Featured Artists
Adriano R. Lucci
Artist Bio
Adrian Ricca Lucci is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the materiality of the body and self. He previously worked as a labor organizer at United Auto Workers unionizing Columbia University graduate workers while studying at The Mailman School of Public Health. Ricca Lucci has spoken about labor and health at Trinity College, Dublin; Indiana University, Bloomington; and The American Public Health Association Annual Conference. He has shown work in New Mexico at SITE Santa FE, The University of New Mexico Art Museum, and Harwood’s 6th Street Studios. He takes studio art classes at the University of New Mexico.
Artist Statement
I have an expanded painting practice that uses textiles to question relationships between vision, touch, and felt sense of the body. I use draoing and hand embroidery to sculpt fabric into seductive biomorphic forms. Textiles act as a stand-in for the body, while stitching and mark making serve as a metonym for touch. In the process of making abstract works about embodiment, I think about how forms that do not cohere as bodies use tension, gravity, and a sense of being grounded in space to evoke corporeality. My most recent body of work, TOUCH, is a series of pink-hued paintings meant to elicit flesh. Patterned ripples are sewn into flesh through a series of tight knots, alluding to how ostensibly soft bodily folds are formed through tensity and traction. I juxtapose this construction with microscopic imagery of cells, spreadsheet sells, and mirrors to cell attention to representation of the body in medical imaging, bioinformatics, and the looking glass. The friction that arises in the self upon encountering images of the body is precisely what TOUCH seeks to address.
Alison Haag
Artist Bio
Alison Haag is a painter and drawer from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, currently living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is in her final year at the University of New Mexico, pursuing a BFA in Art Studio with a focus on painting and drawing, and is preparing for her honors thesis show, Nesting, scheduled for spring 2026. Alison’s work is deeply informed by her connection to the natural world. As a rock climber, she draws inspiration from the landscapes she explores, spending much of her time in places like the Sandia mountains, Diablo Canyon, and Las Conchas. These experiences of immersion in nature not only provide visual inspiration, but also influence the time, rhythm, and energy present in her work. This direct engagement with the outdoors informs both the themes and the physicality of her work, allowing her to translate experiences of awe, movement, and transcendence into her paintings and drawings. Throughout her academic and artistic journey, Alison has consistently explored the relationship between tangible artwork and lived experience, using watercolor illustration as a tool to translate her personal experiences into shared human experiences. Through her practice, Alison investigates the relationship between the body and the land, exploring cycles of transformation, temporality, and connection. Her art reflects a profound interest in the ways the natural world mirrors human experience. She continues to expand her visual language through both observation and lived experience, participating in the lineage of female artists living in New Mexico before her.
Artist Statement
Alison Haag is a painter and drawer from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, currently living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is in her final year at the University of New Mexico, pursuing a BFA in Art Studio with a focus on painting and drawing, and is preparing for her honors thesis show, Nesting, scheduled for spring 2026. Alison’s work is deeply informed by her connection to the natural world. As a rock climber, she draws inspiration from the landscapes she explores, spending much of her time in places like the Sandia Mountains, Diablo Canyon, and Las Conchas. These experiences of immersion in nature not only provide visual inspiration but also influence the time, rhythm, and energy present in her work. This direct engagement with the outdoors shapes both the themes and physicality of her paintings and drawings, allowing her to translate experiences of awe, movement, and transcendence into visual form. Throughout her academic and artistic journey, Alison has consistently explored the relationship between tangible artwork and lived experience, using watercolor illustration as a tool to translate personal experiences into shared human sensations. Through her practice, she investigates the connection between the body and the land, exploring cycles of transformation, temporality, and connection. Her work reflects a profound interest in the ways the natural world mirrors human experience, and she continues to expand her visual language through observation, lived experience, and participation in the lineage of female artists in New Mexico who have explored the same outdoor spaces before her.
Alyssa Hale
Artist Bio
Alyssa (Ash) Hale is a multimedia artist whose primary focus is fiber arts and pottery. Art beginning crochet and drawing in high school, they continued both in college to earn their studio arts BFA degree. An interest in charcoal and painting would later emerge. If Hale could describe their goals artistically, it would be to become a “Jack-of-all-trades” artist with basic to intermediate knowledge in many different forms of media. After graduating college, Hale will continue to pursue an artistic interest in “trippy”, whimsical, and thought-provoking art.
Artist Statement
Alyssa (Ash) Hale is a multimedia artist whose primary focus is fiber arts and pottery. Ash began crocheting and drawing in high school, continuing both in college in pursuit of their studio arts BFA degree. An interest in charcoal and painting would emerge during their time in college. If Hale could describe their goals artistically, it would be to become a "jack-of-all-trades" artist with basic to intermediate knowledge in many different forms of media. After graduating from college, Hale will continue to pursue an artistic interest in "trippy", whimsical, and thought-provoking art.
Amber McQuarrie
Artist Bio
Amber McQuarrie is a multimedia artist who creates vibrant and abstract pieces of art using both 2d and 3d forms. Her pieces explore the beauty of our lives and look at art as a form of enjoyment rather than a hidden message buried beneath the surface. Spending her time exploring the world around us and capturing it from her perspective no matter the material or medium. Each piece is handmade with no two alike, each unique and one of a kind. Creating art to inspiring others to be themselves, create, and take life one moment at a time.
Artist Statement
Amber McQuarrie is a multimedia artist who creates vibrant and unique pieces that range from 2d forms like paintings, drawings, and photography to 3d forms such as ceramics, jewelry, and sculptures. She uses any materials that are available leaving no stone unturned in her journey to create. Whether it is a hand-crafted ceramic mug with decorations or a portrait of your pets filled with vibrant colors and quirky elements capturing their unique personality. She can bring any visions to life with no limits to the inspiration or the material type its constructed from! It is all about how we look at the world around us. My World of Creation capturing life from the way she views it, bold, vibrant, unknown, and mysterious. Each piece is a fraction of who she is bringing her love for nature and discovery into the world of art. We are all living our first life and we all see the world from our own point of view, but it’s time to see the world around us from a new perspective. Allowing us to see art without the stress of politics or understanding behind it. Art that is Art with no hidden messages or meanings, just the enjoyment of what the piece holds to the person viewing it.
Christoper Ober
Artist Bio
Chris is an interdisciplinary artist who began his work in vocal performance and theatre, discovering the connecting qualities of music and singing. Later, he discovered sculptural art and its established qualities in the world around him. He has completed an associate degree in liberal arts and continues his education in the Interdisciplinary arts department at UNM. Chris works in woods, metals, voice performance, and harmonics to create performances and sculptures that intermix music with materials. Chris has primarily shown the performative side of his work, showcasing his artistic practice at the Santa Fe Opera Young Voices program, the Washington National Opera summer program, as well as oratorio performances at St. John United Methodist Church and opera performances at UNM. Chris is currently working on a larger sculptural installation for his graduating class, as well as voice performances across The Valley in New Mexico covering oratorio and acting performances. Chris plans to continue his exploration of how music and material can be joined in new ways and will pursue music in solo and ensemble work.
Artist Statement
My work lives at the intersection of voice and form, where sound becomes almost tangible, and objects vibrate with their own inner resonance. As both a sculptor and a vocal performer, I explore how the body communicates biodiversity and regenerative practice through breath, line, texture, and tone to reveal the unseen connections between each of us. In sculpture, I build structures that echo the rhythms of the human voice: dynamic, layered, and alive with tension. Whether working in metal, wood, or mixed materials, I am drawn to forms that communicate polar diversity—delicacy and strength, stillness and movement, vulnerability and weakness. In vocal performance, I approach the operatic voice as a sculptural tool, shaping sound in space for the sole purpose of connection and communication. Each phrase becomes a contour, each resonance a surface, each breath an invitation to inhabit the fleeting, timeless architecture of sound. Across both practices, I seek to create experiences that are embodied, intimate, and transformative in our regenerative and considerate practices. My work invites audiences to feel the voice as structure and the sculpture as breath—two mediums converging in a shared exploration of biodiversity, conscientiousness, and the expressive potential of the human form.
Destiny S. Messillas
Artist Bio
Destiny Silos Mesillas is a UNM student at the University of New Mexico, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts degree focusing in Costume Design & Illustration with a minor in Arts Leadership & Business in Fall 2025. After she completes her degree, she will be attending Tom Savini’s Special Make-up Effects Program, located in Monessen, PA, to further develop her craft. I plan to start the first special effects makeup studio in the Southwest region of the U.S., partnering with production companies to create a variety of projects. I also will be building educational programming for aspiring special effects artists to have greater accessibility to this art. Some of my hobbies include oil painting, creating multimedia art pieces, dancing, spending time with my pets and loved ones (yes, pets come first), and exploring new places!
Artist Statement
As a multimedia artist with a primary focus on special effects makeup, I often explore transformation and identity. While my artistic practice spans various mediums, special effects makeup serves as a central point through which I investigate the boundaries between reality and illusion. I employ a diverse range of materials, from traditional prosthetics to digital enhancements, and I create characters and narratives that challenge conventional perceptions of beauty, identity, and the human form. My creative process is characterized by extensive research, experimentation, and a commitment to both traditional and contemporary makeup practices. I draw inspiration from diverse sources, including film, theater, and the natural world, to create immersive experiences that invite viewers to question the nature of appearance. Each work I create provides me with an opportunity to explore the potential of makeup to not only alter physical features but also to convey complex emotions and stories. My goal is to create work that resonates on a visceral level, prompting viewers to reconsider their understanding of the self and the world around them. Through special effects makeup, I aim to push the boundaries of what is possible, transforming the human canvas into a dynamic space for artistic expression and social commentary.
Elan Retzlaff
Artist Bio
Elan Retzlaff is an interdisciplinary artist and experimental media student working with themes about queer identity, familial trauma, and community health. Their background in quilting, weaving and filmmaking has led them to their current practice of creating textile objects with new media technology integrations. Examples of these interactions in their recent work includes a tapestry pattern generator working with health data from a government database projected onto a weaving loom; a quilted image of the moon as a base for live computing projections about cultural concepts of gender fluidity, titled “Phasing” which was a recipient of the 2024 Lunar Arts Award grant from the Space Sustainability Research Challenge through the UNM ARTSlab; and an abstract experimental video piece using scans of handwoven fabric that was featured in the Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe in 2024. Elan has studied and exhibited art in New York, Austin and Albuquerque. When they are not creating new pieces they can often be found working with food pantries, clothing swaps, and mutual aid efforts.
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist focused on textiles and installations and interested in themes of community health, familial legacy and queer identity. My work is energetic, emotional, and eclectic and has included weaving, screen printing, quilting, film, interactive media, sculpture, puppetry, programming and physical computing. The variety of media in which I work and my experiments in combining these art forms is reflective of my larger curiosity about the intersections of art and other disciplines. I look forward to continuing to explore how my work in community organizing and public health can inform and interlace with my artistic practice. My current project Frayed Inheritance is a series of experimental mixed media textiles that explore the parallels between how abuse and artisanship are passed down through generations and poses the question of how individuals and communities can break unhealthy cycles without becoming disconnected from their heritage. The juxtaposition between the themes of violence and the soft medium aims to encourage vulnerable reflection on the social issues discussed in the work.
Emma B. Anderson
Artist Bio
_edited.jpg)
I was born and raised in the Albuquerque, New Mexico. I grew up in awe of the cruelty and relief of the desert biome. I am part of the whole that knows what it is to live in drought. I know what it is to hover over the promise of devotional fulfillment. I create through the mediums of photography, mixed media, sculpture, metals, performance, and light + sound. The focal point of my work are the concepts of perception, love, death, paradoxes, and intimacy in the modern world. Also, deeply inspirational to me is our natural world, I am sensitive to spaces, environments both curated and candid. The power of ecological interdependence and its relation to how every one of us creates and destroys. My practice is a love letter to the void and an invitation to connect. To feel so close to my subjects and materials as possible, adhering myself. To utilize the isomorphic current of energy that pulls and pushes, honoring and empathizing without harm or judgement. Allowing my hands to translate what is conjured. My muses are particles of light; vivid emotion in fleeting moments. The full spectrum of intensity as it continues to change form. A slaughtered language communicated without words, what connects everyone and everything. Products of the mind that manifest in our physical world. My hope is that you find your own meaning in my work, riding from one consciousness to another. In this way, art is participatory by nature, existing within the grey area of what is spoken and what is heard. Thank you for feeling, for laughing and crying and dancing and breaking. Thank you for giving and receiving love, thank you for participating.
Er Case
Artist Bio
My approach to art-making is: if it sounds interesting, try it. Regardless of if it is poetry, photography, or even crochet, I am always trying to figure out a way to add another medium or genre to make the idea larger than life. One of my first true loves was theatre, and I think that background informs how collaboration and experimentation are vital to what I do. As a playwright, I love seeing my work is transformed by everyone who interacts with it. I want to push the bounds of comfort for viewers consuming my work, whether it be subject matter or stylistic choices. I want people to walk away questioning themselves and what biases and beliefs they hold. Focusing on horror art has helped me achieve this, allowing my work to confront expectations and challenge perspectives. I hate being shoved in a box and horror lets me escape that by being such a flexible starting point that I can branch my work off of. I don’t just want to leave the audience scared, but also with their world changed and perspective shifted. Art is meant to invoke reaction, my art is meant to leave people’s minds racing. I want to be unnerving because I want my art to say something. All art is about the human experience and mine is no different.
Er Case is an interdisciplinary artist from Denver, Colorado. Currently in their last semester at University of New Mexico, Case made their playwriting debut when Scrap Productions produced their play “You Are Alive, But Are You Living?” in March of 2025. They contributed to “Albuquerque DIY Zine” with An Outsider’s Peek Into ABQ Punk, a multimedia project containing photocollage and poetry. Their work contains a little bit of everything, but usually comes back to horror in the end. They feel that the medium should be chosen based on the project, not the project on the medium.
Fin Martens
Artist Bio
Artist Statement
Let this be a patchwork of all the things that make me alive within the world, not a sculpted bust with my opinions, standing on a pedestal in an empty room. I owe my art to the red earth. the silt in the river and the endless blue sky. This is where it comes from, and these are what I am beholden to. What is an artist if not a conduit? Call us cave painters and mages, heralds of the apocalypse and prophets of the days we all survive it. Call us memort keepers and story gardeners. Call us the antidote to meaninglessness. Call us ontological mutiny. Call us the myth itself. I cannot imagine living anything other than art; This is what I can offer to the world, myself as a conduit for echoing back the stories already present. In the midst of political and climate turmoil, I believe that a shift in myths we make might lay the stepping stones for hope and adaptation in the midst of change. My art is grounded in my animist practice. The stories I weave have their roots in listening to the humans and more-than-humans in this high desert ecosystem I call home here in New Mexico, as I search for a sense of belonging within place and time. I work with many mediums and many modes- sometimes quick and ephemeral, and sometimes elaborate and technical. The shape of art matters less to me tha n the story that wants to be told through it. Call Me every name for wandering home- for the path is long and winding, and there are many great mysteries to be found off trail- many faces to wear, and people to be, paths to follow and mythologies to give form.
Grigori Rogers
Artist Bio
Grigori Rogers is an interdisciplinary artist that combines his love for film and music in imaginative ways. Grigori transmutes a spectrum of ideas and emotions through his work. Such as deep and introspective work through his songwriting or his unique perspectives in his story telling through film. Currently he is working on multiple projects from finishing a script for a horror feature and constantly writing songs about life. He is always searching for other artists to collaborate with and to keep things creatively fun.
Artist Statement
I have always had a creative way of exploring life and I think it comes through my music and film making. I study the healing arts for personal reasons and life makes creativity larger than just something to do. It helps me process and understand life's complexities and with songs like “oh the woes” I credit my creative side for keeping that passion in my life. I also love to collaborate with other artists and create things that expand my perspectives and give more space and energy to create larger projects.
Hannah Mayhew
Artist Bio
Hannah Mayhew is an interdisciplinary artist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She works in music and songwriting, acrylic painting, and fiction and poetry writing. She aims to use her own personal experience and faith to connect with and inspire others through a tender, heartfelt body of work. Much of her interest lies in expressing connection to others and the world around us, emphasizing the idea that we all can find a place and people who help us recognize the things we never thought we were capable of. Hannah works across all of these mediums to build a portfolio that touches the hearts of her audience and brings comfort.
Artist Statement
My work in music and songwriting, acrylic painting, and fiction and poetry writing aims to tell stories exploring the wonder in the world around us. I believe that art, specifically music, can show the most vulnerable parts of ourselves, which is an aspect of my art that I always try to honor personally. In my current project, I plan to approach telling stories through the lens of my faith and Gary Thomas' nine spiritual temperaments, aiming to reach audiences who wish to engage with their world and the beauty that surrounds them in ways they hadn't yet considered. Throughout all of the forms of art that I do, I've learned so much about myself, the world around me, and how to connect with that world. If my art can be a means of expressing that in myself and connecting with others, that's the most important thing my art can do. I believe that art can be a vessel through which we perceive and appreciate the world and the other creations around us through my own experiences.
Joey Johnston
Artist Bio
Joey Johnston is a painter who primarily works with oil on linen. Born and raised in New Mexico, Joey will graduate from the University of New Mexico with a Bachelors in Fine Arts. Their art primarily focuses on their home, New Mexico, and its constantly changing landscape while trying to hold onto history and memories of the past. This is accomplished through still life paintings and subjects that are based in and around places in Albuquerque, with minimal people in view. Their art is ever changing, using different techniques to enhance their paintings, and are learning as they create.
Artist Statement
As an artist who is slowly starting to realize that “artist” is a label which I can call my own, I am left to wonder, what is my art? My chosen medium is oil paints that smell of chemicals and freedom of expression on linen, a material that I bought by accident and fell in love with because of its texture and the way it holds pigment. Medium isn’t art, but a conduit through which I present my ideas, drawing from a lineage of oil painters and classically trained artists, using texture, brush strokes, and oil to make it my art. So what is left but ideas. Ideas are what creates the “artist”, so how do I make my art something that I and others find meaning in. I find that my meaning, my existence as an artist, comes from my surroundings and my memories. Memories that are both mine and others that deserve to be heard. I find my art is designed to give stories and places a way to be more than just a building to be walked past, a story that is lost to time. Through brush strokes and presentation, my art makes me an artist, a show of life, memory, and story through painting.
Kayliegh Begay
Artist Bio
Kayliegh Begay (Navajo) is from Iyanbito, New Mexico. She is a mixed media artist that specializes in printmaking and photography and prints on textiles with hand beaded elements. As a Native American inspired by traditional practices, she uses imagery to tell a story. Her imagery usually consists of self, objects, and landscapes. She incorporates childhood memories and experience of the reservation into her work. Whether it be bold, for example talking about alcohol use, or honoring the beautiful landscape. Begay is currently working on her BFA at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
Artist Statement
As an artist, I use my camera to take photographs of myself, landscapes, and loved ones and incorporate these photographs into my printmaking practice. I use screen printing and relief printmaking to print onto canvas and denim. I incorporate beaded elements and natural dyes to the fabric. For generations, both sides of my family have struggled with alcohol addictions. I have seen what alcohol can do to a person and the side effects. I am responding to this through my current mixed media project called “Our Addictions” that presents the impacts of alcohol abuse and addiction from the Navajo reservation point of view. For this work, I have used self-depictions and older style beer advertisements.
Lillie McQuerry
Artist Bio
Lillie McQuerry is a painter and printmaker from Rio Rancho, New Mexico, whose work centers
on telling narratives through portraiture. She has been practicing art since early childhood in one form or another, and began considering art to be more than just a hobby in high school. As a lifelong introvert and observer, she draws inspiration from personal memories and collected experiences that are realized through her art. Her practice is rooted in painting, but has recently expanded to include printmaking as a secondary medium. The expansion of her artistic practice prompted a shift in her imagery, leading her to explore self-portraiture as a deeper exploration of identity and the complexities of self-representation. Her recent work explores themes of womanhood, autonomy, and the objectification of the female body.
Artist Statement
I’m an artist who is an introvert and observer by nature. I’ve spent a lot of time on the outside, looking in. I hold a collection of memories and experiences, all invisible souvenirs with stories that beg to be visualized. Art is the way I communicate these stories, whether they’re fragments of a personal narrative or anecdotes that aren’t my own. My instinct to translate what I observe into something tangible led me to portraiture; every face, every person is a story in its own right. I’ve always considered myself a portrait artist, and primarily a painter. I’m drawn to the physicality of painting, being able to use my body for something that doesn’t have to be strenuous. I find the process of building up a human face or form and capturing a person’s likeness to be equal parts meditative and challenging. This challenge is the most rewarding aspect of creating art. I believe that’s why I took up printmaking as a secondary medium. Printmaking continuously pushes me out of my comfort zone and away from the arbitrary rules I once set for myself when it came to making art. This shift in my art practice is reflected in my imagery. Learning a new medium helped me appreciate myself and my capabilities, leading to the realization that I may just be worthy of being the subject of my work. I now create self-portraiture, something that has been my focus for a year or so now. I may be an introvert and observer by nature, but I’ve moved past looking in from the outside. I have my own stories to tell, and I hope people will observe them with care.
Lilyan Link Rivera
Artist Bio
Artist Statement
My work in this exhibition contemplates the quiet collapse of an era- the moment when familiarity dissolves, and nostalgia lingers like an afterimage. Through photography, I investigate how endings shape perception and how the act of remembering becomes a form of reimagining. Each image functions as both document and poem, tracing the tension between preservation and release. This project marks a threshold in my practice, reflecting on closure not as finality but as transition. The work exists in this space between what has been achieved and what remains uncertain. It's meditation on renewal, authorship, and the persistence of longing. Within the stillness, Big Sleep considers how transformation often arrives disguised as rest, and how the future begins quietly where the past falls away. Each piece holds its breath at the edge of change, steady as the image softens, waiting for the next shape to appear.
Marisol Velazquez
Artist Bio
Marisol Velazquez is a photographic artist, she works as a Portrait and Landscape photographer. She was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Marisol comes from a large family and often incorporates her family into her creative work. Working with digital and film photography, she explores the quiet moments that define someone's life. Her photographs often explore how love, distance and time can shape the subtle connections between people, place and emotion. Marisol works towards blending honest documentation with poetic observation.
Artist Statement
The way I see it, photography is a subjective form of art. We are all different from each other and therefore we will all interpret art differently. I feel as though the longer I study photography, the less subjective it becomes, and that is just so unfortunate…Photography should serve as a way to free the mind from everyday troubles. It should help both the photographers and viewers to think about simple joys like the way the sunlight bleeds through trees or how beautiful a smile can be when it’s worn by someone you love. My favorite photographs aren’t the ones that use perfect technique or create a straightforward objective narrative, but the ones that hold memories of family, love and genuine joy.
Nova Stewart
Artist Bio
Nova Stewart is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in street style art, sculpture, and photography. Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she was not raised in an artist family and found her passion for art late into college. AWorking as a transgender, nonbinary artist, she focuses on her relationship with gender and the struggles of queer folx in society. Her works are often monumental in scope: full walls, murals, massive sculpture, and large-scale prints make up the main body of her work.
Artist Statement
I am not now who I once was. I was not born an artist, just as I was not born a girl. I fought tooth and nail to become who I might appear to the world as now. From my humble beginnings working in digital photography in my first art course, my practice has grown exponentially. My work focuses on important issues to me and those close to me. In the modern day, queer folds are more in danger than in recent memory. Just as queerness became visible and vivid in the public eye, hordes of hate and darkness rose to snuff us out. Nuclear shadows is possibly my largest piece yet, a massive concrete wall with a mural. Centering discussions around queer and trans erasure in the modern day, the shadow I cast is immutably queer, fighting, against the oppressive darkness of today's society.
Perla J. Munoz
Artist Bio
Perla Jael Muñoz is a Mexican American painter and drawer specializing in oils, oil pastels and watercolors. Their subjects range from landscapes, architecture, portraiture and abstraction using their own personal memories and identity as a Chicana artist as their core inspiration. However, their main focus is their color palette. Each color scheme aims to enhance its imagery and luminosity. Muñoz is currently working on their BFA in the University of New Mexico.
Artist Statement
My work embodies the experiences of immigrants in the 21st Century and seeks to capture the contemporary lives of immigrants in America through oil paintings. As a Chicana artist raised by a single mother from Mexico, it felt necessary to depict the lives of Latin Americans. I look not towards one specific race, but explore the different ethnicities that are currently being suppressed. While it can be difficult to document every individual's wide-ranging struggles and experiences, my work focuses on politics, traditions, and religion. As a form of protest, I paint the everyday lives of contemporary immigrants
Pyiere Charrette
Artist Bio
Artist Statement
Truchell Calabaza
Artist Bio
Truchell is a Pueblo Native American artist from Santo Domingo Pueblo (Kewa), New Mexico. Her multidisciplinary practice blurs the boundaries between photography, sculpture, and sensory experience. Working with materials such as black and white film, digital images, cyanotypes, anthotypes, paint, fabric, string, wood, and cardboard. She creates interactive works that invite viewers to engage beyond sight, to touch, feel, and experience art though multiple senses.
Her work explores themes of family, tradition, culture, and experimentation, reflecting the living connection between her Pueblo heritage and contemporary artmaking. Refusing to be limited by a single style. Truchell continuously redefines what photography can be. Transforming it into an experience that moves, breathes, and invites participation.
Artist Statement
As a Pueblo Native American artist from Santo Domingo Pueblo (Kewa), New Mexico. My photography expands beyond the frame. The piece becomes an invitation to experience, to sense, and to feel. I create work that engages all senses: looking, seeing, hearing, and sometimes even smelling and tasting. My approach is deeply experimental, blending black and white film, digital images, cyanotypes, anthotypes, mixed media, and installation while also adding tactile materials such as paint, fabric, string, wood, and cardboard. I’m not set to a single style of photography. My work exists in constant motion shifting between materials and methods of framing to find new ways of seeing and feeling. Each piece of mine challenges traditional definitions of photography. By transforming the act of viewing into an intimate and interactive experience. My photography encourages audiences to lean into their curiosity to follow their intrusive thoughts, to touch, to feel, to connect. Rooted in my family, tradition, and Pueblo culture, my work redefines how photography can live in the world. Not just as an image but as something more, something that moves, breathes, and invites participation.
Zee Paul
Artist Bio
Artist Statement
I am a visual artist who was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and currently resides in the South Valley of the city. I’m on track to completing my Bachelor’s of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. I draw creativity from my experiences as a local connected to the Middle Rio Grande valley and its diverse riparian ecosystem, as well as from being a non neurotypical white queer woman with past and present difficulties in mental and physical health. I value sustainability, land stewardship, local community, anti-consumerism, anti-facism, trades and maturity. My artwork is also influenced by nature, folklore, mythology, religion, memes, current affairs, movies, and human rights issues. I find inspiration in themes of absurdism, philosophy, magical realism, suffering, psychedelia, and surrealism. For three-dimensional artworks, I utilize skills in woodworking, ceramics, sculpture, small scale casting and small metal construction. I also use acrylic paint, charcoal, pencil, pen and ink,relief carving and etching. I study leather work, silk screen printing, macrame and other cord works and welding. I plan to utilize my university education to create a local small business as a platform for displaying and selling my developing artwork. I envision my business becoming a legacy of reclaiming trade skills mastery in art practices.