Chip Thomas, also known by his street art moniker Jetsonorama, is a physician, public artist, and activist who began practicing medicine in the Navajo Nation in 1987. According to Thomas, "In June of 2009 I started a self-funded, public art project on the Navajo Nation, Western Agency, I called ‘Big.’ I went back through 22 years of negatives and started blowing photographs up larger than life and wheat pasting them onto roadside stands and abandoned buildings. I'm still amazed at the resonance this project has with people on the reservation and amongst travelers passing through. I'm thankful for having found this form of self-expression as a means of relating to the community where I've lived and worked for almost half of my life."

Thomas’ large-scale wheat-pasted photo murals bring together images, memories, emotions, people, and stories deeply rooted in the land, history, and cultural backdrop of the Navajo Nation. Thomas disrupts vast landscapes by activating large structures as canvases for murals that uplift community members as they see themselves and their stories larger than life. The murals have served as vehicles for public health announcements during the COVID-19 pandemic and as sites of collaboration with other artists and activist organizations. The murals also communicate with non-Indigenous viewers, bringing attention to the issues that persist in many tribal nations.

Thomas will activate the Museum’s lobby with his iconic photo murals as Albuquerque Museum’s 2024 Visiting Artist. He is also one of the participating artists in Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue which will be on view beginning fall of 2024.

Albuquerque Museum’s Visiting Artist program is generously funded by the Frederick Hammersley Fund for the Arts at the Albuquerque Community Foundation

About the Albuquerque Museum Visiting Artist Program
Since 2011, the Visiting Artist program at Albuquerque Museum has featured contemporary artists with a connection to New Mexico. The annual program provides an invited artist the opportunity to reimagine and activate the museum’s lobby, which is the first space visitors encounter upon entering the museum. The program includes the display of the artist’s work for one year, public engagement, and artist talks. The program aims to provide a bridge between the artistic practice of the visiting artist and the experience of contemporary art by the public.

The Visiting Artist program considers artists with compelling conceptual creativity. The large-scale space of the museum lobby has inspired several artists to create site-specific installations. Artists, however, are given the freedom to determine how they want to interact with the space.

Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, curated by Ginger Dunnill and Josie Lopez, features large-scale installation, sculpture, video, and a robust programming line-up celebrating the work and ideas of 23 artists who have contributed to Dunnill's Broken Boxes podcast. The exhibition celebrates ten years of the podcast of the same name and amplifies the collective strength of contemporary artists.

Focusing on interviews over the past four years, the exhibition features large-scale installations by renowned artists and includes floating metal “jingle clouds,” a vibrant parade float honoring matriarchs, a colossal wolf forged from community care, brilliant mirrored tapestries honoring lives lost, a monument to Trans rights, and much more. Each of the featured artists engages their own cultural experience and elevates activism within diverse communities.

Broken Boxes—the podcast, the exhibition, and the exhibition catalog—centers around bringing artists together in dialogue with each other. By opening up the conversations across communities, groups, art practices, materials, and shared spaces, Broken Boxes demonstrates how artists are forging new forms of action.

Artists: The exhibition features the following 23 local and international artists, nine of whom are creating new work: Tanya Aguiñiga • Natalie Ball • CASSILS • Autumn Chacon • Raven Chacon • India Sky Davis • Jeremy Dennis • Kate DeCiccio • Amaryllis R. Flowers • Sterlin Harjo • Elisa Harkins • Christine Howard Sandoval • Cannupa Hanska Luger • Tsedaye Makonnen • Guadalupe Maravilla • Laura Ortman • Katherine Paul (Black Belt Eagle Scout) • Joseph M. Pierce • SWOON • Chip Thomas • Marie Watt • Saya Woolfalk • Mario Ybarra Jr.

This exhibition extends beyond the confines of Gallery 1 and activates the lobby, atrium, and permanent collection spaces of the Museum. Chip Thomas’ photographic mural and Raven Chacon’s soundscape and score are on display now and will remain on view through the end of the Broken Boxes exhibition.

About Broken Boxes: Broken Boxes is an artist-run independent broadcasting platform shedding light on narratives of complexity, solidarity, contradiction, and inspiration in the arts. For more information, visit brokenboxespodcast.com

Storm Pattern (2021) is a textile score and eight-channel hyper-directional sound installation by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and artist Raven Chacon (Diné), featuring isolated field recordings of flying drones captured at the 2016 Standing Rock Oceti Sakowin camp. The title of the work refers to a regional style in Navajo weaving in which zigzags and other elements radiate outward from the center. In this score, the patterns show the transmission and broadcast of surveillance and counter-surveillance footage beyond the mountains and waters of Oceti Sakowin. The recorded drones were controlled by police, DAPL security, and by the protesters themselves, including multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota), who was born on the Standing Rock Reservation and is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold.

This work is part of the Albuquerque Museum permanent collection and is also presented as part of Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue, on view beginning September 2024. Chacon and Luger shared a conversation on the podcast that reflected on their time together traveling to Oceti Sakowin camp, the largest of several temporary camps on the northern edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and located on Luger’s ancestral homeland. Both artists supported the water protectors during their resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Raven Chacon Bio
Raven Chacon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The National Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art. The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center. As a member of Postcommodity from 2009 to 2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the two-mile-long land art installation Repellent Fence.

Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital Award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2022), the Pew Fellow-in-Residence (2022), and is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow.

Albuquerque Museum presents Vivarium, Exploring Intersections of Art, Storytelling, and the Resilience of the Living World. It features multiple works by seven distinguished artists: Nathan Budoff, Patrick McGrath Muñíz, Steven J. Yazzie (Diné/Laguna), Eliza Naranjo Morse (Tewa, Kha’p’o Owingeh), Stanley Natchez (Shoshone-Tataviam), Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe Indians of Oklahoma), and Eloy Torrez. The exhibition also includes a selection of works from the Tia Collection including paintings by Nanibah Chacon (Diné/Chicana), Julio Larraz, and more.

By exploring the delicate balance within nature through a variety of visual languages and cultural lenses, Vivarium invites viewers into a vibrant exploration of diverse environments. Latin for "place of life," the title Vivarium encapsulates the convergence of each artist's unique perspective to form a dialogue about how the non-human living world strives to survive even when human constructs threaten its existence.

While the word “vivarium” can also be defined as enclosing, restricting, or otherwise pinning down the non-human world, this exhibition is about flipping the microscope on ourselves. It juxtaposes the natural environment with the unnatural structures, relationships, and confines that humans have built alongside the worlds of animals.

Vivarium not only showcases the talents of the artists but also serves as a catalyst for dialog and action in the face of ecological and societal challenges. It is a vivid reminder of the power of art to inspire change and foster a deeper connection with the world around us.

From multi-plate images to today’s smartphone panoramas, the panoramic format intrigues viewers with its distortion and large-scale views. Straight roads are curved, ponds widen into lakes, and buildings start to bend because the distance between the subject and the camera lens changes as the lens rotates. This makes the photographs look rounded, sometimes taking on a fish-eye quality. “Around We Go” features Cirkut prints, some encompassing a full 360-degree view, from the Albuquerque Museum’s photo archives, on view from March 30-November 17, 2024.

The Albuquerque Museum presents Nuclear Communities of the Southwest on view from March 23, 2024 to September 15, 2024. This exhibition features videos, photographs, and memorabilia from Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories as well as Kirtland Air Force Base. These historical objects are placed in conversation with artists’ responses to New Mexico’s involvement in the development of nuclear technologies. Special attention is paid to the Tularosa Basin downwinders, a community of people unknowingly exposed to the Trinity Test plutonium bomb explosion on July 16, 1945.

Popular culture often celebrates a singular figure, an iconic story, or a heroic ending. Nuclear Communities of New Mexico challenges this narrative by telling the stories of the people who were impacted by and in some cases who had a hand in creating nuclear New Mexico.

Drawing from the museum’s permanent collection, this exhibition presents a definition of nuclear beyond the scientific. The ‘nuclear family’ consists of a mom, dad, and their children in a single-family household. While the ‘nuclear age’ defines a new age in science, it also marks a new era in history. The laboratories successfully promoted the idea of the nuclear community to recruit people for work. Primary sources, like promotional materials and government documents, are included in the exhibition and allow for a deeper look into how communities were created, which communities were ignored, and how communities connected to the fallout of the nuclear world in New Mexico have continued to survive.

“New Mexico has played a significant role in U.S. history with regards to the development of what is now referred to as the nuclear age,” said Andrew Connors, Albuquerque Museum Director. “To be able to tap into our permanent collection and work with affected communities to bring a different dialogue to a part of history that has been in the public eye of late is important to the Museum’s mission.”

New Mexico’s role as the test site and development of the nuclear bomb has been viewed in popular culture through the lens of a few isolated figures and events. The stories and legacies across the state and Southwest region, however, exist in a much broader context. This exhibition raises important questions: How do nuclear institutions impact communities? What stories are told by and for the people connected with the labs? How do artworks reveal the consequences of scientific innovation? Featuring the work of artists like Nina Elder, Luis Jiménez, Patrick Nagatani, and Eric J. García, visitors are invited to engage with a broader view of the nuclear world and the land and people it affects, especially in New Mexico.