Museum of International Folk Art curators, Patricia Sigala and Chloe Accardi, are dedicated to co-collaborating exhibitions alongside community members—and especially those who are in some way connected to a particular exhibition’s theme. For the upcoming exhibition, Between the Lines: Prison Art & Advocacy, this commitment to community feedback and engagement is particularly strong.
“We have deepened conversations with community internationally, locally, and brought in voices that otherwise may not have been included in other exhibits or programming, says Patricia Sigala, educator and community outreach & engagement specialist at MOIFA.
Between the Lines: Prison Art & Advocacy began as a small exhibition in the museum’s Gallery of Conscience last year but will now be opening as a much larger exhibition on August 9, 2024, and will feature a large range of prison art from across the country and the world. Local collaborations with formerly incarcerated Santa Fe artists and children whose home lives have been impacted by incarceration have been crucial to the process.
“There are so many people that we want to reach with this exhibit … We want to educate people who don’t know a lot about mass incarceration and the effects that it has just on so many millions of people’s everyday lives,” says Chloe Accardi, MOIFA’s folklorist and media specialist. “But we also wanna be sensitive to those many, many people who are personally touched by the prison system.”
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
EC0501: Listen to the Land: Art at Bosque Redondo with Dakota Mace, Daisy Trudell-Mills, and Kéyah Keenan Henry
Santa Fe YouthWorks
Sites of Conscience
Brown v Board of Education School-to-Prison Pipeline initiative
Love Pa’ Mi Gente Shine Through Me, by Jimmy Santiago Baca in the Spring 2024 issue of El Palacio
John Paul Granillo
Carlos Cervantes
Golden Venture
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Encounter Culture, a production of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, is produced and edited by Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios.
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