High Five Hall of Fame: Highlights from the UNMAM Collection
Featuring highlights from the museum’s permanent collection, including paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and an archived virtual seminar, High Five Hall of Fame centers on narratives of connection and explores the enduring influence that artists and exposure to their works inspire.
Founded in 1962 with the mission to serve as a teaching institution, the museum has provided decades of access to historically significant artworks, innovative programming, and opportunities for connection and collaboration. This exhibition considers the personal impact of the museum’s collection through earnest stories by alumni, artists, and arts professionals that might inspire the gesture of a congratulatory, communal “high five.”
From the Collection
High Five Hall of Fame pairs artwork from the UNM Art Museum permanent collection with personal stories by alumni, artists, and arts professionals. Featured artists include:
We’d like to extend our sincere gratitude to our exhibition contributors:
Nancy Abbott Baker
Planned Giving Consultant, Santa Fe
Marjorie Devon
Tamarind Director Emerita, 1985 – 2015
Miguel Gandert
Photographer and Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Communication and Journalism, University of New Mexico
Sarah Greenough
Senior Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Brian A. Gross
Brian Gross Fine Art, Santa Fe
Charlotte Grey Jackson
Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe
Marie Watkins
Professor Emerita, Art History, Forman University Greenville, South Carolina
April Watson
Senior Curator, Photography, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
The exhibition also includes excerpts written by Douglas R. George, UNM Professor of Art History, and Peter Walch, UNMAM Director from 1985-2001, originally published in The University of New Mexico Art Museum: Highlights of the Collection (2001).
“While serving as a curator fellow at Tamarind Institute (1976–77), I also worked part-time at the UNM Art Museum, cataloguing photography acquisitions for Van Deren Coke, the founding director. The museum preparator and I had been discussing art and artists from California and he asked if I would like to see a recent addition to the collection by Roy De Forest. He pulled the painting out on the storage rack and I was dazzled by what I saw—this vibrant composition so richly painted, a true horror vacui with every inch of the canvas filled. It took my breath away and I remember that moment so clearly. I said to myself, this is genius.”
Brian A. Gross
Brian Gross Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“I fell in love with the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron while a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in the early 1990s. The mesmerizing lectures of Dr. Eugenia (Nia) Parry brought to life the wonder and “wackiness” of nineteenth-century photography, and Cameron’s photographs, for me, were at the epicenter. Her portraits of women, wild-haired and otherworldly as seen through the gauzy haze of Cameron’s lens, were especially striking.”
April Watson
Senior Curator, Photography, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.
“In the fall of 1973, when I arrived in New Mexico, I was stunned by its beauty and dazzled by its light. But it was within the darkened lecture halls of the art history department at UNM that I discovered my calling. There, I found Beaumont Newhall, a reserved New England gentleman who seemed as if he was lit on fire when he spoke about photography. Beaumont entranced his students not only with the depth of his knowledge, but also with stories of his friendships with many of the medium’s foremost practitioners. Passionate and articulate, erudite but warm and eminently approachable, Beaumont became a model of the kind of historian, curator, and scholar I hoped to become and the person I aspired to be.”
Sarah Greenough
Senior Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Rose B. Simpson: Seminar
Rose B. Simpson: Seminar was a six-week intensive museum program on the custom online platform UNMAM.ART. Created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UNM Art Museum pivoted its fall 2021 exhibition plans to include an online learning experience.
Seminar features six essays and spontaneous reflections written by artist Rose B. Simpson. Simpson is internationally known for mixed media clay sculptures and is also an accomplished creative writer. Simpson’s words are accompanied by images of her own artwork as well as prints by Robert Pruitt, Fritz Scholder (an enrolled member of the Luiseño tribe), Dyani White Hawk (Sičangu Lakota), and Anna Hepler, that inspired her 2021 residency at the Tamarind Institute. UNM students responded wholeheartedly to Simpson on Seminar, crafting in-depth responses to her writing on profound topics such as the environment, capitalism, generational trauma, and personal truth.
The archived project demonstrates how Simpson and more than 175 students engaged in insightful, back-and-forth conversations for more than a month. In total, students spent over 100 hours on the platform and returned to the site, on average, 11 times. The platform allowed participants to communicate with each other through text, sound, video, and photography. A collaboration across disciplines and mediums, the students’ and Simpson’s exchanges on the platform constitute a new virtual space where communication, creativity, and learning are unconstrained by time, space, and traditional conventions of the classroom or museum. The platform has the potential to facilitate conversations and meaningful interactions between UNM students and artists anywhere in the world.
UNMAM.ART was built in collaboration between the University of New Mexico Art Museum and MediaDesk, a creative agency based in Albuquerque. The UNMAM team was led by Mary Statzer, Curator of Prints & Photographs, and Arif Khan, Director. The MediaDesk team was led by Sommer Smith, Creative Director.