NNMC News:Artists explore how war affects community 5-7 p.m., through Sept. 21, at NNMC Center for the Arts Gallery, Nick Salazar Center for the Arts Building, 921 North Paseo de Oñate in Española.
DANA CHODZKO ●CYNTHIA JEANNETTE GOMEZ● NICOLAS HERRERA ● DAVID LINDBLOM ●NORMA NAVARRO ● SABRA MOORE● MARGARET RANDALL● DANIEL VALERIO ● JULIE WAGNER + STORY SCROLLS with AFTER/WAR stories from our diverse community
Gallery Hours: Tues, Wed, Thurs 1-6 p.m.
There is a long history of residents from the Espanola area going to war as soldiers or engaging in the local revolts and incursions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Early examples are the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 which originated in the leadership of Popay at Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo or the role of Genizaros from Abiquiu and elsewhere, formerly enslaved Native children, in defending the northern frontier. The effects in our community from the Mexican/American war of the nineteenth century continue to reverberate in complex ways. More contemporary examples include the WWII veterans who survived the Bataan Death March and the Vietnam veterans, whose traumatic return helped introduce the heroin epidemic to this area, or the continuing series of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Artists from diverse gender and ethnic backgrounds have created artworks related to the multiple ways that the experiences of war can echo back home using a variety of media & concepts. Chodzko’s assemblage sculptures trace the effects of PTSD on a relation-ship; Navarro made her abstract weaving while reflecting on the ways communities and ideas tear apart and come back together in different cultural configurations, like threads; the videos of Gomez, Valerio and Lindblom delineate the narratives of Genizaro peoples, the descendants of formerly enslaved Native children; Moore incorporates the stories of many contributors to create a cloth house of memories and reflections, she also weaves a cage that contains a question; Herrera paints about the Iraq war among other military experiences; Randall photographed citizens visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to find the names of a lost kin or friend; and Wagner uses the testimonials of survivors of Hiroshima to create a photo album from a history of suffering and restitution.
