Hindsight Insight 4.0: Portraits, Landscapes, and Abstraction from the UNM Art Museum is the third installment of the UNM Art Museum’s hybrid project and exhibition space devoted to complicating existing narratives about racism, colonialism, and gender stereotypes while de-centering curatorial authority and institutional voice. Created and curated by museum staff and collaborators, the exhibition features portraits, landscapes, and abstract artworks from the museum’s permanent collection that complement curricula at the University of New Mexico during the Spring 2024 semester.
The intention behind this ongoing experimental project is to honor and engage student and faculty perspectives, interests, and concerns to make art relevant and alive for the UNM Art Museum’s core audience. From Spring 2023 through Fall 2024, the museum staff is developing multiple iterations that engage the university community to generate critical dialogue that resists static presentation and fixed interpretations.”
-Mary Statzer, Curator of Prints & Photographs
Hindsight Insight 4.0 is an extension of the classroom created by museum staff and UNM professors Megan Jacobs and jessamyn lovell. Students in each class will activate the exhibition and contribute artwork, responses, and presentations. These collaborations celebrate UNMAM’s role as a teaching museum that engages the broader campus community.
Created & Curated By:
Artist and Associate Professor, UNM Honors College
Megan Jacobs is a visual artist and Associate Professor in UNM’s Honors College. Her interdisciplinary honors courses help students hone their critical thinking skills to creatively construct their way in the world. She recently co-developed and team taught the course, “Eco-Art: Making Art to Reconcile with the Climate Crisis,” with UNM honors student Kineo Memmer (BA, 2023) and was awarded the 2022-23 Teacher of the Year Award by UNM’s College of Arts & Sciences.
Using a variety of media, Jacobs’ creative practice explores delicate relationships, including the interweaving of two partners in love, the bond of parent and child, and the tenuous relationship between humans and the natural world. Jacobs’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Aperture Gallery, Saatchi Gallery, the Museum of New Art (MONA), Currents New Media Festival, and others. Her work has been featured in magazines such as Adbusters, Musee Magazine, and Lenscratch, as well as an anthology of women photographers titled, Eye Mama: Poetic Truths of Home and Motherhood (teNeues, 2023).
Jacobs earned a BA in Fine Art from Smith College and an MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico.
Principle Lecturer III, UNM Department of Art and Art History
jessamyn lovell is an artist, licensed private investigator, and Principle Lecturer III in UNM’s Department of Art and Art History. As an artist, they work with photography, video, and surveillance tools to document their own life experiences, making connections between class and personal identity. A book titled Dear Erin Hart (SF Camerawork, 2015) chronicles finding, following and photographing their identity thief. lovell is currently integrating their skills as a private investigator into their artistic practice as an ongoing conceptual art piece called D.I.Y. P.I. (Do It Yourself Private Investigation). Two photographs from D.I.Y. P.I. are featured in this exhibition.
lovell’s work has been featured by media outlets such as Hyperallergic, Wired, This American Life, The Today Show, BBC World News, and many more. They are the recipient of several awards, including the Aperture Portfolio Prize and the CENTER Excellence in Teaching Award, and were recently a Center for Teaching Excellence Fellow at UNM. lovell works with the internationally recognized performance troupe La Pocha Nostra as a producer and performer.
lovell earned their BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and MFA from California College of the Arts.
Curator of Prints & Photographs, The University of New Mexico Art Museum
Mary Statzer is a curator and educator who is most at home in museums. Statzer grew up in Illinois and moved to the southwest where she has lived and worked in Arizona and New Mexico. Statzer trained as an artist and art historian, earning a BFA in printmaking and drawing from Illinois State University, an MFA in printmaking from Arizona State University, and a PhD in the theory and history of art from University of Arizona. Photography and print are Statzer’s specialties. She is currently Curator of Prints and Photographs at University of New Mexico Art Museum, where she has organized exhibitions in all mediums of art for the past six years.
From the Collection
Sarony & Company, Ada Isaacs Menken, 1866. Albumen print carte de visite. Gift of Joan and Van Deren Coke.
Hindsight Insight 4.0 is organized into two thematic sections that invite continuous participation. UNM undergraduate students will be key collaborators through ongoing displays of class projects during the Spring 2024 semester. Visitors are also encouraged to make their own contributions to Hindsight Insight 4.0 by using the in-gallery photography studio and sharing written responses to form a collective artwork.
A Sense of Self: Performing Identity for the Camera explores photography’s role in constructing identity and public personas. Instructor jessamyn lovell, graduate assistant Ellan Luna, and curator Mary Statzer selected a range of historical and contemporary portraits from the museum’s collection. Throughout the semester, these works will serve as inspiration for students enrolled in Art Practices II to create artwork about identity that will be on view later in the semester.
Artists featured include E.J. Bellocq, Matthew B. Brady, Brassaï, Julia Margaret Cameron, Rahoul Contractor, André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri, Mike Disfarmer, Jess T. Dugan, Judith Golden, Zig Jackson, Harold Henry Jones, Gertrude Käsebier, jessamyn lovell, Stephen Marc, Delilah Montoya, Patrick Nagatani, Anne Noggle, Bill Owens, August Sander, Henry A. Schmidt, Cindy Sherman, Jiehao Su, Andy Warhol, and Carla Williams.
This section includes an in-gallery photography studio where students and visitors are invited to make a portrait. Portraits will be collected and displayed on the museum’s public monitor and website.
Eco-Pulse: Rise and Fall focuses on the interconnection between humans and the natural world. Artworks in this section include a range of materials – paper, plastic, contaminated water, salt, elk hide, moss, clay, a silver-dipped leaf – signifying complexity and challenging notions of man-made vs. natural art media. The salon-style installation encourages further dialogue among the pieces, creating new and meaningful associations through formal and conceptual similarities and contrasts.
Artists featured include Kenneth Baird, Cheryl Bowers, Alison Carey, Daniel W. Coburn, Robert D’Alessandro, Susan Davidoff, Lesley Dill, Ellen Garvens, Basia Irland, William Pope.L, Nicola López, David Maisel, Rosana Paulino, Meridel Rubenstein, Daman Sauer, Rose B. Simpson, Kiki Smith, Michelle Stuart, June Wayne, Paula Wilson, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, and Brian Rea.
This section encourages reflections and responses. Students in Megan Jacob’s class, Social Transformation through Art, will create a series of altars informed and inspired by the works on view. Students will also submit their work for presentation at UNM’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Conference in April. Visitors are invited to participate by posting written responses on the gallery’s wall, building a large, collective artwork through the duration of the exhibition.
The Reading Room holds a variety of books selected by the collaborators – Megan Jacobs, jessamyn lovell, and Mary Statzer – along with copies of Afterlives: Photography, Memory, Archive, a publication by Hindsight Insight 2.0 and 3.0 collaborators Collective Constructs. The books are thematically paired to each section of the exhibition. A computer and scanner are available to provide access digital works and scan chapters. The space also showcases two collaborative projects by students in Francis Reynolds’ and Anna Rotty’s Fall 2023 course Visualizing Ideas in Photography.
Along with the materials in the Reading Room, this section of our website features a variety of digital resources such as articles, databases, museum collection pages, and videos that expand on the themes of the exhibition. Explore the digital resources selected by each collaborator below.
Megan Jacobs
- Kinship is a Verb, (2021) Orion Magazine, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, John Hausdoerffe, Gavin Van Horn.
- Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth, (2022) by Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez.
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, (2015) by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
- All We Can Save: Truth Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, (2020) by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson.
Collaboration in process…
Hindsight Insight 4.0 is an ongoing process. Watch this space for new articles, upcoming events, and invitations to engage with the exhibition.
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Click here to view all upcoming events supporting Hindsight Insight 4.0.
LEARN MORE:
Looking Back
Hindsight Insight 4.0 is part of an ongoing exhibition series that began in the Spring of 2023. Through this ongoing initiative, UNMAM invites the university community and other collaborators to actively participate in the development, presentation, and interpretation of the exhibition. Review previous iterations of the series here:
