The UNM Tamarind Institute is collaborating with the City of Albuquerque to create opportunities for several local artists. Five artists have been selected to create lithographs through the project: Eric Garcia, Szu-Han Ho, Gabriela Hernandez, Jane Lackey, and Zahra Marwan.
The plans for this project began well before the pandemic hit. Inspired by the momentum of the City’s initiative Tipping Points for Creatives, Tamarind’s project is providing an opportunity for artists who are poised to benefit from expanding their practice to include collaborative printmaking, specifically at Tamarind Institute.
For many artists, the opportunity to collaborate with Tamarind’s highly skilled printers yields new thinking about their creative practice and builds new international audiences for their work, essentially tipping local professional artists into the next phase of their career and into new markets.
Each artist will participate in a two-week workshop residency to make one lithograph in collaboration with Tamarind student printers, with the supervision and guidance of Tamarind Master Printer and education director Brandon Gunn. The resulting portfolio of five prints, will become part of the City of Albuquerque Public Art Collection, Tamarind’s own in-house archive, and the formal Tamarind Archive, housed at The University of New Mexico Art Museum. Remaining portfolios will be exhibited in Tamarind’s gallery, and promoted widely through Tamarind’s online presence.
Tipping Points five artists:
Eric J. Garcia blends history, contemporary themes and a graphic style to create politically charged art that reaches beyond aesthetics. Using installations, murals, hand printed posters and his controversial political cartoons, he aims to challenge his viewers to question sources of power and the whitewashing of history. Born and raised in Burque's South Valley, Garcia received his BFA with a minor in Chicano studies from the University of New Mexico, then went on to receive his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a core member of the printmaking collective, Instituto Gráfico de Chicago and a new member of the Justseeds Cooperative.
Gaby Hernández (they) is a queer non-binary immigrant artist and community organizer from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico who migrated to the United States at the age of 7. Their passion for social justice is rooted in their own and their communities’ experiences navigating systemic barriers in healthcare access, immigration status, and economic disparities. As an artist and community organizer, they aim to use art to shift culture and build community.
Szu-Han Ho’s work in performance, sound, and installation explores the relationship between bodies and sites of memory. She often works collaboratively, through collective action, structured improvisation, and group composition. Recent projects include Migrant Songs, a choral performance art piece incorporating stories and songs of human and nonhuman migration; Border to Baghdad, an exchange between artists from the US-Mexico border and Baghdad, Iraq; and Shelter in Place, a sculptural installation and performance inspired by her family’s history in Taiwan. Szu-Han has lived in Albuquerque for 10 years and has had a deep connection through family ties in New Mexico for much longer. She is currently an associate professor in Art & Ecology in the Department of Art at UNM.
Jane Lackey’s works on paper map intersecting lines and shapes that converge to articulate topographies of sequenced, frenetic relationships. These drawings reveal hidden forces of human nature that are felt and rendered through material sensations, marks and patterns. Informed by her life-long affinity to cloth textiles and the interlacement of threads, her drawings and installations investigate the connective tissue of human communication. Lackey has lived in Santa Fe, NM since 2009. Her works on paper and installations have been included in solo and group exhibitions at 516 ARTS and Central Features in Albuquerque and at Center for Contemporary Art and New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. Her artworks have been shown extensively throughout the United States and abroad. Numerous artist grants and residencies have supported her art projects including the Japan-US Friendship Commission/ National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship in 2011. Lackey’s work is in the permanent collections of The Detroit Art Institute, Cranbrook Art Museum, The Wellcome Trust Collection (London), Kent State University’s James A Michener Collection among other public and private collections. Lackey was Artist-in-Residence, Head of Fiber at Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1997-2007 and was Contributing Faculty at Santa Fe University of Art and Design, 2011-2017.
Zahra Marwan grew up in two deserts which vary drastically and have many similarities in culture. One close to the sea, the other close to the mountains. She studied the visual arts in France, and continues various pursuits to further educate herself. She currently lives in the Barelas neighborhood of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and works in her studio at the Harwood Art Center, where she incorporates Kuwaiti tendencies into her daily life. She has so many projects to feel proud of including creating work for the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the National Institute of Flamenco Arts, and being part of the City of Albuquerque and Bernalillo County Public Art Collections.
Tamarind Institute is an internationally recognized fine art lithography workshop affiliated with the College of Fine Arts at The University of New Mexico. Tamarind is dedicated to the preservation and advancement of lithography through education, research, exhibitions, and artist residencies, and is credited with introducing collaborative printmaking among contemporary artists around the world. Tamarind frequently sponsors programs with diverse populations, locally and internationally, benefitting University, Albuquerque, and New Mexico constituencies. For more information, call 505-277-3901, or email.