ALBUQUERQUE — Where is the artist’s voice in the museum? This question, posed during an artist roundtable on opening weekend of the exhibition Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, is answered in part by the exhibition itself.
For the past 10 years, Broken Boxes Podcast has been transmitting ideas between artists thanks to its creator, Ginger Dunnill, who also co-curated Broken Boxes. The show features large-scale artworks, installations, videos, and performances by 23 artists — many of whom are friends with each other and with Dunnill. All have contributed to the podcast, which covers topics such as mental and physical health, Indigenous sovereignty, settler colonialism, migration, and navigating the commercial art market. Directional speakers located throughout the exhibition space play excerpts of podcast episodes, creating an ambient soundtrack for the show; visitors can listen while in proximity to works by the artists whose voices they are hearing.
One of those voices is that of Autumn Chacon, a Diné and Chicana sound artist and activist. Her installation, “Between Our Mother’s Voice and Our Father’s Ear” (2016), is a durational, unlicensed radio broadcast that incorporates sounds from the exhibition mixed with field recordings and excerpts from the Broken Boxes Podcast. Chacon, who uses sound art as a form of resistance, turned her focus to breaking down ownership and forced regulations after working in licensed broadcasting. In Broken Boxes, some of her ideas about the power of occupying airwaves — for example, the fact that speech is a vibration that cannot be undone — are made visible by a feather microphone with its cable running the length of a central gallery wall in a wave pattern.
Sound as a catalyst for personal and collective transformation makes an appearance in other works as well, including Marie Watt’s grouping of tangible, touchable jingle clouds, and Guadalupe Maravilla’s mixed media sculpture “Disease Thrower #17” (2021), set against the backdrop of the artist’s “Tripa Chuca (mural)” (2024). The installation comprises three towering figurative metal rod sculptures with hexagonal upper and lower portions that frame gongs, accented with fibrous materials like wood, cotton, and loofah. Maravilla’s practice, rooted in activism and healing, is informed by his experiences with stage III colon cancer and references his experiences migrating from El Salvador to the US as a child because of the Salvadoran Civil War. The artist ritually retraced that route, gathering objects that he incorporated into “Disease Thrower #17,” which he activates as healing portals during sound bath ceremonies.
Additional sites of vocalized or otherwise audible transformation are present in Black Belt Eagle Scout’s music videos “Spaces” (2023) and “My Blood Runs Through this Land” (2023), and Joy Harjo’s short film “A Map to the Next World” (2023). The generative potential of connection to the land and material changes are evident in Christine Sandoval’s “Ignition Pattern” drawings, made from fire, water, soot, and fiber, and in Ryan Dennis’s Ma’s House (2020), for which the artist transformed his family home into a communal art space.
Since seeing the show, I’ve been thinking especially about two works. In “Original Fragment of the Lost Girls Treasure Map” (2024), Amaryllis R. Flowers depicts a sugary sweet, pastel-colored topographical map replete with mountains, fields, and streams, populated with processions of disembodied legs and high-heeled feet making their way through glittered puffy paint, gemstones, and other craft materials. Good Girl Swamps, a murky body of water just a stone’s throw from Behavior Islands, lies sandwiched between the Astral Plane and Shadowlands, and surrounded by Unchartered Waters, Fringes of (Inner) Hell, Princess Portal, and Foundation of Proof. I listened to the projected recording of Flowers discuss the relationship between fantasy and trauma in her work, and describe a time in her life when art was no longer her anchor but rather her terror. She had endured a psychotic break induced by, among other things, graduating from Yale and the mounting pressures and turbulence of being a “successful” artist following her graduation from Yale’s prominent MFA program. “Acts of imagination under unbearable living conditions help us to evolve,” she says.
Transgender artist Cassils alludes to such conditions in their work, “The Resilience of the 20%” (2016), as well. The title points to an increase of 20% in the murder rate of trans people worldwide in 2012 from previous years. Installed in Broken Boxes is a nearly two ton bronze cast of the clay slab that the artist, who incorporates bodybuilding into their practice, bashed during their performance “Becoming an Image” (not part of the show).
Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue amplifies artists’ voices in ways that are at odds with the narratives propagated by much of the mainstream art world. Here, artists share stories about their lives and experiences instead of relying solely on institutional didactics to “explain” what their work is about; they ask for help and encourage others to do the same; they engage in slow looking and listening; they push back, create change, and break free. They do indeed speak truth to power. Actions like these and projects like Broken Boxes are vital, and not just in a time when our constitutional rights and fundamental freedoms are on the chopping block. Words have power, and there is still so much more to say.
Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue continues at the Albuquerque Museum (2000 Mountain Road Northwest, Albuquerque, New Mexico) through March 2, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez.
