care + curiosity
2023 Confluence MFA Thesis Exchange
Presented by the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque at Santa Fe Art Institute
June 7 - 10, 2023
The studio arts Confluence concentration at the University of New Mexico is a low-residency field-based program of study in interdisciplinary arts and regenerative culture. As members of Cohort 6, we have had the honor to receive place-based knowledge from artisans and distinguished practitioners in New Mexico, New York, Connecticut, and Oaxaca. The practices of our cohort incorporate dance, walking/wandering, cartography, geology, alchemy, community engaged arts, teaching, and healing. We have developed unique methodologies for creating art in thoughtful, playful, collaborative, generous and embedded ways centered on the ethics of care and mutually affective engagement with the communities and ecosystems surrounding us. This exhibition marks a culmination, but also initiates a continuation and expansion of our work into the future.
curator’s statement
Erin Elder
26 months ago, seven people began a journey. Scattered across the United States and amidst a global pandemic, this group of artists committed to the pursuit of knowledge and creativity through many unknowns play ahead. Together they formed the sixth cohort in a low-residency MFA program which was, at that time, based at a university in New England. The low-residency format allows students to get an education while tending to families, jobs, burgeoning careers, and their home communities. Meeting twice a year for immersive in-person learning, the program’s field-based structure facilitates practice in interdisciplinary arts and exposure to regenerative cultures. This program is designed to travel, migrate, wander, and meet with the unexpected.
Over course of their journey, the cohort of seven converged in different hotels: New York, Connecticut, Oaxaca, New Mexico and, of course, online. Along the way, their path was altered by forces large and small. COVID surged. The climate continually changed. And then the program moved to a new institutional home at University of New Mexico where it is now a concentration within the traditional on-site MFA program. With resilience and adaptation at the conceptual core of the newly renamed “Confluence” program, all involved were forced to experience those lessons in real time. Meanwhile, the seven paths braided together and apart; they forked and meandered. Eventually their distinct tributaries flowed together and pooled for a moment in this time and place.
It is a great honor to witness these seven streams of creativity that together comprise the first graduates of the new Confluence MFA concentration at the University of New Mexico.
The cohort has traveled through unexpected transitions, twists, and turns to be here now, in the days before summer, in a place called O’ghe P’oghe or White Shell Water Place or Santa Fe. To this place hey bring the relics of their unique practices – objects, images, videos, and sounds – these relics that are inherently out of place. This is because the seven come from places that are dear to them, places they steward and study through creative acts of care. One lies her body on the banks of her native river. One weaves willows to heal a neighbor’s pain. One brings soft, gentle awareness to the space of illness. Most collect objects that carry meaning with them. Most work with earth. All walk. All acknowledge. All look and listen and learn with their bodies.
This confluence of artworks and gestures, collections and methods, perspectives and embodiment is borne out of unique circumstances and are the products of unique individuals. They communicate carefully cultivated methods for survival, healing, and witnessing fleeting beauty. And together, they express and ethos of care and curiosity that is honest, tested, and immeasurably impactful. They invite nature. They instill ritual. They map with intuition. Invoking deep time and surrendering to material, they allow things to happen simply, wondrously. For me, these collective outcomes are much more than artworks or diplomas, because they are evidence of a quiet, incremental, and durable hope. Despite their inevitable dispersal into future unknowns, this confluence of creative pathways feels courageously, inspiringly, like a way forward.
-Erin Elder, Guest Curator
Confluence wishes to thank the faculty members of University of New Mexico, Department of Art: Studio, Education, Theater & Dance, Architecture, and History for their support, as well as the staff of SFAI for hosting this exhibition. Special thanks to Confluence Co-Directors Carol Padberg and Mary Mattingly.
