Watch: Jami Porter Lara Exhibits at
The National Museum for
Women in the Arts
Alumni Spotlight
Jami Porter Lara discusses the importance of the arts, her time at UNM, and how she uses a 2000-year-old ceramic process to connect the past and present in Border Crossing
As part of UNM’s Land Arts of the America West program, Jami Porter Lara’s travels took her to a remote stretch of the US/Mexico border where she discovered ancient potsherds intermingling with recent traveler’s discarded plastic water bottles.
This juxtaposition of artifacts ultimately led her to conceptualize Border Crossing, a fantastic recontextualization of the ubiquitous modern vessel that is far from a “recycling awareness project,” and which is currently on exhibition at The National Museum of Women in the Arts.
“By pulling the plastic bottle away from the profane and towards what we perceive to be beautiful or natural or sacred, I hope that human beings can find some forgiveness for ourselves and the things that we make, and seeks to provide a space to contemplate both an ethical beauty as well as an ethics of beauty in the face of human need,” says Porter Lara, who was also recently featured on the NMPBS program ¡COLORES!.
The exhibition runs through May 24th in the nation’s capital.
We’re excited to share that Myrriah Gómez, Associate Professor at the Honors College at UNM, has written an insightful article titled “Art and Activism at Highlands University” in Santa Fe Magazine, El Palacio.
Jessamyn Lovell: Artist, Investigator, Innovator
Blending art, inquiry, and lived experience, Jessamyn Lovell creates work that challenges perceptions while forging new paths in contemporary photography.
MFA Alum Emma Ressel Awarded Postdoctoral Fellowship at Center for Regional Studies
Emma Ressel is an artist working with large format film photography, re-photography, and archives. Her current work researches natural history collections to examine how we describe nature to ourselves over vast timescales. Ressel earned her BA in Photography at Bard...