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.
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.