Harwood Art Center
09.20.23 – 10.26.23
We Are. Here Together. adapted Maestas’ short film, Yucca goes to group into a richly collaborative exhibition incorporating sculpture, poetry, performance, workshops, costume design, and new media. Mounted as part of the Art & Social Justice Residency, We Are. Here Together. included exhibitions in two gallery spaces, as well as a live performance.
Gallery 1 – We Are.
This gallery installation immerses visitors in a surreal world of dreaming hybrid plant people. Created in collaboration with fellow QTBIPOC New Mexico artists Hank Cooper, Pico del Hierro Villa, mk, and Gabriel Maestas, the uncanny cast discusses their lived experiences, from joys to grief and everything in between. Voiced by tonal sound developed by Ryan Parker, each yucca’s narrative is “translated” on LED message boards.
Gallery 2 – Here Together.
during a class on local ecology and art-making using found and recycled materials, myself and a group of 2nd and 3rd graders built large-scale, whimsical, yucca-inspired sculptures emphasizing the intimacy and creative generativity of co-presence, and how truly special it is to be alive in space together. These structures, reconfigured, appeared in the final exhibition alongside documentation of the class and some of the questions students considered during their build process.
We Are. Here Together. live!
Co-performed by fellow QTBIPOC artists Hank Cooper, Pico del Hierro Villa, mk, and Gabriel Maestas, the exhibition pieces transformed into costumes through which the cast dreamed, conversed, and voiced their lived experiences to tonal sound developed by Ryan Parker. Through active inhabitation, these artworks were intended to naturalize queer experiences not only in the broader spectrum of living beings, but in educational and youth spaces in particular.
rica maestas 