The Transformative Surface is the first group exhibition of its kind at the UNM Art Museum to feature innovative new media, video, and sound works of art by nine faculty artists from the departments of Art & Art History and Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media, and six guest artists: Jim Campbell, Bruce Nauman, Daniel Reeves, Peter Sarkisian, Woody Vasulka and Gail Wight. As a component of the ISEA12 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness symposium, the UNMAM exhibition presents fifteen works that may be classified as ‘the canonical and the new’ in video art and large-scale new media installations. Characterized by the infinite possibilities of transformative surfaces, these works vary from the wholly optical or aural, interactive and malleable, or a combination of the seen, heard and felt, inspired by ancient, natural and urban environments and paradigms, and the body.

UNM Faculty in The Transformative Surface include: Bill Gilbert, Catherine Harris, Szu-Han Ho, Shaurya Kumar, Patrick Manning, R. Lee Montgomery, Andrea Polli, Mary Tsiongas and Claudia X. Valdes.

The exhibition was organized by E. Luanne McKinnon, Michele Penhall and Mary Tsiongas.

Dancing with the Dark, Joan Snyder Prints 1963 – 2010 is the first exhibition about Joan Snyder’s adventurous approach to printmaking, a medium in which she has worked extensively for over forty-five years. Recognized as one of the pioneering voices that championed feminism, Snyder’s woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, and monotypes are an integral part of her powerful art that is motivated by insightful revelations about herself as an artist, motherhood, female sexuality, social injustice, identity and mortality. These themes are often expressed through a personalized vocabulary of symbols that includes flowers, hearts, seedpods, trees and words.

Organized by Marilyn Symmes, director of the Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, this exhibition presents over eighty of Snyder’s rarely seen editioned and uneditioned prints, unique hand-colored monoprints, progressive proofs and variant impressions which range from the earliest landscape and portrait woodcuts, to mid-career prints and recent work through 2010. Symmes has stated that, “Joan’s art is autobiographic and serves as a visual diary. Her prints, like her paintings, explore and expose her anxieties and passions, as well as strongly express her feelings of joy, rage or sorrow. Her background as a painter is evident in her execution of prints, which are full of textured, gestural forms and painterly applications of vivid color.”

Snyder’s work resides in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; and, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. In 2007, she received a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

Location: UNM Art Museum is located in the Center for the Arts on the main campus adjacent to Popejoy Hall
Admission: FREE with suggested $5 donation
Parking: Paid parking available in the Structure accessed from Central and Stanford
Hours: Tues.-Sat. 10:00 am-4:00 pm; Closed Sunday and Monday

Please visit www.unm.edu/~artmuse for more information or call 505.277.4001.