2016
Flats and Rounds, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI
In Color, print archives 10 Grand Press, 333 Montezuma Arts, Santa Fe, NM
Banned, Santa Fe Community Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Water Rights
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Santa Fe Art Institute Residency
I’ve lived in La Cieneguilla for 28 years. For someone born in White Plains, NY who lived in 5 houses before she was 6 and never went west of the Mississippi River until 15 years of age, remarkable. Am I enchanted? In German there is a word for my condition: Fernweh. Akin to wanderlust, there is something in my soul that likes to feel like the outsider on a forever frontier. I work in the gap of detached yearning. Like a prayer.
Slowly, I’ve come to realize this place is home.
When beaver moved into the Santa Fe River they felled the cottonwoods planted by WildEarth Guardians in 2008. A handful of farmers downriver complained the dams impeded the flow of the river for irrigation. My project, while at the Santa Fe Art Institute asked ‘can humans and beavers coexist on the stretch of river between the Santa Fe Wastewater Treatment Plant and Cochiti Pueblo, where it joins the Rio Grande?
I joined the Santa Fe River Traditional Communities Collaborative. We are diversity in action- ranchers, artists, farmers, Cochiti Pueblo natives, Spanish land grant inheritors, newcomers, city, county, state and federal employees. I questioned if I had a voice in water rights when I first heard about the beaver controversy. Me, organic produce and meat shopper, against farmers??? I don’t think so. And yet, here I am, posing a counter narrative to what has been the popular belief in these parts regarding highest and best use of water.
As a land-owner with 2 acres and a domestic well, the project at SFAI/ Water Rights has opened into a broader story of land, stewardship, and the narratives that shape our perception of belonging and a shared future.
NEWS BREAKING: NOVEMBER 17, 2021
The beavers are back!
Banned at the Santa Fe Community Gallery
The installation, Tropic of Cancer: Let’s Smuggle, will be included in the exhibition Banned at the Santa Fe Community Gallery. Come peek at the forbidden.
I’ll be installing the work on the 86th anniversary of Henry Miller’s arrival in Paris and the genesis of Tropic of Cancer. The book was published in 1934 and banned as obscene in the US, England, Russia and Germany. It went viral, so to speak, becoming an underground hit in the US, with numerous copies smuggled home by GIs during and after WW2.
The installation is part of an ongoing body of work based on an inheritance I received in 1995 from Henry Miller’s boyhood friend and literary supporter, Emil Schnellock, by way of my great aunt Dorothy, Emil’s sister. Miller’s letters to Emil offer a window into Tropic of Cancer in the making and the emergence of Miller’s Voice as a writer.
When I started the project in November 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, the question of censorship, surveillance and who control the flow of information was, and continues to be, as alive as ever. What is obscene, whose voice is being heard and who is being silenced drives my investigation into the materials.