Exhibition breaks boundaries as it unites artists

To mark the podcast’s first decade, Dunnill partnered with the Albuquerque Museum and the museum’s head curator, Josie Lopez, for a group exhibition titled Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue. The show opens Saturday, September 7, and runs until March 2, 2025, and features installations by 23 working artists who participated in the podcast over the past four years.

One of these artists is Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, and Lakota), who is also Dunnill’s life partner, creative best friend, and a regular host on Broken Boxes. The podcast, he says, allowed him to explore the idea of plurality and human connections.

“I was traveling a lot,” Luger says of the early days of Broken Boxes, “and I was meeting artists here and there, but I’m not good at maintaining friendships. And Ginger said, ‘We need to start a podcast, and I’m going to interview the folks you meet, and when you meet cool new people, ask them if they would be interested.’ So doing Broken Boxes helped me cultivate and maintain relationships that my whatever psychology or neurodivergence wouldn’t allow me to, versus my coming and going and traveling and missing the opportunity to do so. So that’s been really nice.”

He adds that the stories and conversations Dunnill collects are “beyond intersectionality and really look at the uniqueness in our cultural experiences, look at where the similarities are, look at where the differences are, but through it all, look at the resilience and the intelligence all of these different people have developed.”

That’s the “secret sauce,” Cannupa says. “The idea that as long as we keep being isolated in our margins and don’t see our collective power, we will continually exist within those margins.”

The partnership between Dunnill and Lopez of the Albuquerque Museum also led to an accompanying book published by the University of New Mexico Press titled Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue (2024), with two introductory essays by Dunnill and Lopez and 23 sections, each dedicated to one of the artists in the exhibition. Those sections include a short introduction by Dunnill about each artist or a short essay by the artist. Each section also contains a short excerpt from a Broken Boxes episode.

Like the book, the exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum is organized by artist. Lopez says that at first, the plan was to set up the works and installations by themes that run through Broken Boxes: narratives of space, expressions of action, systems of belongings, and imagination praxis.

“That process felt a little bit stifling to Ginger,” Lopez says. The co-curators scrapped the idea. “It was a really interesting process for me, because [Dunnill] pushed me out of my curatorial box. As a writer, I always think about my projects starting with a thesis, and that’s how I curate: I create a thesis and each artwork is evidence to prove different elements of the argument.”

Both Dunnill and Lopez agree that displaying the artists’ works by theme would have been contrary to what Broken Boxes stands for and would have added a layer of interpretation that would impose walls, so to speak, on the different pieces.

“I thought there was an opportunity to use the museum, at this moment in history, in this place, as a vessel for what could be possible,” Dunnill says. “My work is always about changing systems from the inside. And Josie knows how to push against things in institutional spaces that can be hard and fast with no reasoning. I’ve never worked in a museum setting or curated a museum show, so I learned a lot from her about the constraints and the way things are done, and that you actually do have to have X, Y, and Z, because the audience is so diverse, and you want to make sure everybody gets it. So it was a big learning curve for me.”

The exhibition breaks down the museum’s own boxes as well: It extends beyond the confines of the main gallery and takes over the lobby, the atrium, and spaces normally occupied by the permanent collection. Sound scores and murals, hanging and monumental art all interact together, with no forced connection between them. “It’s up to each of the viewers to come in and take from it the idea of spirituality, and of land, and of the universal versus specific,” Lopez says.

Pasatiempo spoke with four of the 23 artists in the exhibition and asked them to reflect on a breadth of topics related to their artistic practices. Each conversation is condensed into two questions and answers.

CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER is a Santa Fe-based interdisciplinary artist who creates community-oriented work that deals with gender violence and environmental justice.

What is the role of plurality in forcing social change?

The United States has a myth, and that myth is of rugged individualism. The truth of the story is, we’ve never ever done anything alone in the history of human beings. It’s been done by many, always. And so when you have many working toward a goal from every angle that they have access to, this is how you start to see change, this is how you start to recognize that shift.

Your work is rooted not in righteous anger toward colonizers, but in a deep well of empathy for them. What does that mean?

I think the core of it is sympathy. I’m not 100% sure yet whether or not I can truly empathize [with colonizers], but I can sympathize pretty well. I see a lot of fear and a lot of sadness and a lot of emptiness in them. What I see is a population that’s displaced, that’s removed itself from any notion of belonging to anywhere. And that’s sad to me. The privilege that I have as an Indigenous person in North America is that I belong to this place, even if it doesn’t belong to me.

KATE DECICCIO worked as a therapist in several prisons, including San Quentin in California’s Bay Area, where she offered art classes to incarcerated people. She now uses her artistic practice with formerly incarcerated people in Oakland in her fight for a prison-free future.

You come from a long line of white settlers and grew up on occupied Nipmuc territory, and you acknowledge that openly. How does this play into the idea of accountability?

I think that white people are terrified to stand in responsibility, because what standing in responsibility and what accountability have been, and what we’ve seen, is completely punishment obsessed. But if I stand in accountability from a repair perspective, if I can be quite clear on all the ways that I represent what’s fucked up, what’s broken, then I can participate in repair.

You collaborate with formerly incarcerated people to empower them to rewrite their narratives, and you do so via portraiture. What does this collaboration look like?

The person whose portrait is being taken is completely art directing. We’re talking the whole time about how it is that they want to be represented. How do you want this to feel? Do you want to be serious? Do you want to look really powerful? Are you looking straight into the camera? Are you dreaming about a future? Each person has a lot of decision-making power in the way they’re photographed. They choose which photograph we use as the reference to create the stencil, and then we cut out the stencil together, and then I work with each person to paint their portrait.

CHIP THOMAS, aka jetsonorama, worked for more than three decades as a physician in a small community on the Navajo Nation. He is also a photographer and muralist and the artist behind such projects as The Painted Desert. He now lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

What does activism mean to you? Are you an activist?

There’s a Native anarchist [Klee Benally (Diné)], who passed away in December at the age of 48. He is someone I considered an activist. I collaborated on projects with him to support some of the causes he was advocating for. But I think the term has become kind of a corporate title. You can make art and be an activist, but are you really in the trenches? Are you really in the street advocating for the cause that you’re promoting in your art? I would like to think that, especially with anti-nuclear issues, I walk the talk that appears in my art.

How did your artistic practice fit into your medical practice before you retired? And how is it different now that you no longer practice medicine?

My medical practice and my art practice were really complementary. You can see in my art the love and appreciation and respect that I have for the [Diné] community; that’s the same energy that they [the Diné] would get from me when they saw me as patients. So the question for me now is, How does all that look now that I don’t have the medical piece, informing and complementing the art piece, you know? How do I engage with the community and still advocate? What I miss is the engagement. You know, the day-to-day, face-to-face engagement with the community, and hearing their amazing stories, having invitations to go out and visit people in their homes.

RAVEN CHACON is a performer, installation artist, composer, and collector of sounds (see “Homecoming,” February 23). He won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in music for “Voiceless Mass,” a work he scored for chamber ensemble, pipe organ, and sine tones, and performed inside a working church. He is from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, and lives in Albuquerque.

How do you collect sounds? And what do you do with them?

I listen all the time, and those things that I hear might end up as gestures for instruments. Whether that’s an instrument that I make or an instrument that exists, like a viola or a clarinet. Other times, I work with field recordings. If it’s something that spontaneously presents itself to me, I try to record it on my phone, very simply and quickly. I’m not always necessarily concerned with fidelity either. I’m more concerned with how these sounds might influence a work that I’m making, and whether they end up as content within the work or not remains to be seen every time I do something. But sounds are definitely a constant part of what I do.

You participated in two Broken Boxes episodes. What was that like for you?

Ginger is somebody I highly respect. She’s been part of the New Mexican arts and music community for a long time. So my conversations with her and Cannupa have always been really special, because they’re people I can talk very openly and freely with and share ideas with without the kind of conventions I think that normal interviews can take. They’ve had really insightful questions to me about what it is I do, and I’ve always felt really free to express some of my ideas with them but also with Cannupa’s audience.