Learn how the Mud Kin Project is honoring the monsoon season through art

To usher in the start of New Mexico’s monsoon season, the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI) presents a weekend of land- and lightning-themed art by six Indigenous and Latinx artists.

“Mud Kin Project: A Lightning Score” consists of an exhibition, performance, brick-making workshop and a nature hike. It is the brainchild of Tracy Fenix, a Tejana curator with deep ties to the Southwest.

“I was born and raised in El Paso, but my family is from rural West Texas, and I started the Mud Kin Project while I was in grad school (at the University of Southern California), as part of my curatorial thesis in 2021,” Fenix said. “Now it's become a bigger curatorial mapping project to think through the critical policies that are impacting a lot of Native and Latinx folks who live across the borderlands area and who share ancestral lineages and ways of thinking, in terms of sharing different forms of ecological remediation and adobe architectural and artistic practices.”

The weekend kicks off Friday, June 13, with “Echoes between Earth and Sky,” a sound-based performance by Eva Aguila and Star Feliz, incorporating field recordings from Michoacan lands, along with voice, bells and live soundscapes. The sounds will emanate from large, glowing resin sculptures.

“They’re thinking about the echoes of time and how we can stay attuned to the ways in which our ancestral spirits guide us,” Feliz said.

Margarita Paz-Pedro will present a sculptural installation made from adobe bricks, embedded with ceramics and overlaid with images of Chaco Canyon. On Saturday, June 14, Paz-Pedro will lead a brick-making workshop, using locally sourced mud.

“The bricks that are being built will be used for a new public art installation Margarita is creating next year along the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico,” Fenix said.

Another installation, by Marcus Zuniga, includes yucca plants and a large, convex mirror. The work references the energy-gathering properties of metal, as well as the history of mining in Zuniga’s ancestral homelands of the Gila in New Mexico and Guanajuato, Mexico.

Doza Mendoza will present an altar-like participatory installation with animal bones collected from their family’s intergenerational cattle ranch near Santa Fe. Visitors will be invited to engage with the installation using analog cameras.

“The intention with the cattle ranch — and an important part of working with Doza — is their intention to turn the cattle ranch into an ecological artist residency,” Fenix said.

Fenix is inspired by artists like Mendoza, who are bridging the divide between traditional Southwestern cultures and the contemporary art world.

“My grandpa’s from Marfa, (Texas),” Fenix said. “But I had never heard about (artist) Donald Judd until I went to UT Austin. No one from Marfa ever did any outreach to us, and I had no idea any of this (Land Art) was happening until 15 years later.”

Fenix said she felt “completely baffled” to learn that Marfa was an international art destination.

“Mostly, I felt excluded,” she said. “Still to this day, Marfa really caters to high-end artists. I think they’re slowly trying to build a community that’s centered around Brown folks, but there’s a struggle and a tension there.”

With the “Mud Kin” series of curatorial projects, Fenix calls attention to Indigenous and Latinx artists whose work maintains a deeper and more reverent connection to the land than that of many white Land Art practitioners from the 1960s and ’70s.

“We all think about ethics and how we can share knowledge with each other while respecting different tribal forms of creation stories and moving through the land,” Fenix said.

“The title, ‘A Lightning Score,’ comes from a conversation that I had with (filmmaker) Edson Reyes about a film that will be presented in the show,” Fenix said. “We had talked about the way that lightning takes shape, and how it charges you. It's highly intense, and it's also a rhythmic cycle that happens during the monsoon season in New Mexico.”

Fenix also drew parallels between the speed and power of lightning and the urgency demanded by the current political moment.

“Thinking about how lightning shapes the sky in New Mexico during the monsoon season, it's such an urgent and quick act, like a jolt. And right now, because of the presidential administration and how they are targeting us, we need to be swift and urgent in how we act,” Fenix said. “That's why the show is so short, because the intention is for us to move in the space and be present and work through these tensions in a short period of time.”

Fenix hopes the weekend’s events will attract a range of participants, including those from families like hers, who have traditionally felt excluded from contemporary art.

“I think an important part of the show is allowing the audience to engage in the participatory process of co-building and co-relating to the work through skill sharing and storytelling,” Fenix said, “from the performance that happens on Friday to the workshops on Saturday, and then closing it with like a nice forest hike.”

Mud Kin Project honors the monsoon season through art

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