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Search Results for: Erin Currier

An Interview with Erin Currier: Artist, Writer & Activist

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by Lisette García and Barrett Martin

excerpted from Ponderosas: Conversations with Extraordinary, Ordinary Women 
by Lisette García, Ph. D
available November 20th
Sunyata Books

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And then you have to do it all the time.”
–Angela Davis

Barrett: I first met Erin Currier and her late partner, Anthony Hassett, in 1996 when I was visiting mutual friends in Taos, New Mexico. A group of us went on a hike together, in the magnificent Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the high desert of northern New Mexico. We all had much in common—a great love for music, art, and an obscure martial art that we were studying with the same master in Taos. Even though we were all relatively young, we seemed to understand each other in a much deeper way than most new friends. [Read more…]

New Work From Erin Currier

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American Women (dismantling the border) II

American Women (dismantling the border) II (48″x60″) depicts the U.S. Mexico wall being dismantled by American Indigenous women (Comanche, Navajo, on the U.S. side; Aztec, Miztec, Mayan, on the Mexican side). Most borders which define Nation States — topics of such heated debate — were only recently built, created by Colonial conquest, and are false constructs: hastily drawn lines etching across and carving up lands inhabited for millennia by Indigenous peoples. Thus, it is the right of the Indigenous to dismantle the oppressive walls and artificial distinctions of the world: walls that slice through the heart of communities and ecosystems, the only function of which is fear based exclusion. [Read more…]

Twenty Que With J. Matthew Thomas

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By Erin Currier

The appearance of J. Matthew Thomas on our Earth is a rare and fortuitous event, akin to a special comet or eclipse that occurs once every 500 hundred years or so. He is the DaVinci of our day-and-age, a true Visionary bringing together community, education, environment and art with international events such as the PASEO, programs such as Studio TAOS and Pecha Kucha nights. His tenure at the Harwood Museum in Taos has seen him at the curatorial Vanguard in featuring previously unknown or undervalued works by Women, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and other underrepresented artists. [Read more…]

Twenty Que with Larry Bell

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by Erin Currier

Even a cursory investigation into nearly any seminal cultural moment, institution, or movement in the latter half of the 20th century, reveals the presence of artist Larry Bell. Bell’s presence in the Arts is akin to the glass boxes that he is most known for, that, at once, reflect, reveal, and transform their environment. The works are mirrors, windows, lenses, yet are also self-contained and complete in and of themselves. From Disney animation, to Abstract Expressionism, to the West Coast Light and Space movement, to the famed Ferus Gallery, to Dennis Hopper’s legendary Taos scene, to the Venice Beach scene (he even has a bar named after him: “Larry’s”), to the iconic cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Bell was there, and none of it — and, in turn, the Arts today — would be the same without his presence.  [Read more…]

Walk to Vegas Has Legs, And Is A Sure-Footed Comedy To Boot

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Reviewed by Erin Currier

In the character-driven lineage of such classics as Goodfellas, Big Lebowski, and True Romance; Walk to Vegas (written by Vincent Van Patten and Steve Alper; directed by Eric Balfour) features a brotherhood that operates on an informal black-market economy impervious to the rules of law, other than the innate sense of honor established through direct eye contact, firm handshakes, and camaraderie. It is a den of high-stakes Hollywood gamblers continuously engaging one another in ever-more outrageous ante-upping, dares and bets that culminate in our protagonist, Vincent VanPatten, attempting a walk from LA to Vegas in seven days in a suit. The characters of this instant classic — played by such greats as Eileen Davidson, Jennifer Tilly, Danny Pardo, Paul Walter Hauser, and James VanPatten, are straight out of Cervantes. The result: pure comic genius. [Read more…]

A Master’s Farewell: Eduardo Galeano’s Hunter of Stories

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Reviewed by Alci Rengifo

Hunter of Stories
by Eduador Galeano
Nation Books, 272pp. $26.

Eduardo Galeano taught me where my parents came from. Always more historian than novelist, or commentator as chronicler, the Uruguayan maestro’s work was one whole mosaic framing the Latin American experience from conquest to capitalist modernism. Galeano, who shed his mortal coil in 2015, was the modern artist of the vignette, telling history in snapshots. I first read him as a young student when a mentor recommended his classic Open Veins of Latin America, an eloquent history of the economic and social history of the region, told with a journalist’s precision and novelist’s sense of language. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez famously gave a copy of the book to Barack Obama during a summit in 2009, and I still sadly suspect that Obama didn’t bother to read it. [Read more…]

Anthony Hassett’s Last Evenings on Earth

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at The Harwood Museum of Art, Taos NM
Reviewed by Erin Currier

Not unlike tin scraps gathered, then painstakingly crafted and painted into ex-voto offerings under the dim flicker of propane lamps in the outer rings of Mexico City, Antigua, or Salvador, and not unlike the mid-century Beat “cut-ups” of William S. Burroughs scattered like lotus petals on a mosaic tiled floor in the junk-sick dawn of Tangiers, and not unlike the embroidered Ayahuasca-dreamt songlines of the Amazonian Shipibo, Anthony Hassett’s pen, ink and glaze drawings in Japanese Moleskin albums are rhythms of a history at once autobiographical and universal: poetic calling cards shuffled and laid bare in a line by an adept renderer’s hand that has the strength and fury of a fighter’s fist combined with the mystical empathy of a Stigmata. [Read more…]

The Moment Worth Struggling Toward

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The Event of Literature

An Interview with Erin Currier

CHRISTOPHER HASSETT: There seems to be an explicit call to action in much of your work, or at the very least the demand that one take note of some supreme injustice in the land or amongst peoples. Yet what I appreciate about your work is that, more than it being mere critique or some one-dimensional, stop-action capture, it instead offers a way forward, and in my mind that way forward is dependably the right way forward. I’m thinking of, as an example, a new work of yours titled American Women (Dismantling the Border). Can you speak more to this idea of there being a constructive framework or, rather, this inherently optimistic baseline level of production which seems not only to shape but lay a distinctive stamp across your entire arc of expression? [Read more…]