The next installment of the permanent collection exhibition series, Hindsight Insight 4.0: Portraits, Landscapes, and Abstraction from The University of New Mexico Art Museum, recently opened to the public. The hybrid project space and exhibition features portraits, landscapes, and abstract artworks from the museum’s collection that complement curricula at the UNM during the Spring 2024 semester.
A reception will be held on Friday, Feb. 23, from 4 - 7 p.m.
Created and curated by UNMAM curator Mary Statzer with UNM professors Megan Jacobs and jessamyn lovell, Hindsight Insight 4.0 is organized into thematic sections that invite continuous participation from both students and the broader community. UNM undergraduate students will be key collaborators through ongoing displays of class projects during the Spring 2024 semester.
Featured artists
Hindsight Insight 4.0 features both regional and internationally renowned artists, including many with strong ties to the University of New Mexico. Highlighted artists include Jess T. Dugan, Basia Irland, Nicola López, Delilah Montoya, Patrick Nagatani, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, William Pope.L, Meridel Rubenstein, Cindy Sherman, Rose B. Simpson, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol, Carla Williams, and Paula Wilson.
About the exhibition
A Sense of Self: Performing Identity for the Camera explores photography’s role in constructing identity and public personas. Instructor lovell, graduate assistant Ellan Luna, and Statzer selected a range of historical and contemporary portraits from the museum’s collection. Throughout the Spring 2024 semester, these works will serve as inspiration for students enrolled in Art Practices II to create artwork about identity, which will be on view in the museum later in the semester.
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.
Students in Jacobs’ class Social Transformation through Art will create a series of altars informed by the works on view. Students will also submit their work for presentation at UNM’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Conference in April.
Visitors are encouraged to make their own contributions to Hindsight Insight 4.0. In A Sense of Self: Performing Identity for the Camera, an in-gallery photography studio invites visitors to make a portrait to be displayed on the museum’s public monitor and website. In Eco-Pulse: Rise and Fall, visitors are asked to post written responses on the gallery’s wall, building a large, collective artwork through the duration of the exhibition.
The themes of Hindsight Insight 4.0 are further explored in the Reading Room, where visitors can browse books selected by collaborators Jacobs, lovell and Statzer, along with copies of Afterlives: Photography, Memory, Archive, a publication by Hindsight Insight 2.0 and 3.0 collaborators Collective Constructs. The space also showcases two class projects by students in Francis Reynolds’ and Anna Rotty’s Fall 2023 course Visualizing Ideas in Photography.
Hindsight Insight 4.0 connects the past, the present, and the potential of the collection by reflecting on the museum’s history while making it relevant to 21st-century learners. Through this ongoing initiative, UNMAM invites the community to actively participate in the development, presentation, and interpretation of the exhibition.
Top image: Sarony & Company, Ada Isaacs Menken, 1866. Albumen print carte de visite. Gift of Joan and Van Deren Coke.