Manifestation of experience: Liam Daly's 'In The Arroyo' inspired by grandfather's work

It’s been 13 years since the New Mexico School for the Arts Art Institute was founded.

In that time, the organization has provided access to a rigorous mastery arts and academic high school education for youth with passion and aptitude for the arts, leading to post-secondary learning, careers in the arts, and lives that contribute to society.

NMSA Art Institute’s Interim Visual Arts Chair, Liam Daly, recently completed a master’s degree in art education from Columbia University in New York City.

His thesis, “In the Arroyo,” is on display at the Thaw Visual Arts Gallery at the New Mexico School for the Arts campus at 500 Montezuma Ave. in Santa Fe. It runs through March 10.

“In the Arroyo” is the culmination of a three-year exploration into Daly’s relationship with his grandfather and the world.

As an anthropologist and archaeologist, Daly’s grandfather, Doug Schwartz, spent his life traveling the world studying people, places and things.

After his grandfather died, Daly discovered a film that his grandfather had produced and narrated about his time exploring and excavating sites in the Grand Canyon.

“I was drawn to the ways in which he spoke about his process,” Daly says. “I then began to adopt many of his practices into my own creative process as I explored a space familiar to me. Many of the works in this exhibition are manifestations of this experience. The artifacts, research and ‘information’ provided in the works are the product of the exploration of the mundane and a reflection of my own experience as a child.”

Daly says his work generates conversation between objects and displays by taking the materials used as historically and psychologically literal motifs and by situating objects and imagery into relationship with the viewer’s own methods of understanding.

“Each piece references ways in which I relate to and acknowledge the world and objects around me,” Daly says. “I explore my understandings of control, value systems, identity and memory through a juxtaposition of form, landscape, the found object and mechanisms of understanding. Through the manipulation of different methods of display, the viewer is invited to postulate or deduce their own narratives with both regard to the various articles being presented and their own interactions with the work.”

The Art Institute is a nonprofit, and provides this programming through fundraising, at a budget of over $2 million every year and will serve 341 students during the current school year.

It also supports access to arts education through a residential program which allows students from surrounding rural counties to attend NMSA, and the Community Engagement Program, which brings interactive arts programming to students across the state.