Communication & Journalism Professor Miguel Gandert has received the Artist-in-Residence Award from the Center for Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Gandert will travel to Chicago over fall break to present a public lecture and teach a seminar. Gandert will present, “Dancing on Hard Ground: Reading History and Intercultural Relationships in the Rituals of New Mexico, Mexico and Bolivia.”
Photo: Miguel Gandert
The rituals profiled in this talk, both religious and secular, are a confluence of Meso-American indigenous peoples and the Spanish Colonial era. The celebrations are a living symbol of the historically complex 400-year relationship between European Christianity and the pre-colonial indigenous populations of the Americas.
“By examining the symbols of community celebrations as layers of text, a different history can be read. The themes of racism, exploitation, civil rights, social revolution and the environment are among the major issues mediated during these celebrations,” he said.
Rituals of New Mexico, Mexico, Bolivia and their relationship to colonial Spain and the West explore not only the confluence of two distinct worlds, but also as symbols of a complex inner struggle dwelling in the hearts of indigenous and mixed people who try to preserve a fidelity to contradictory cultures.
“The metaphors found in these rituals are not only a living history of complex intercultural relationship between Spain and the Americas, but also can be examined as window into the concepts of globalization and as ritual as a mediation between the first and third worlds as well as the current tensions playing out in the Middle East,” Gandert said.
Gandert, a native of Española, NM, is a fine art and documentary photographer. He teaches courses in photography, ethnography, art history and intercultural communication. His recent work explores the contrast between the Hispanic life in Spain, Latin America, Old and New Mexico.
Gandert, who continues to work in black-and-white photography, sees documentary work as both a form of art with a strong capacity for expression as well as a way of telling stories and understanding complex cultural relationships. A primary focus of those stories is Gandert’s mestizaje heritage and the fusion and tension of the relationship between Spanish Colonial and native cultures of the Americas.
Gandert’s photographs have been shown in galleries and museums throughout the world and are in numerous public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, the Beinke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection at Yale and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe. His series, Nuevo México Profundo, Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland, was the subject of a book and one-person exhibition for the National Hispanic Culture Center of New Mexico, in 2000, and his work was selected for the 1993 Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Media Contact: Carolyn Gonzales, (505) 277-5920; e-mail: cgonzal@unm.edu