LAND art

LAND

Jay Critchley: Covers and Cover-Ups


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Alicia Inez Guzmán: Can you say a few words about yourself and how you “came out” as an artist? Jay Critchley: I was thirty-three years old when I had a rebirth and found my unadulterated self as an artist. I’m a “born again artist.” I had come out as a gay man four years earlier

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LAND

Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos) PART II


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In a 2015 Artforum interview, the artists described the artwork not as an act of appropriation, but of recontextualization: In order to get to Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos), one has to drive along the southwest coast of the island and pass a large petrochemical complex that has been abandoned since the 1970s. It now

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ADOBE, belonging/unbelonging, contemporary art, LAND, stories on land

Rafa Esparza’s “Brown Matter” Part II


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Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field suggests what brown identity might stand for without essentializing it into one trait. In a review of the exhibition that came out in this month’s issue of THE Magazine, I described the work’s suggestive power in the following terms: The question that arises: What makes brown identity? The installation doesn’t

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belonging/unbelonging, contemporary art, LAND, stories on land

Rafa Esparza’s ‘Brown Matter’ Part I: When the Building Blocks of Home Inhabit the Whitney


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In northern New Mexico, adobe is a fact; homes made of sun-dried bricks pepper the high desert landscape. I grew up in an adobe home. It belonged to my great-grandmother, Juanita, and her husband, Rosenaldo. The walls were over twelve inches thick, bulbous and uneven, finished on the interior and white washed. So thick were

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stories on land

Sharing Scarcity: Why The Ancient Ethos of Hispanic Water Democracies Matters


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This was originally given as a talk–a personal story and an aesthetic point of departure–for New York-based mixed-media artist, Christine Howard Sandoval, at Parsons School of Design on February 10, 2017. I present Christine’s words, here. During the fall of 2016 I was awarded an artist residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI) for

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LAND

Tierra o Muerte


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Just before entering Tierra Amarilla, a small town in northern New Mexico located along the Chama River, drivers are greeted by a handmade billboard proclaiming Tierra o Muerte. Perhaps greet is the wrong word. It might be better to say that the phrase is thrust into one’s awareness. It cuts: land or death.  Scrawled in thick capital letters, the

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