Otsego Institute: Tesuque Olla
The olla comes from the Tesuque Pueblo, located 9 miles north of Santa Fe, NM. In the Fall of 2019 American Indian magazine published “The Path of a Pot” by Anne Bolen on Tewa pottery, which emphasizes Tewa people’s ontological relationship with pottery, stating, “A Tewa pot is never empty—and while used or cared for, always alive, and even if a jar or bowl is not in use, it is only dormant, anticipating the moment that it will once again be awakened by the touch of Tewa hands.” For this reason, I interpret this olla as a dormant-living being. While it is impossible to say when the touch of Tewa hands last awakened this olla or when the next time will be, I would like to proposition that are approaches that can be taken towards activating beings such as this olla while we await for them to awaken. For this reason, my analysis of this olla derives from: understanding the history of the land where this being came from, taking into consideration Tesuque people’s cosmological and ontological beliefs as it relates to this being and attempting to (re)orient the relationship between the human (viewer) and more-than-human (object).
Mujeres de Maíz: A Lifetime of Social Praxis
In examining the role and erasure of the Chicanx and Indigenous artists in the U.S. who have long been engaging in social practice to achieve social change, I look to the collective Mujeres de Maíz, whose artists and projects challenge European and U.S. Western academic concepts of a “participatory aesthetic” and take on social practice as a praxis (a reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed) and way of life, rather than a one-time event or project. Not only does the work of Mujeres de Maíz allow for a decolonization of the white/Western art world, which has historically promoted oppressive, xenophobic, and primitive notions of Indigenous peoples; it also allows for a recovery of pre-colonial knowledges that have been lost through the ongoing process of colonialism. Mujeres de Maíz’s social practice, or rather social praxis, therefore accounts for the past, present, and future of Indigenous womxn and womxn of color at large, by centering pathways towards survival and the healing of mind, body, and spirit.
Carlos Jackson: Reckoning With Hxstory
Reckoning with Hxstory, is an online-exhibition curated by Museo Eduardo Carrillo featuring Carlos F. Jackson’s drawings and silkscreen prints. The works in the series present a narrative that underlines hxstories of structural inequalities in the U.S. This online exhibition takes its title from the first sentence of Chicanx Studies founding manifesto, El Plan de Santa Barbara, which states, “For all people, as with individuals, the time comes when they must reckon with their history.”
Advertising Xicanx: Decolonizing through the Visual Public Sphere
Galeria de la Raza in the Mission District of San Francisco is home to one of the oldest ongoing public art projects in the nation, the Billboard Mural. This thesis focuses on three queer-centric murals—Alex Donis’ My Cathedral (1997), Alma Lopez’s Heaven (2000) and Maricón Collective’s Por Vida (2015)— which were vandalized upon installation. These Billboard Murals are taken as case studies through which to examine interrelated phenomena: the evolution of the term Chicano (Chicana/o; Chican@, Chicanx, Xicanx) as successive generations have challenged misogynistic and hetero-normative ideologies; and the role of Galeria de la Raza in developing an alternative strain of social-practice art, one that originated during the Civil Rights Movement and remains central to the process of decolonization through public visual culture.