Hindsight Insight 3.0: excitement in collaboration

Over the summer, Mary Statzer and Angel Jiang – curators at the University of New Mexico’s Art Museum – asked three professors to choose works for an exhibit that would connect with their syllabuses.

Ray Hernández-Durán, who teaches Chicano & Latinx art, pulled pieces by Chicano and Latinx artists. Kevin Mulhearn, who teaches the history of photography, pulled abstract and portraiture photography from various time periods, Jiang said.

The UNM Art Museum unveiled its latest exhibition, “Hindsight Insight 3.0: Portraits, Landscapes, and Abstraction” on Friday, Sept. 6.

The exhibition features art from the museum’s permanent collection, as well as pieces by artist and UNM assistant professor of Painting & Drawing, Amanda Curreri. Featured alongside Curreri works are selections by curators Jiang and Statzer, as well as Hernández-Durán and Mulhearn.

“Hindsight Insight 3.0” is the second in a series that is centered around collaboration and experimentation that began last spring, Statzer said.

“We’re lucky that we have this amazing collection on campus,” Mulhearn said. “So we’re trying to take advantage of that.”

When surveying the museum’s collection, Curreri noticed a gap in art relating to curriculum on Queer activism. Statzer then decided to incorporate Curreri’s own pieces in turn.

“By including Curreri’s work, it’s sort of this provisional stop-gap measure,” Statzer said. “Imagining a future where we have more Queer activist art.”

Curreri’s part in “Hindsight Insight 3.0” features textiles in many forms: bobbins, rope and ponchos. One piece titled, “We Cannot Live on Clams Alone,” depicts shells hanging from a checkered background. The piece was inspired by a protest that took place in the 1920s in Plymouth, Massachusetts, as well as from Curreri’s own mussel dinners.

“Just trying to jam that social aspect into the material of the work – not making the mussels but having them be a byproduct of the social,” Curreri said. “And it turns out, they’re kind of pretty.”

Students being able to see the art in-person is an important aspect of “Hindsight Insight 3.0,” according to Hernández-Durán, Mulhearn and Statzer.

“I think being in the presence of objects is a lot like being in the presence of people,” Statzer said. “Objects have a physical presence that affects you, and often that can be greatly enhanced – much more than an image of something.”

Curreri’s students will remove one of the rope pieces from the museum biweekly and work with it. The piece originally began on a bridge over the Ohio River – a place that served as the division between the North and South during the Civil War. It was created with community organizers, artists and other collaborators, alongside conversations about race.

“We spanned the bridge making ropes – symbolic action of our difference in togetherness — so trying to see if this material can be reactivated, have meaning, carry that meaning in a new way here,” Curreri said.

Hernández-Durán’s students will write papers on the works that will be shared with the Art Museum, he said.

“My students are going to do research anyway,” Hernández-Durán said. “But instead of doing research on something they find online or see in a book, they can actually go to the gallery and see the object and produce work that’s going to help the museum.”

The “Hindsight Insight” series will have two more iterations following 3.0. The themes of these exhibitions remain ambiguous for now, Statzer said, but they will also involve student participation.

“What would make me feel best about this show is feeling like students are engaging on all different levels,” Statzer said before the opening. “Whether they’re in the classes with the professors we’ve collaborated with or just walking int o the museum.”

Lily Alexander is a beat reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at sports@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @llilyalexander

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