Animas Perdidas, Fort Lewis College
Posted November 17, 2011 by dylanminer in Events
Animas Perdidas
Art Gallery at Fort Lewis College
Durango, Colorado
Through the end of November
A few weeks ago I did a week long residency as a Visiting Artist at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Fort Lewis College was once a boarding school for Native kids, so the college offers ALL Native students a tuition waiver. This is super rad (something that hypothetically ALL public colleges and universities in Michigan also honor). As such, over twenty percent of the Fort Lewis student body is Indigenous. While in Durango, I worked with fifteen university students, both Native and non-Native. I also spent an afternoon with high school students in Ignacio, the community where kids from the Southern Ute reservation go to school.
Overall, everyone in Durango was amazing, making me feel at home. One student even hooked me up with a bike so I could commute from my hotel room in downtown Durango to the campus on top of a mesa (thanks, Brit). Needless to say, my Michigan lungs were burning before I even reached the precipice. Since I spent my time building lowrider bikes, it seemed to make sense that I would commute via bike and not consumer fossil fuels. I was shocked at how much of a bike city Durango is!!
The exhibition, titled Animas Perdidas, evoked the history and ecology of the Animas River (Río de las Animas Perdidas or the River of Lost Souls) as a way to thnk about a more just and sustainable future, particularly in the intermountain West. From this starting point, I created a site-specific installation for the gallery, paying particular attention to the materials being used. Focusing on issues of transportation, sustainability, land tenure, and the animas perdidas of history, the exhibition incorporates wall painting, cut fabric, hand-printed pennants, video and manipulated slide projections, water and coal, bicycles, and the art of social engagement.
In addition to the site-specificity of the exhibition, an important aspect of this project was the ongoing collaboration with Fort Lewis College students in which we built three unique lowrider bicycles based on local animas. Created over the course of five intense days, the bicycles symbolize important historical episodes and relate thematically to the gallery installation as a whole. One bike recalls the Western Federation of Miners, a radical early twentieth-century labor union known for their involvement in the Cripple Creek Strike. A second bicycle investigates the activities of las Gorras Blancas, a late-nineteenth century clandestine organization which fought to maintain communal control of lands for Mexican communities in Northern New Mexico. The final bike serves as a memorial for Norman and Shirley Begay, Ute and Navajo anti-nuclear disposal activists who were killed in a mysterious automobile accident in 1998. Overall, Animas Perdidas explores the relationship between aesthetics, collaboration, and the potential for art to enable new ways of being in the world.
Durango Telegraph Story on the Project
Durango Herald Photos of the Project
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