ACROSS THE ROOM FROM EACH OTHER hazel batrezchavez + mk
MK, “The Inside of the Casket”.
Across The Room From Each Other, a collaborative performance and exhibition with hazel batrezchavez and mk acting within a collective space interweaving ongoing conversations of family and practices of personal and public memorial over the duration of 6 weeks. Please check back for dates for performances, exhibitions openings for each phase.
PHASE ONE (October 2 – 23), hazel batrezchavez considers the layers of systematic oppression related to silencing and policing of individuals both at the border and on the stolen land we currently occupy. BLINDFOLDED UNDER THE SAME SUN moves freely between poetry, textiles, sound-video installation, and large-scale sculpture. It is grounded in batrezchavez’s familial history of migration from El Salvador/ Mexico and the inter-generational experiences they have shared when it comes to resistance, isolation, and survival.
BANNER on north side of STF is a temporary installment affiliated with the work of hazel batrezchavez. The artist is a participant of a coalition of artists, fronteristxs. As part of the movement for abolition and to divest public pension funds from private prisons, fronteristxs will install a wall-size message in downtown Albuquerque on Oct 2nd at 10AM. Watch live on Instagram and Facebook: @fronteristxs
Follow #NMERBdivest, a project of the Prison Divest New Mexico Coalition
PHASE TWO (October 26 – November 6), hazel batrezchavez and mk perform their collaborative piece Across The Room From Each Other, over the duration of four days, they will acknowledge their own perspective journeys, and collective memories regarding familial histories.
PHASE THREE (November 9 – 28), mk investigates coping mechanisms through the function of photographic memory within the last remaining family archives in their immediate family. You’ll miss me when I’m gone, calls attention to their uprooted deep southern upbringing in relation to the practices of memorial, forgiveness and celebration while addressing their personal and public relationships with family
hazel batrezchavez and MK received Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar Award in 2020. The Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar (EVAS) series offers professional space for two Master of Fine Art graduate students per year as their final thesis show. The culminating exhibition launches them into their profession as an artist. With the series, we underscore exceptional artists attending regional institutions while highlighting Albuquerque’s innovative contemporary art scene.
hazel batrezchavez received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Studio Art and Anthropology from Grinnell College in 2017 and her MFA in Sculpture at the University of New Mexico in 2020. Since then she has been a part of various group exhibitions and pop-up shows in the United States, specifically in California, New Mexico, Iowa, and most recently México City, and Michoacán, México. batrezchavez is a recipient of the Center of Fine Arts, Dean’s Travel Grant Award, MaryAnn Evans Grant and of both the Lucile Lattanner Reid Brock and the Betty Sabo Scholarship. At the moment batrezchavez is partnering with the Santa Fe Dreamers Project as part of her StoryMaps Fellowship at the Santa Fe Arts Institute (SFAI) to create a collaborative project, that centers the voices of humans that have been forced to migrate from their homelands. As she continues to prepare for a performance at the border ports of entry in El Paso and Brownsville, Texas following her own families migration.
MK (Monica Kennedy) is an artist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 2017, they received their BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston and are currently attending the University of New Mexico for their MFA in Photography. They are originally from a small rural town by the name of Sulligent, Alabama, and this place has become a driving force for the mass majority of their work.
Using found items, stories, and the longing to be back with their family in this small town. They work in a variety of mediums ranging from photography, printmaking and sculpture in order to pursue and question their upbringing, identity, family, and the terms of loss and memory. They have shown at institutions such as the Blaffer Art Museum, The National Hispanic Cultural Center and SITE Santa Fe.
Student Summer Workshop
Nanibah Chacon site visit at Resilience, mural at Washington Middle School during collaborative studio.
MARCH – SEPTEMBER 2020
Sanitary Tortilla Factory will be hosting an artist-led project in creating a large public art piece to be included in the International Albuquerque Sunport’s public art collection. The collaborative artist team will re-envision the graphic content of each letter of ALBUQUERQUE. Using the rich history of Albuquerque (1300-present) artists will create sophisticated graphic symbols of the region’s complex histories. Popular cultural icons will share space with the buried histories that uniquely honor the history and cultural diversity of what we call Albuquerque.
WORKSHOPS + ARTIST MENTORSHIPS = COLLABORATIVE STUDIO:
Finding the truth? Reimagining our histories and future
Youth artists from the community will join the artists in an intensive studio focused series of workshops and events. Visiting artists, NANI CHACON (ABQ ), ANDREA DELEON(ABQ), Grace Rosario Perkins(ABQ) will share their practice and work with students in developing finished work for the public art component at the Albuquerque Sunport. The group will use working studio discussions, field trips to museums, visits to critical sites as a backdrop to create the core images that represent the complex history of this region
STUDENT ARTISTS
Grace Archibeck, Sekai Berry, Anila Marks-Lopez, Melinda Modisette
ASSISTANT
Magdalena Ramos-Mullane
Building a Police-Free Future: Frequently-Asked Questions
This FAQ zine is meant to be a starting point. It’s short, and shares the basics of what we’re talking about when we talk about abolition. It’s been a very useful tool for sparking conversations with people who haven’t considered these ideas before.
For further information, more detailed dives into specific data and policy proposals, and more, check out MDP150’s Resources page.
The text below is also available in different formats, so that people can print/share:
- 8-page zine – directions for how to cut/fold here
- Page by page
- Just the text on one sheet of paper, front/back
- Instagram post
The goal of this initiative is to shift the discussion of police violence in Minneapolis from one of the procedural reforms to one of meaningful structural change. We will achieve this by presenting a practical pathway for the dismantling of the Minneapolis Police Department; the transference of its social service functions to community-based agencies and organizations; the replacement of its emergency intervention functions with models not based on military methods; and the redirection of resources to support community resilience and people-directed development.
For the Record: Albuquerque Artists During COVID-19 (BEAU CAREY)
As a long time documentarian Melinda Frame collects people’s accounts of their experiences during the COVID-19 outbreak to serve as a historical record of our times. Melinda focused this series on Albuquerque’s artist community. Melinda talked with many artists not only about how the pandemic is impacting their lives and art practice, but also explore with them how it may influence their artistic process as the pandemic continues to evolve. This series was created in partnership with the City of Albuquerque’s DIY Media COVID19 Creative Economy relief program.
In the Waiting Room by hazel batrezchavez
View Here
“my grandmother is here tonight
she writes like this
highlighter on lineless paper
bible verses
she pins them onto her mirror
so her survival tactics are reflected back at me
In The Waiting Room
where i am standing just as i am here now
Alone
surrounded by whiteness to my right and left
i don’t run here anymore, because there is no where to go ”
– excerpt from In the Waiting Room Poem by hazel batrezchavez
In the Waiting Room, is an exhibition that bears witness to the places where
individuals are asked to perform their identity, in highlighting the microaggressions
faced by someone who is racialized in crossing borders, inverting practices of authority
and focusing on the historical violence of language. In the Waiting Room, draws
parallels between the southern border and the institution as systems of oppression that
take up space and silence certain humans. The work is built as a reaction to the
current cultural landscape the artist navigates and moves freely between the written word,
large scale sculpture, textiles, performance, and video installation.