Great news…I am a recipient of THE AMPLIFY CREATIVITY GRANT from the ARTEZONA FOUNDATION! I am very grateful for this grant and the timing of it. This grant will help me expand my practice and make new work for my first museum show (more on that later). I can’t wait to share the work I’ve made with the support of ARTEZONA.
To find out more about this grant and the ARTEZONA FOUNDATION visit www.artezona.org
and follow on Instagram @artezonagallery and @artezona.foundation
I haven’t done a News post in a while and I wanted to highlight some amazing things that happened this past year. My piece, “Weaning Fountain” was included in The Corning Museum of Glass’ yearly publication, New Glass Review 42!
From The Corning Museum of Glass: “New Glass Review is an annual exhibition-in-print featuring 100 of the most timely, innovative projects in glass produced during the year. It is curated from an open call for submissions by the curator of postwar + contemporary glass at The Corning Museum of Glass and a changing panel of guest curators.
In 2020, 927 individuals and companies from 50 countries submitted 2,501 digital images. All entries, including those that were not selected for publication, are archived in the Museum's Rakow Research Library.”
Thank you to the curators: Susie J. Silbert, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Glass, The Corning Museum of Glass / Simón Ballen Botero, designer, Medellín, Colombia, and Amsterdam, Netherlands / Sarah Darro, independent curator and Gallery Manager, Center for Craft, Asheville, North Carolina / Erika Diamond, artist and Assistant Director of Galleries Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, New York
I was stunned to find out I was chosen as a finalist for the Spring Hopper Prize! Thank you to the organization and also to the amazing jurors: Pamela Meadows, Curator at Boulder Museum of Art, and Jody Graf, Assistant Curator at MoMA PS1. Check out my online portfolio here!
Pandemic Mother Map during the early stages of Covid-19. It was funded by the “Pandemidiarios On the Border” grant program through the @confluencenter at The University of Arizona. Centered in the Sonoran Desert, the projects responded to living through Covid-19, in this particular place. Tucson Weekly and Alexandra Pere recently covered Pandemidiarios and my project was featured! The projects were also recently archived in the Special Collections at the library at the University of Arizona. You can see the project by clicking here.
Inspired by the story that my Great-Great-Grandmother emigrated from Altar, Sonora, Mexico, to Phoenix during and ‘epidemic’, "Pandemic Mother Map" visualizes the cyclical nature of pandemics through the my own ancestral line across five generations, my families movement through the Sonoran Desert, and the occurrence of three global pandemics (epidemics) spanning 131 years.
This idea came about because of the burden the pandemic placed on mothers. I saw my friends and family struggling in different ways while reading about mothers leaving the workforce in record numbers. Personally, I had so many questions about how to help my child through Covid beyond homeschooling. “What did she need from me?” At the same time I was struggling with how to help my mother who was in the hospital in a different city. “How do I keep the people I love safe?” It was in those moments I thought about my Grandmothers, especially my most favorite human ever, my Grandma Preach and how incredibly strong she was. I kept thinking, this is not new, so why don’t we know what to do??? My relatives experienced epidemics and pandemics, the times they lived in saw the “Russian Flu”, smallpox, and the Flu of 1918 and yet, here I am. I became curious about the deeper time of Pandemics and the resulting movement of women across borders, in and out of certain sectors of society, and the deep and hidden work we do to care for others.
I recently curated our first show in the project space at our studio building, Millville Studios. Tucson really turned out for the one night event. It was an incredible experience all around. You can find a short description of the show below and a link to install photos here taken by the incredible Maya Hawk.
I’m incredibly grateful to work with and make art alongside the artists included in the exhibition: Susanna Battin, Erik Schmahl, C.E. Fitzgerald, Ryan Hill & myself.
Odd Room highlights the work of the five resident artists at Millville Studios working in separate spaces, but under one roof during this stretch of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The show is situated in the basement of the building and takes inspiration from Weronika Zielinska-Klein’s “Guestroom Project,” where she invited artists to work in the “odd room” in her family’s home. The project was interpreted as being born of her experience as a new mother, her embodiment of maternal care colliding and informing her artistic practice and vice versa*. Odd Room is an opportunity to engage as a community of artists, highlight new modes of working and connecting while experiencing new life rhythms, performing new rituals of care and inhabiting spaces anew. The show honors the way we negotiate our new realities, where time operates differently and things may be awkward, provisional, or vague and where artists are encouraged to make the odd work.
Curated by: Sara Hubbs
*Epp Buller, R. & Reeve, C. (2019). Hospitality as Ethical and Creative Responsiveness in the Work of Weronika Zielinska-Klein, Inappropriate Bodies, Art, Design, and Maternity (p. 336). Demeter Press
