7/31/08
Campo Expandido XVIII
1/10/08
20/20
20 Years 20 Artists
Celebrating Twenty Years of Working Classroom
January 19 - February 16, 2008
Working Out
by Lucy Lippard
Twenty years ago Nan Elsasser founded Working Classroom, now moving into its own building in Albuquerque. During those two decades it has become a force for the arts and progressive action in New Mexico. The name Working Classroom is a good description of its unique function. Sure, all classrooms are supposed to be places where students (and teachers) work. But a classroom that works, in both senses, is sadly rare.
Working Classroom also works out––gaining muscle as it moves beyond its center. It teaches its students skills few adults can boast––how to conduct oral history interviews and archival research on family and local history–– activities that bind people to place and commit them to responsibility for what happens there. It sends them out into the world (and into some arts worlds) where their examples will be doubly significant because of the art world’s biases toward white male artists.
The artists in this exhibition prove that need not be so. They include several famous names and even a MacArthur awardee. They come from Haiti, China, Mexico, France and the Navajo Nation, as well as from our own African American and Hispano communities. Their visions are crucial to our futures. Artists are consciousness-raisers. They frame what people see. If they all came from the same places––geographically, and in life––the arts would be dull and monochrome.
These artists have given support and strategic tools to young people who might never have considered a vocation for the arts, as well as to those who have been discouraged from even thinking about such a life (or even thinking). Best of all is the advice, contact and role models provided by these working artists (as well as actors, community activists and others) who (to quote the website) “promote peace, tolerance and respect for human rights at home and abroad.”
So Working Classroom is not only a place where public art, performances, and educational projects are produced, but a place where idealism is taken for granted. Its bilingual phone-answering-machine message offers a clue to the organization’s emphasis on diversity. (They can be forgiven for not also translating into the area’s seven Native languages, though they serve these often “historically ignored” communities as well.)
These ideals are central to the arts of the twenty-first century. They are the results of struggles that took at least half of the 20th century, struggles that are not yet won.
These artists do not only make good art. They look at context, meaning, and effect. When the Working Classroom students go out into the world, they act in films, go to art school or law school, win awards and scholarships, attend national youth conferences. Hopefully, they will never forget where they came from and will in their own turn become community arts activists changing other lives as their own were changed by Working Classroom.
Lucy Lippard is an internationally known writer, activist, and curator from the United States. Since 1966, Lippard has published 20 books on feminism, art, politics, and place, and has received numerous awards and accolades from literary critics and art associations, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants in criticism. She has written art criticism for Art in America, The Village Voice, In These Times, and Z Magazine.
11/2/07
¿Quiénes son los Animales?
Day of the Dead installation dedicated to lives of animals sacrificed to human greed.
From fashion runways to fast food drive throughs, university labs to undercover fight pits millions of animals live and die in pain to satisfy the human quest for entertainment, fashion and cheap eats. This year, Working Classroom marks its annual artistic celebration of Dia de Muertos with traditional Mexican food, music by Lenore Armijo and Quienes Son Los Animales?, a series of contemporary altars dedicated to the dogs, horses, rhinos, elephants, minx, roosters and yes, even mice, tortured and killed, not for human need but for human pleasure.
The exhibit features installations depicting labs, slaughter houses, fight pits and fashion houses. After watching a video of raccoons skinned alive for their fur, 13-year old Ximoara Ortega Trinindad decided to help fashionistas “see how the fashion industry gets the fur on their coat collars.”
Valley High seniors Bianca Benevidez and Lauren Martinez-Burr, a vegetarian herself, pulls the curtain back, revealing a slaughterhouse conveyor belt where a hand plucks animals up, chops them up and spits them out, neatly and antiseptically packaged for tonight’s dinner.
Despite the grisly themes, the exhibit is neither grim nor depressing, says guest instructor Isaac AlaridPease. “The work is colorful and intentionally childlike; it is that spirit that engages viewers and provokes reflection.”
The celebration in Visiones Gallery, 212 Gold Ave SW, Albuquerque NM 87102(southwest corner 2nd & Gold), sponsored by Tricore Reference Laboratories, begins at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, November 2. Tickets are $12/Adults and $6.00/Students & Seniors.
The exhibit continues through November 21, 2008. Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 9:00 – 5:00 pm or by appointment.
This exhibit is made possible by generous support from the City of Albuquerque, Department Family & Community Services, County of Bernalillo, Surdna Foundation, McCune Foundation.
Working Classroom is a street conservatory that identifies and recruits talented young artists and actors from Albuquerque’s historically ignored communities—and provides tuition-free education and training, including college scholarships. Classes are taught by the country’s top artists, playwrights and directors -professionals who welcome new creative opportunities and a prestigious venue for cutting-edge work.
Letras Limpias Muertes Sucias
Crean altares contemporáneos para periodistas asesinados, jóvenes artistas dan un golpe de creatividad por la libertad de prensa.
El 2 de noviembre - Día del Muertos - a las 6:00 de la tarde, en la 7 Poniente # 314 altos, centro histórico Puebla, México, los estudiantes, ayudados por tres artistas prominentes, Eliécer Alejo, Yolanda Gutiérrez y Francisco Guevara, revelarán LETRAS LIMPIAS, MUERTES SUCIAS, una instalación política y artísticamente provocadora, un altar contemporáneo que honoran a periodistas asesinados por informar la verdad.
La exposición, en el Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura de Puebla, es la culminación de un taller de tres semanas patrocinado por el Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura de Puebla (IMACP) y dos organizaciones de arte con sede en Albuquerque, EEUU el National Hispanic Cultural Centerl y Working Classroom.
Este año, como primer paso para establecer un programa en México, la organización llevó el modelo de proyecto a través de la frontera. Invitados a elegir el tema de mayor opresión sobre derechos humanos en México, los 17 estudiantes mexicanos participantes del proyecto escogieron las amenazas a una prensa libre. “Queremos hacer reflexionar a los ciudadanos sobre la importancia de los reporteros” comenta Jessica Alonso de 16 años. En México, lamenta Erick Rodriguez, de 16 años, "La verdad ha llegado a ser una sentencia de muerte". “Es una realidad que se está viviendo, la gente tiene que estar informada sobre la muerte de la gente que busca que las noticias sean verídicas, que se entere la gente que queremos un cambio, no todo es manipulación y mentiras” declaró Saúl López de 19 años.
Y eso es exactamente es lo que sucederá el 2 de noviembre, cuando las puertas al Instituto Municipal de Arte Y Cultura de Puebla se abran, las velas se enciendan y los espíritus de Manuel Buen Día, Enrique Pera Quintanilla, Brad Hill, Fakher Haider, Steven Vincent, Saul Martinez Ortega, Amado Ramirez, Ramiro Téllez Contreras y muchos otros periodistas asesinados vuelvan a visitarnos para compartir un trago de tequila y alentar a los vivos a seguir luchando por la libertad de prensa.
7/30/07
Campo Expandido VIII
Raymundo Sesma, multidisciplinary artist, was invited by Working Classroom to create with a group young student apprentices a site specific intervention conceived especially by the artist for Albuquerque, New Mexico.
This project, sponsored by Infill Solutions and Downtown Action Team, took place in a declared national historic site designed by John Gaw Meem in 1950, where the Southern Union Gas Co. was originally located.
The student apprentices who participated in the project were: Denisse Del Río, Víctor Mejía, Abraham Mejia, Dylan Ryames, Genesis Del Rio, George De la Torre, Aron Kruchoski, Michael Lopez, Lisandra Tena.
Since 2004, this Mexican artist has been developing in Italy and in Mexico a series of monumental, public, and ephemeral works, such as the museum of The Triennale di Milano, the 110,000 square feet of exterior surfaces at the Punta Norte Outtlet designed by Javier Sordo Madaleno in the State of Mexico, the former industrial space BaseB, in Milan, Italy and recently, in Basel, Swistzerland.
Raymundo Sesma, considers that “Campo Expandido” (Expanded Field) means searching for a dialogue with landscape, expanding the work field of painting without linking it to a 2D surface such as a canvas. But instead using the architectural surface and in this specific case, the sculptural characteristics of the space. Therefore the surfaces replacing the canvas, makes the paint to acquire a 3D value precisely as an expanded field.
Such intervention also denotes the creation of a new dialogue with the urban landscape, with the intention to make the sculpture transform itself into landscape that defines the work field. In that way Sesma’s work is not only a material or intellectual production that completes or reveals through an artistic gesture something exiting, but also a communication method that articulates in different levels, capable of creating a system of communicating channels between landscape, architecture, community, history, tradition, future, etc. and of course the viewer.
Campo Expandido VIII "has been built" using three architectural volumes: a small volume with two large windows, an open space with three walls and a PNM building that contains an electric generator. Campo Expandido VIII was thought as an art work that intends –with these essential architectures contextualized inside a plaza's parking lot in the City of Albuquerque–, to activate the architectural surfaces, considering the different distances between them, through encrypted texts and colors taken from the context.
Such action transformed the buildings visually into one architectural structure – which did not existed – in the surrounding landscape. This effect that is achieved through the perspectives created and revealed by the artist, invites the viewer to walk around and visually creates a virtual architecture.
Campo Expandido VIII is designed through a series of aphorisms written by Eligio Cauldron for Sesma's work, which were encrypted by the artist with the use of a computer. The aphorisms refers to the concept architects as the builders of spaces, capable to analyze the way to look at, which should not be different to the way to inhabit. According to Raymundo Sesma it's a current priority to expand the conscience of what happens and surrounds us.
"The process of encrypting, has expressed the artist, resides in hiding to the view, hiding what we already know. The result is some sort of makeup or camouflage that disguises, and is not the esthetic aspect or what pretends to be what interests, but what exists behind the appearances."
Campo Expandido VIII will be inaugurated with a photo sample of documentation of the work development.
6/1/07
Travelin' Man
The ancient Chinese styling of Albuquerque’s latest public art acquisition may transport viewers back in time. Artist Wanxin Zhang says this dialogue between history and modernity is no accident.
He says the Travelin’ Man sculpture, inspired by some of China’s greatest archeological finds, transcends time and culture while also standing for all the people who continue to shape Albuquerque.
“We call him the Travelin’ Man because he represents the traveling people,” explains Zhang, who is originally from Changchun, China. “You don’t know where people are from or where they’re going. It’s a spiritual and cultural traveling, a personal journey.”
The Travelin’ Man has no particular background, he adds, but springs from a combination of all the cultures and experiences of Albuquerque’s many visitors, residents and ancestors.
Zhang, now based in San Francisco, was approached a couple of years ago by Working Classroom, an Albuquerque program that brings students and professional artists together to collaborate on art reflecting a diverse community. After 15 years of living in the U.S., Zhang has experienced the convergence of cultures he represents in his art firsthand and calls this country his second home.
Last year, Zhang and Working Classroom won an art commission from the city to create the Travelin’ Man for the Cesar Chavez Community Center. The sculpture, dedicated in May, is the latest in a series of more than 100 terra cotta warriors created by Zhang over the last 10 years. His pieces are held in collections in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Beijing.
At 7-1/2 feet tall, the sculpture is reminiscent of the terra cotta warriors unearthed in 1974 from the tomb of the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang. The emperor had ordered the construction of the underground army in Xi’an, China, to preserve his empire and offer protection even in death. Along with the paranoid emperor and his army of terra cotta soldiers, thousands of conscripted workers were sealed alive during the tomb’s construction in order to keep its location a secret.
When he first saw the Chinese terra cotta warriors in the 1980s, Zhang decided to give back to those fallen soldiers and workers “the respect that every human life should have.” Although inspired by a tragedy that occurred more than 2,000 years ago, Zhang says his renditions embody hope. “I am giving the warriors new lives,” Zhang says in his artist’s statement. “My art is about finding a dialogue within ourselves in history, politics and society.”
Zhang says he learned about Albuquerque’s rich culture through the project. Working with local students during the city’s Tricentennial celebration helped him grasp Albuquerque’s history and diversity, which, along with the landscape, he incorporated into the design.
The Working Classroom students created the relief on the base of the sculpture, which represents the four seasons. “I Love Albuquerque” is engraved on the back of the traditional-style sculpture, a wink to modernity that has become a staple of Zhang’s anachronistic series. The Travelin’ Man also holds a map in his hand—in English—symbolizing 300 years of travelers in Albuquerque.
To see this new addition to the city’s art collection, stop by the Cesar Chavez Community Center at 7505 Katherine SE.
Artist Wanxin Zhang in his studio.
