New Mexico: Alamagordo to Albuquerque
9.5″x8″; fragments of a road map of New Mexico from a Rand-McNally Road Atlas on the inside cover of Leonard Equals Einstein: Leonard and His Time Machine by Gene Darby (1967); 2025. 2025-02-25 H
New Mexico: Las Cruces to Carlsbad
9.5″x8″; fragments of a road map of New Mexico from a Rand-McNally Road Atlas on the inside cover of Leonard Equals Einstein: Leonard and His Time Machine by Gene Darby (1967); 2025. 2025-02-25 G
COMMENTARY
In 2022, I curated a pair of exhibitions at 516 ARTS in Albuquerque, “Many Worlds Are Born” and “Technologies of the Spirit“, that looked at how the divergent histories of race, conflict, and colonialism in New Mexico inform how we imagine our futures. The exhibitions were informed by a Curatorial Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts where I researched how artists can use historic sites, collections, and archives to make work that contributes to civic discourse.
I am not from New Mexico. When I started the project in 2020, I had not yet been to New Mexico. The place was utterly foreign. In my mind, New Mexico was not yet a thing. When you are not of a place, you have, at first, only its mythology to rely on. This is what makes travel so wonderful. The tourist steps into that mythology and dances with its shiny gods and simple dramas. The day-to-day realities of a place are hidden by arcs of history and well-worn paths of visitors who have come before. The tourist may get the main bullet points of a place, but not the details and certainly not the realities. With its mysterious desert, thick cultural roots and trunks, and millennia of history, to the tourist, New Mexico is a gleaming turquoise bracelet, a memento of having passed through its ether.
The project was meant to be more than a travelogue. I believe that at the intersection of art and history lies a deeper understanding of our world, one that can disrupt the state of affairs and give us an opportunity to advance humanity. I’ve called this in the past “important magic and powerful medicine.” If I were a 16th century explorer, I would tell you that I have found the mythical Golden Cities of Cibola. I would draw you a map and show you the silver and bead work from the place that I “discovered”. If I were an 18th century surveyor, I would regale you with an inventory of natural resources and profiles of the exotic, yet industrious, people who are ripe for modernity. If I were a 20th century travel writer, I would share with you picturesque photographs and wax on about the fry bread and chilis and the bowl of caldo de queso I had after a day of horseback riding through the desert; because, as we all know, the real treasures are the friends we make along the way. But this is the 21st century and the mythologies of place obscure a reality that is way more complicated. They don’t advance humanity. They hinder it.
For the project to be more than a tourist endeavor, for it to have any value beyond the self-aggrandizement of its participants, we had to wade into the muck of history and sit with its multiplicities and divergences. What I learned is that there is not one New Mexico; there are two million of them, each a complicated negotiation of facts and fictions, ancestral traumas and present day circumstances; fluid, everchanging; and as real and valid as the sun hitting your face.
With every exhibition, particularly those with an outside curator, conflict is bound to happen. The typical pressures of mounting two exhibitions of commissioned artworks; the personalities of the museum director and my own; and an unsuccessful attempt to censor the artwork of a Diné artist made the experience difficult, at times outright painful. When things were at their worst, I found myself sitting in Albuquerque Old Town Plaza waiting for a call from the National Coalition Against Censorship, missing my husbands and feeling utterly alone on the planet. I looked around and thought to myself, “Wow, this place is really amazing.”
I long to return to New Mexico and keep an eye out for a reason to visit. When I came across a spread of the state in an old Rand-McNally Road Atlas, I decided to make these two collages. Maps are, after all, just another abstraction of a place, an idea, a kind of navigational mythology.
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New Mexico: Alamagordo to Albuquerque
by Ric Kasini Kadour
9.5″x8″; fragments of a road map of New Mexico from a Rand-McNally Road Atlas on the inside cover of Leonard Equals Einstein: Leonard and His Time Machine by Gene Darby (1967); 2025. 2025-02-25 H
$150
In stock
New Mexico: Las Cruces to Carlsbad
by Ric Kasini Kadour
by Ric Kasini Kadour
9.5″x8″; fragments of a road map of New Mexico from a Rand-McNally Road Atlas on the inside cover of Leonard Equals Einstein: Leonard and His Time Machine by Gene Darby (1967); 2025. 2025-02-25 G
$150
In stock