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.”
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.
Ananke by Viola Arduini
Ananke
Viola Arduini
April 12th – 26th, 2019
Opening: Friday, April 12th, 6-9 pm
Closing: Friday, April 26th, 6-9 pm
Ananke, the Necessity, was considered one of the forces dominating nature and human fate in ancient Greece; even the gods were subjects to her; a mechanical force of chained events, reactions, given possibilities. In this exhibition, Viola Arduini explores and suggests a renewed understanding of the power of such force, while suggesting the necessity for change. Ananke is the mechanical, blind destruction humans are causing on the planet, yet Ananke is the need of a reaction.
Arduini’s creative practice investigates relationships formed by humans, animals, and technology, engaging in issues of biodiversity loss, promoting new forms of dialogue about coexistence.The impact of human activity on the planet is so enormous, cohabitation with other species seems impossible. Mixing languages and practices from both art and science, Ananke offers a space for questioning and promoting change regarding the current ecological crisis.
Arduini’s work narrates – through embodied aesthetic experience for the audience– stories that are just small enough to be felt and thought; yet are complex and open for generating new connections, feelings, and ideas. Embodiment becomes a tool through which stories and ideas are activated, a space for generating different views of extinction and cohabitation; ideas of kinship, interspecies relationships and human presence become the ground for seed
ing different awareness and possibilities for new archetypes.
Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar
Ananke by Viola Arduini is a University of New Mexico MFA thesis exhibition that is part of Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s 2019 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.
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.
Guard Everything Appropriately and All Will Be Well
Nora Wendl
Nora Wendl, Guard Everything Appropriately and All Will Be Well
Performative legal document redaction & film screening
On view: March 11 – 15, 2019, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
In 2014, I was given access to the transcript of the trial van der Rohe vs. Farnsworth, in which architect Mies van der Rohe and the client that commissioned him to build a glass house in Illinois, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, sued one another. The architect alleged that she still owed him some of the cost of constructing the house, and she responded by alleging that he had misrepresented the cost of the house to her, and was practicing fraudulently—they both sought financial remuneration from the other, and much is revealed about their personal and working relationship in this document.
The transcript, a hefty 4,000 pages, is guarded by the estate of Mies van der Rohe, who are concerned with preserving the architect’s legacy—indeed, his grandson describes it as a “grave concern.” My negotiation of access to this document as a writer, artist and historian meant that I was bounded by the requirement that I not make the information available to others, under threat of legal action. “Guard everything appropriately, and all will be well,” and “I know you’ll conduct yourself professionally” were final instructions from the estate—both vague, and threatening.
From March 11 to March 15, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., I will clock in at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory exhibition space to redact this 4,000-page document in public. Working within the confines of typical American working hours, I will not be able to address visitors: I must continue to redact with a deadline of Friday, March 15th, 5:00 p.m. Visitors who arrive during Redaction Hours are invited to take any available seat in the gallery. This performance is meant to reveal what it means, in physical terms, to read and redact such a large document, to work at preventing it from entering into the flow of documents that make up history.
Also on view in the exhibition space during Redaction Hours and at the reception is a two-channel film made during a recent residency at Santa Fe Art Institute in which I worked with filmmaker Melinda Frame to prepare for this durational performance at Sanitary Tortilla Factory.
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.