March 23 - May 26, 2023
From the Rubin Center:
“The Rubin Center announces an exhibition that documents and explores the artistic and collaborative processes behind the multi-year community-engaged performance, Experiencing the Bosque, under the artistic direction of Sandra Paola López Ramirez.
Opening to coincide with World Water Week at The University of Texas at El Paso, Here, And the Wind documents the process behind Experiencing the Bosque, a performance made in collaboration with the Center for Environmental Resource Management at the Rio Bosque Wetlands Park in November 2022. The exhibition is on view from March 23 through May 26, 2023, with an opening reception on March 23 from 5-7:30 pm.
For Experiencing the Bosque, more than 40 dancers engaged with various sites at Rio Bosque, presenting choreographies developed from more than a year of public programs, workshops, and community-engaged practices. The exhibition documents the process of community engagement in the creation of the performance, considering the intersections between land, movement, research, and conservation, and how artists develop, research, and theorize collaborative creative processes.
“The Experiencing the Bosque project highlights the potential of the arts to engage diverse audiences in the exploration of critical environmental topics,” says Rubin Center Director Kerry Doyle. “Sandra Paola López Ramirez has worked with interdisciplinary teams of artists, activists, educators and students to explore the unique ecosystem of the bosque, engaging both hearts and minds in the process.”
Here, And the Wind also includes the world premiere of a documentary film about the project, as well as photographs, written texts and drawings from workshop participants, wearable sculptures produced by students under the supervision of UTEP Metals professor Jess Tolbert; a sound installation by UTEP music faculty Chris Reyman and his students; maps, and other forms of visual information related to the park. Finally, in line with the collaborative engagement across all facets of Experiencing the Bosque, Here, And the Wind invites visitors to move through the space in dialogue with the choreographies of the performance: visitors will be offered prompts and scores for their own experiences of movement in dialogue with the landscapes around us.
This exhibition offers an innovative curatorial approach to making visible the creative process of research. Centered at a leading Hispanic-serving research university, the exhibition presents the ways in which artist-centered research practices engage body, environment, and community, in dialogue with academics, performers, activists, and environmentalists. “To make artistic research and process visible and accessible to our many communities is an important stance to take, as a museum of contemporary art,” says Rubin Center Curator Laura Augusta, PhD. “Here, we are de-centering the object or final performance as the culmination of creative work. Instead, we want to show the significance of the entire creative process, inviting multi-sensory engagement with the vast Experiencing the Bosque archive. To underscore process is not only an aesthetic decision, but a political one: we are pleased to think alongside the many Experiencing the Bosque collaborators about the ways artistic research and our shared interdependence—among the human and more-than-human worlds—can offer new models for our engagement with nature, the body, the histories of extraction and division along the border, and the science of conservation.” “
Reception: March 23, 2023 | 5–7:30 pm
UTEP Rubin Center for the Visual Arts
500 West University Ave.
El Paso, 79968 TX
(915) 747-6151
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