Redefining a narrative: 'Into the Hourglass' at the NHCC takes a look at the importance of paño arte

Eric Christo Martinez built a body of art work in prison.

During his time creating, it evolved from paño arte to fine art.

“I started studying the fine arts and built a body of work of everything from your typical prisoner art to stuff you would see in a museum,” Martinez says. “That was really my vision, even before getting out, was taking prison art into different mediums. I wanted to help take those stories from prison and present them in a way that is digestible for an audience.”

Martinez is one of many artists featured in “Into the Hourglass: Paño Arte from the Rudy Padilla Collection,” which is open at the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum.

The exhibit runs through April 14, 2024.

“ ‘Into the Hourglass’ offers an opportunity to not only celebrate the incredible life and work of Rudy Padilla, but also to shine a light on an art form that’s often misunderstood,” says Jadira Gurulé, NHCC Visual Arts Program manager. “We’re also thrilled to announce that this will be a traveling exhibition, giving New Mexicans a chance to view the exhibition before its national tour begins.”

Paño arte is an art form that dates to the 1940s, when prisoners began decorating handkerchiefs and other cloth items as a way of communicating with the outside world.

“Into the Hourglass” features more than 100 paños or pañuelos (Spanish for cloth or handkerchief) amassed by the late collector and community advocate, Rudy Padilla, as well as artworks by New Mexican artists whose work has been influenced by the style and visual vocabulary of paño arte.

Redefining a narrative: 'Into the Hourglass' at the NHCC takes a look at importance of paño arte

The Rudy Padilla Paño Collection – the largest public collection of its kind in the United States – was acquired by the NHCC in 2019.

The artworks and archive are significant resources for understanding and celebrating an important form of artistic and cultural expression created by incarcerated (and formerly incarcerated) artists from Chicano and Latino communities across the Southwestern U.S.

“Originally, we started with a goal of 150 paños of about 300, which was a challenge,” Gurulé says. “We did that by selecting and voting on items. We had a lot of discussions on how to cut things down.”

Assisting Gurulé on the team is Rebecca Gomez, the NHCC curator, whose job it was since she was hired in 2022 to curate the exhibit.

“This is an archive that really advances Chicano art history,” Gomez says. “It is also an important art form in Chicano art history. It’s not been well documented until now.”

Gurulé says the United States has one of the highest number of prisons in the world, and incarceration is deeply rooted into our world.

“It’s an opportunity for us to think about that and the impact on Hispanic/Latino/Chicano communities,” Gurulé says. “To try and see the reason why this artwork is so significant in Chicano art. This is an opportunity to look at something that hasn’t particularly been well documented at times and has also been really stigmatized. These artists have been making Chicano art into American art for a really long time.”

Gomez says in addition to celebrating paños as an art form and the contributions of incarcerated artists to the broader fields of Chicano and American art, “Into the Hourglass” also examines the role that incarceration plays in contemporary American society.

Many of the paños contain political messages about inequities built into the criminal justice system, oppression and cycles of poverty.

“For me, it was really more important to focus on the collection and the symbolism behind the hourglass and how important it was to Rudy,” Gomez says. “We really didn’t want to continue the stigma of prison art.”

NHCC educators will collaborate with local juvenile detention centers, and the center is planning a community symposium in early 2024 with New Mexico organizations that do work around incarceration.