Many Worlds Are Born - How Do We Do History?

The events of 2020 revealed America’s complicated relationship with history. As part of a Curatorial Research Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Ric Kasini Kadour spent 2021 visiting over one hundred historic sites and museums with an eye towards how history organizations share knowledge with the public and what art organizations can learn from them. In this discussion, Kadour is joined by Rob Martinez, New Mexico State Historian, and three artists from the exhibition, Art Meets History: Many Worlds Are Born, each of whom are picking up the unfinished work of the past and carrying history to the present. Joanna Keane Lopez explores Lópezville as a looking glass into the complexity of Socorro and a larger story about New Mexico. Margarita Paz-Pedro’s (Laguna/ Santa Clara Pueblos) work comments on history, survival, labor, and connectivity of New Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and how they shaped the region. Welcome to Aztlan by Marlena Robbins’ (Diné) invites the community to contribute to the artwork as a way to consider how history is remembered and performed.