well as photographs by such creative luminaries as Man Ray, Martin Munkácsi, Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Nickolas Muray, and Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo, among many others. The exhibition promises to reveal new insights into Kahlo’s rich and deeply personal world, and tells a fascinating story of an artist, a place, and an era.

This collection of photographs was first revealed to the public in 2007; Mexican photographer and photo historian Pablo Ortiz Monasterio curated the images selected for the exhibition, which encompass six central themes: Origins, ‘Blue House,’ Politic, Revolutions and Diego, Broken Body, Frida’s Loves, and Photography. Each section testifies to the important role photography played in Frida Kahlo’s life. Kahlo carefully and meticulously accumulated a vast collection of photographs, and while the collection contains images that undoubtedly belonged to her family and to Diego Rivera, it was Frida’s own diligent efforts that ensured these photographs were preserved for posterity.

* This exhibition is organized by Frida Kahlo Museum – Casa Azul/Diego Rivera Museum; Banco de Mexico Fiduciario en el Fideicomiso Museos Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo.

September 22, 23, 28, 29, and 30 at 7:30 pm
September 24 and October 1 at 2:00 pm

Tickets are $12 general admission, $10 faculty and seniors, and $8 staff and students
via unmtickets.com

SCRAP Productions, the University of New Mexico’s student production company, produces A Bench at the Edge, by Luigi Jannuzzi with the UNM Department of Theatre and Dance and in partnership with AGORA Crisis Center, the nation’s first student-run college crisis center. The show, directed by student director Samuel Shoemaker-Trejo, grapples with themes of suicide and death, and attempts to both open a candid discourse on those topics and to simultaneously produce a great piece of theatre for the enjoyment of the viewing public.

The show consists of a meeting between two individuals on a literal representation of the metaphoric edge between life and death, and showcases the hopeful nature of life. The production will occur in UNM’s Rodey Theatre in the UNM Center for Performing Arts. The show dates and times are as follows: September 22, 23, 28, 29, and 30 at 7:30 pm; and September 24 and October 1 at 2:00 pm. Tickets are $12 general admission, $10 faculty and seniors, and $8 staff and students.
A Bench at the Edge promises evening of laughter, tears, and genuine contemplation of the human condition and the one thing that ties it all together: life.

With a focus on narrative soundscapes from borderlands communities, this presentation reflects on the ways that music —in particular, Chicana/o punk— can examine complicity, entanglement and compromise in relation to nation, identity, migration and globalization.

Unrepentant border crosser, writer, ex-dj, and academic, Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez is an Associate Professor of US Southwestern Literatures, and Creative Writing in the Department of Spanish, and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. Has lectured and taught at universities across the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Author of four collections of short stories, Algún día te cuento las cosas que he visto (2012), Luego el silencio (2014), One Day I’ll Tell You the Things I’ve Seen (2015), and En el Lost ‘n Found (2016). His academic work focuses on US Latino cultural expression, and US/Mexico border cultures.

September 29th, 30th, and October 5th, 6th, & 7th at 7:00pm
September 24th & October 1st at 2:00pm
Tickets: https://www.unmtickets.com/fine-arts/

Last year’s off-Broadway sensation, THE WOLVES by Sarah De Lappe, opens the University of New Mexico’s Department of Theatre and Dance 2017-2018 main stage production season.

THE WOLVES chronicles the nine-members of a girls’ high school soccer team as they go through their pre-game warm-ups, discussing the world and womanhood, while navigating the pitfalls of adolescence. This fierce pack of young women explore life’s big questions as they come to terms with a complicated world.

Gregory S. Moss directs THE WOLVES, which runs September 29 through October 8, 2017 in the Experimental Theatre on UNM’s Main Campus.