Black Hole/Atomic City (State of Decay)
The Black Hole in Los Alamos, NM, 2009. Photo by Jeff Keyzer
Black Hole/Atomic City (State of Decay)
August 2 – 30, 2019
OPENING RECEPTION: August 2, 6-9pm
Black Hole/Atomic City (State of Decay) is an exhibition dedicated to alternative stories related to “the nuclear business” in New Mexico since the dawn of the Anthropocene/Trinity test near Tularosa in July 1945. The combined burden of nuclear byproducts and waste that decays over tens of thousands of years weighs heavily on New Mexico, a “national sacrifice zone.” The show will be on view until August 30.
Impacts that largely affect Indigenous and rural communities from nuclear weapons and their production in New Mexico and around the world, are not featured in the celebratory story of the Atomic Age promoted by Los Alamos, set for the commemoration in 2020 of the 75th Anniversary of the Trinity Test and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and only cities to be destroyed with atomic weapons.
What is the impact of the theft and decimation of sacred lands? How have involuntary radiation exposures from atomic explosions and contamination from mining and milling of uranium affected generations? What are the ongoing threats from transportation and storage of radioactive waste?
This will be one of numerous efforts to highlight alternative views of our nuclear world during the lead up to the Anniversary of the Nuclear Age. The Black Hole, a Los Alamos business known world-wide for recycling equipment and materials from the Los Alamos Scientific/National Laboratory, was owned by anti-nuclear activist Edward Grothus, who died in 2009. Artist and activist Barbara Grothus is the lead organizer of the project.
Artists include: Josh Atlas, Brandi Beckett, Mitch Berg, Anna Bush Crews, Sabrina Gaskill, Barbara Grothus, Sheri Inez deLopaz Kotowski, Sto Len, Melanie Mills, Santiago Perez, Thomas Powell, Rachele Riley, Yasuyo Tanaka, Jessi Walsh, Nora Wendl
This exhibition was made possible in part by the Fulcrum Fund. The Fulcrum Fund is an annual grant program, created and administered by 516 ARTS as a partner in the Regional Regranting Program of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Love, Art & Tortillas
Reception & Open Studios: Friday, July 5th, 2019 6-9pm
Exhibition: July 5-26, 2019
Kim Arthun, Frank McCulloch, Paul Akmajian, Inez Foose, Tina Fuentes, Larry Smith, Susan Ricker, Jeanette Williams, Wes Mills, and David Levinthal
Sanitary Tortilla Factory is pleased to host an exhibition of artists that shaped the historic path of artistic production in downtown Albuquerque. Deep creative roots and a commitment to artists was shaped by M & J’s Sanitary Tortilla owners Beatriz and Jake Montoya, Richard Levy and countless artists for over two decades. The exhibition includes many artists that showed work at the restaurant, historic images of the restaurant and lithographs created at 21 Steps.
February of last year, local legend, Frank McCulloch, stopped in at the current iteration of Sanitary Tortilla Factory. Frank had just attended the funeral for the owner of the original Sanitary Tortilla Factory, Jake Montoya. Coffee that brisk morning opened a time capsule of Art, Love and Tortillas. Frank’s stories, exhibition announcements highlighted a vibrant arts scene beginning in the early 1970s. Frank McCulloch and Tina Fuentes often “grabbed a taco” during a break from the studio and artist fondly remark that art returned from the restaurant carried the aroma of tortilla chips. In the late 80’s Richard Levy and Jeff Ryan of 21 Steps, a waterless lithography shop worked with renown artists including, Lorna Simpson, James Casebere, Wes Mills, David Levinthal, Thomas Barrow, Frank Romero and Patrick Nagatani.
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.
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.