KQED write up on former Sanitary Tortilla Factory Artist in Residence (A.I.R.) Christine Wong Yap.
“When we’re more self-aware,” Wong Yap’s Belonging project website states, “we can be more intentional about the spaces we co-create.”
I WANNA BE YOURS
Grace Rosario Perkins “I WANNA BE YOURS”
Opening: Friday, June 7, 2019 6-9pm
Exhibition: June 7 – 28, 2019
Sanitary Tortilla Factory is pleased to host a solo exhibition of Grace Rosario Perkins. Bouncing between Oakland and Albuquerque, Grace is concurrently showing work at the Oakland Museum of California, as
well as in Chicago IL, Berkeley CA, Providence RI, and Kingston, Ontario. In Perkins’s first solo exhibition in her home state of New Mexico, I WANNA BE YOURS, Grace presents us with an installation of large scale paintings, textile work, and objects in conversation made in her Albuquerque studio. Like all of Perkins’s work, these pieces engage language, familial history, abstraction, punk ethos, and autobiography. The artist will have a limited edition number of wearable pieces and printed material available onsite for purchase.
Please join us for a reception for the artist Friday, June 7th from 6-9pm. The exhibition is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 12-5pm and by appointment.
Identidad Working Classroom and 21st Century Program
Artists of Working Classroom & 21st Century Program
May 3-31, 19
RECEPTION: May 3rd, 6-8pm
Sanitary Tortilla Factory, in partnership with Working Classroom and its 21stCentury Program, presents a showcase of student’s Spring 2019 semester work exploring topics within Self Identity. This topic was interpreted through various mediums including sculpture, painting, printmaking, video projects, and Teatro. Join us on Friday, May 3rd from 6 – 8pm to celebrate and support our artistic youth!
Working Classroom cultivates the artistic, civic, and academic minds of youth through in-depth art projects with contemporary artists to amplify historically ignored voices, resist systemic injustices, and imagine a more equitable society. Over 21 years, Working Classroom has expanded and matured. Together, our students, staff, and parents have created an internationally recognized model program that now includes a street conservatory where students study art and theater, a bilingual theater company, a student gallery, academic tutoring center and college scholarship fund. Every project and program emphasizes community advocacy and incorporates academic, entrepreneurial and life skills. For example, acting students have written, performed and toured original plays about alcohol and domestic violence, AIDS, immigration and New Mexican history. They have performed across New Mexico, at the Latino Chicago Theater and the World Congress on the Family in Columbus, Ohio; represented the United States at the VII International Festival of Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro and represented New Mexico at the First United Nations Congress on Girls. Art students have written, illustrated and published a comic book about predatory lending and a fotonovela about domestic violence. Their landmark public art brightens homeless shelters, food banks, community art centers and clinics and is anchoring a major cultural tourism project in one of Albuquerque’s poorest neighborhoods.
Used to Know Me Now – Teena Lee Ryan
Used to Know Me Now
Teena Lee Ryan
Opening: Friday, March 22, 5-8pm
Closing: Friday, April 5, 5-8pm
My maternal family is from Appalachia. I am the third generation to be named after Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Not only was the double ‘e’ in my first name inspired by the general, but my middle name as well. Changing my name would be a meaningless gesture, rather I demolish, rewrite and reimagine my personal narrative, in the hope I can construct my own legends. I explore ritual, creation, destruction, fiction, the fallibility of memory and the transformation of identity. Through my work, I believe it is possible to originate and uphold my own story.
Ritual, creation, destruction, and transformation are utilized to uncover my present self. I use these tools to conceive and fabricate my own story. A story that will exist as my legend, in the way I deem honest. What these works all share is an exploration of the embodiment of knowledge and experience. Most of the work is a ritualistic exploration of the ways that embodiment, which physicality weighs on the soul, is digested and lost, is ripped asunder, is a skeleton that harms as much as it helps. I make artifacts as ritual offerings to reclaim myself.
Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar
Used to Know Me Now by Teena Lee Ryan is a UNM MFA Photo thesis exhibition and the first of two exhibitions in 2019 that is part of Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar (EVAS) series. The Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar series offers professional space for the culminating exhibition that defines the student’s launch into their profession as an artist. The series hopes to underscore exceptional artists attending regional institutions while highlighting Albuquerque’s historic connection to contemporary art practice.
KQED – Christine Wong Yap Asks: Where Do You Feel a Sense of Belonging?
Wong Yap is currently in the “production & commemoration” stage of Belonging, a months-long social practice project that began in November 2018 with her residency at Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society.
For the first five weeks, she was in “story collection” mode, distributing and collecting questionnaires in English, Spanish and Chinese. She conducted workshops with the help of community groups like Soccer Without Borders, San Francisco’s Chinese Culture Center and The Beat Within. It’s an expanded version of a similar project she undertook in Albuquerque in 2017, when she was in residence at an arts space called the Sanitary Tortilla Factory.
“I wanted to do something that said everyone belongs here,” she remembers. We’re sitting between two tables at Kala Art Institute, the venerable Berkeley printmaking workshop, with Wong Yap’s notes, sketches and bandanna prototypes spread around us.
Amo ergo sum I love, therefore I am – Valerie Roybal
February 1 – March 8, 2019
Reception: February 1, 2019 5-8pm
For the past year, Valerie Roybal had dedicated her studio practice to creating an installation focused on her love of things. Valerie fondly attended to a host of objects that were discarded
and obsolete. Roybal’s intimate and delicate reconstructions of fishing weights, postcards, sheet music, and oddities reconstruct a sophisticated elusive narrative that speaks to poetic passing of time. What had been overlooked and abandoned now becomes intricate parts of an obscure narrative. The constellation of objects carries a deep affection for the passing moments of our collective triumphs and fragility of our lives.
This exhibition was planned over a year ago. With Valerie Roybal’s passing this past week, the exhibition becomes part retrospective, part memorial, and tribute. The exhibition will be mounted by artists sheri crider and Heidi Pollard.