Curator:
Erina Duganne
Abigail Satinsky

Organized by the Tufts University Art Galleries and curated by Erina Duganne, Professor of Art History, Texas State University, and Abigail Satinsky, Curator & Head of Public Engagement, Tufts University Art Galleries.

Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities is an in-depth examination of the formative 1980s activist campaign Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America. The exhibition features more than 100 artists, including original participants and contemporary artists in conversation with the campaign.

The Artists Call campaign, started by a transnational group of artists in New York City in 1984, used public demonstrations, film, art exhibitions, mail art, performances, and poetry readings to protest U.S. military interventions in Central America. All told, more than 1,100 artists took part; together, their efforts represented a political statement against the longstanding history of U.S. intervention in Central America.

Art for the Future offers a robust chronicle of the campaign and its intersection with art and activism today. The exhibition includes major works by Josely Carvalho, Jimmie Durham, Dona Ann McAdams, Ana Mendieta, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Martha Rosler, Juan Sánchez, Nancy Spero, Zarina, and many others. The exhibition also features ephemeral materials from the personal archives of organizers Lucy Lippard and Doug Ashford. Art for the Future asks: What does meaningful solidarity look like when people come from different backgrounds, privileges, and experiences? Can art-making itself be a kind of solidarity? How have notions and practices of solidarity evolved with the spread of the internet? How can solidarity networks from the past inform our practices today?

Art for the Future highlights original works, including Hans Haacke’s U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983, which recreates an isolation chamber used by U.S. troops to detain prisoners at the Point Salines airport following the U.S. invasion of Grenada. The exhibition also features Reconstruction Codex (1984) by Sabra Moore and 19 collaborators, including Emma Amos, Camille Billops, Virginia Jaramillo, Nancy Spero, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, among others. This work pays homage to the ancient Indigenous cultures of Latin America by reconstructing a Mayan codex.

The exhibition also presents works by contemporary artists in conversation with Artists Call, including Carlos Motta’s wall-sized installation from his ongoing series, Brief History of US Interventions in Latin America Since 1946. Beatriz Cortez’s 1984: Space-Time Capsule collapses different artistic and political trajectories to examine ideas of resilience, solidarity, and creative freedom. Naeem Mohaiemen’s film Wooster Street thinks through community via Artists Call participants Judy Blum, Krishna Reddy, and Zarina. Benvenuto Chavajay’s photo installation Doroteo Guamuche reclaims the Indigenous identity of lauded Guatemalan long-distance runner Doroteo Guamuche Flores.

All exhibition and catalog text for Art for the Future is fully bilingual in Spanish and English. The illustrated catalog surveys Artists Call’s mobilization of writers, artists, activists, and art organizations and looks at the campaign’s legacy today. It features essays by artists and the exhibition curators as well as interviews with Artists Call organizers. UNM Associate Professor of Art History, Kency Cornejo, contributes an essay titled, “Writing Art Histories from Below: A Decolonial Guanaca-Hood Perspective.” The catalog places Artists Call within a wider visual, historical, and sociopolitical context and fills a gap in the examination of political and aesthetic actions across the Americas, both then and now. Catalogs will be available for purchase during the run of the exhibition.

Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities is organized by the Tufts University Art Galleries and curated by Erina Duganne, Professor of Art History, Texas State University, and Abigail Satinsky, Curator & Head of Public Engagement, Tufts University Art Galleries.

Major support for the exhibition and catalogue was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA).

Raymond Jonson Gallery

The UNM Art Museum presents the University of New Mexico Department of Art’s 29th Annual Juried Graduate Exhibition. The exhibition, titled Not Yet and Yet, features the work of twelve artists currently enrolled in the MFA Program and working in all mediums – painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, sound/installation, and video.

The artists’ works presented here speak to the ideas of our time through representations of identity, perceptions of self, attraction and repulsion, consideration of natural phenomena, and comfort or lack thereof, with humor and heart swells throughout. As a whole, there is a palpable feeling that, amidst the fits and starts, the hammer and the dance, something of promise could be on the horizon.

-Nancy Zastudil, Guest Curator

• Featured Artists
• Alyssa Eble
• Eleonora Edreva
• Ranran Fan
• Karina Faulstich
• Juana Estrada Hernandez
• Daniel Hojnacki
• Ashley Miller
• Jenny Irene Miller
• Sofía Méndez Subieta
• Shelby Roberts
• Anna Rotty
• Christopher Schuldt
• Marlene Tafoya
• Corn Wagon Thunder

Alexandria Zuniga de Dóchas
Guest Curator

Nancy Zastudil is an independent editor, writer, and curator working toward equitable representation in and access to the arts. From 2018 to 2021, Zastudil was gallery director at Tamarind Institute where she curated exhibitions around themes of identity, belonging, and narrative. Previously, she was administrative director of Frederick Hammersley Foundation, owner of Central Features Contemporary Art, and associate director of the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston. She edits artist books and exhibition catalogs, and she contributes to Arts and Culture Texas, Edible New Mexico, Hyperallergic, Southwest Contemporary, among others. She regularly participates in artist award juries and grant proposal reviews, most recently for the Mid-America Arts Alliance, Fleishhacker Foundation, Creative Capital, and Harpo Foundation. Zastudil received her MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts in 2007 and her BFA in Painting and Drawing from The Ohio State University in 2001.

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