PHOTOS: Celebrating the Work of “Hindsight Insight 2.0” Collaborators

Opened in March 2023, Hindsight Insight 2.0 represents the inaugural exhibition in an ongoing series dedicated to recontextualizing the UNM Art Museum collection. As we prepare to transition into the next phase of Hindsight Insight, we’d like to take a moment to celebrate the work of Hindsight Insight 2.0 collaborators Jess T. Dugan, Eleanor Kane, and Collective Constructs. The photo gallery below highlights the contributions made by this inaugural group of collaborators in the spring of 2023. 

I want to thank all of the collaborators for sharing their knowledge, labor, and passion in the making of Hindsight Insight 2.0. Your generous contributions brought this exhibition alive, gave it a powerful charge, and deepened its meaning.

-Mary Statzer, UNMAM Curator of Prints & Photographs.

Photographs by Stefan Jennings Batista.

Francis Reynolds' "Underwood & Underwood Landscape (University of New Mexico Art Museum Study I)"

Image 40 of 40

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

Hindsight Insight 2.0: Portraits, Landscapes, and Abstraction from the UNM Art Museum is a hybrid project space and exhibition devoted to complicating existing narratives about racism, decolonization, and gender stereotypes within museum collections while de-centering curatorial authority and institutional voice. Created and curated by museum staff and collaborators, the exhibition features over 60 portraits, landscapes, and abstract artworks from the UNM Art Museum collection.

The intention behind Hindsight Insight 2.0 is to honor and engage student perspectives, interests, and concerns to make art relevant and alive for UNMAM’s core audience. Over the next two years of this ongoing experimental project, museum staff will engage the university community to generate critical dialog that resists static presentation and fixed interpretations.

-Mary Statzer, Curator of Prints & Photographs

Hindsight Insight 2.0 is made possible by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. The Terra Foundation for American Art, established in 1978 and having offices in Chicago and Paris, supports organizations and individuals locally and globally with the aim of fostering intercultural dialogues and encouraging transformative practices that expand narratives of American art, through the foundation’s grant program, collection, and initiatives.

CREATED & CURATED BY:

Collective Constructs members (L to R) Anna Rotty, Francis Reynolds, Marcella Ernest, and Marina Perez. Photograph by claudia hermano.

Collective Constructs is a group of visual scholars working to facilitate original research, critical thinking, and collaborative learning. Formed on Tiwa land at the University of New Mexico, Collective Constructs centers visual sovereignty and remix strategies as tools of both analysis and creative liberatory practice. In our engagement with the UNM Art Museum, we center our understanding of American Indian Curatorial Practice as work that is long-term, mutually meaningful, reciprocal, and with mentorship.

Marina Perez is a descendant of the Nahua and Huichol peoples of West Mexico. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, educator, and cultural worker specializing in community and cultural art-making practices. She earned an MA in American Indian Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and is currently a Ph.D. student in Art History at the University of New Mexico. Her scholarship addresses emerging themes in contemporary Native arts, archives, and oral histories.

Francis Reynolds uses photography to investigate how ideology operates through images, or how images are ideology. In his work, he resurfaces photographs from the past to examine their continuing pull on the present—whether these images were created as works of art, for commercial purposes, or as tools of control. His participation in Collective Constructs explores how landscape is a framework for understanding space, one that can foreground certain aspects of a space while rendering others unintelligible. He received his BA in English from Reed College and is an MFA candidate in studio art at the University of New Mexico.

Anna Rotty is an artist living on Tiwa land in Albuquerque where she is an MFA candidate in studio art, and visual scholar here at the University of New Mexico. She sees photography as a powerful tool to slow us down, help us pay attention, and shift perception, treating imagery of landscape as active rather than reiterating a passive gaze. Through conversations with family, with optical investigations, and by prioritizing light as material, Rotty strives for that magical feeling of lifting up a rock to see what world is living underneath. As part of Collective Constructs, Rotty finds collaboration and conversation to be critical components of art practice. Her work has been exhibited at Strata Gallery and Form & Concept in Santa Fe, and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

Marcella Ernest engages in collaborative work both intellectually and as practice. She is Gunflint Lake Ojibwe and an enrolled member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior and has heritage that includes Eastern European ancestry. Her interdisciplinary practice includes creative responses to the archive, research, writing, lecture + performance, sound, and video art. She explores oral histories and family photos as sites of memory and open-ended reflections on politics of place, and the varying relationships between social art history, gender, and Indigenous land justice. Marcella holds a PhD in American Studies and is currently an Assistant Professor of Native American Art History with the Department of Art Studio, History and Education at the University of New Mexico.

 

Photograph by Bryan Birks

Jess T. Dugan is an artist whose work explores issues of identity through photography, video, and writing. They received their MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, their Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University, and their BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Dugan’s work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of over 50 museums, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the International Center of Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the Library of Congress.

Their monographs include Look at me like you love me (MACK, 2022), To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag, 2018) and Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015).

In 2015, Dugan co- founded the Strange Fire Collective to highlight work made by women, people of color, and LGBTQ artists.

They are the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an ICP Infinity Award, and were selected by the Obama White House as an LGBT Artist Champion of Change.

Eleanor Kane was born and raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her undergraduate degrees in Art History and Studio Art are from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She then moved to New York to earn her master’s degree in Art History from City College. In 2018, Eleanor moved to Albuquerque where she is currently pursuing her PhD in Art History at the University of New Mexico, concentrating on Spanish Colonial Art. Her dissertation explores the possibility of Novohispanic Nuns as Art Patrons. Eleanor teaches introduction to Art History courses at UNM and works at the UNM Art Museum as a Programs Assistant.

When Curator Mary Statzer asked if I would be interested in collaborating on a section of Hindsight Insight 2.0, I knew right away who I wanted to elevate and emphasize: Women Artists.

Not all great artists are men, but most permanent collections give that distinct impression. The title of my curated section is “Women Depicting Women,” and all the works illustrate at least one woman. In hopes of working towards equal representation in museums, these artworks will reintroduce visitors to a selection of incredible woman artists.”

-Eleanor Kane

Mary Statzer, Curator of Prints and Photographs. Photograph by Stefan Jennings Batista.

Mary Statzer is a curator and educator who is most at home in museums. Statzer grew up in a small town in Illinois. She has lived and worked in the Southwest, specifically Arizona and New Mexico, for 30 years. 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 PhD in the theory and history of art from University of Arizona.

Photography and museums are Statzer’s scholarly specialties. She edited a book titled, The Photographic Object 1970, that was published in 2017. 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 five years.