Disruption, Survival … and Breaking Boxes

Published September 4th, 2024 at 12:00 am, Last Updated September 5th, 2024 at 11:42 am

Ginger Dunnill started the podcast Broken Boxes a decade ago as a way to stay tuned in to the arts community after she had children. She was familiar with other podcasts like This American Life and The Moth, but she says when she started the project, she didn’t see podcasts as a big platform for activism like they are now. 

“It was a fun place for me to play creatively, to share stories, to create a studio companion for other artists who are my peers where they could just listen to other people’s stories to promote a kind of solidarity. As it progressed, I kind of took it more into the field and went ‘direct action’ for environmental justice issues like Standing Rock. I interviewed people from the Navajo Nation who were protecting their sacred mountains and I just kind of took it into that space for a few years.”

Dunill still has her podcast, but has now taken on a new role, as co-curator of a gallery at the Albuquerque museum. The exhibition — co-curated by Albuquerque Museum Head Curator Josie Lopez — starts its six-month run next week and features art from guests who have appeared on Dunnill’s podcast. Although the exhibits in the Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue differ in their medium, genre, and subject matter — floating metal “jingle clouds,” mirrored tapestries, a monument to transgender rights, live music, video and short films  — Dunnill feels two tropes are explored by each artist and reflected in their work: Survival and Disruption

“I think those are two very different things, but I think that they’re two themes that are running through the exhibition for sure.”

She says the 23 artists she selected for the gallery have “activist, advocate, disruptor or cultural activators” values. 

“They use their art as a platform for speaking about larger issues in the world and also larger issues in their communities that need to be healed or represented,” she says. 

The Broken Boxes exhibit includes artists such as Chip Thomas, who does large scale mural pasteups and wheat pastes in the Navajo nation and across the country promoting social equity and environmentalism. 

“It’s a really thoughtful way to approach his audience to look deeper at what’s happening in our world.” she says.  

Amaryllis R. Flowers, one of the artists featured in the Broken Boxes gallery, is a personal friend of Dunnill.  Flowers moved around the U.S. most of her life. When she was 19 she moved to Santa Fe where she lived for about seven years. She had no idea that she had moved to one of the most important art centers of the country.

“It was such a blessing that I landed there because I connected with an artist community that are still some of my dearest friends, like Ginger,” Flowers says.

Today, Flowers holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale, and has shown her work internationally. Her contribution to the Broken Boxes gallery is a a large mixed media map fragment.

“It’s mostly 2D but there’s some 3D sculptural elements,” Flowers says. “It’s a lot of craft materials, as well as airbrush, puff paint, gemstones, bones, marker, wash, watercolor, kind of a mix of all of these different mediums that I love working in.”

Flowers says that her art is about storytelling.

“I make fantasies for survival, for those of us who are not meant to survive,” Flowers says. “Fantasy gets this reputation of being a genre of escapism and being frivolous. But for me, fantasy has never been that. I’m a big fantasy nerd. Fantasy has never been a means to escape, it’s been a means to stay and to be able to imagine something other than the reality that we’re existing in, and that we’re co-creating, building and also surviving. And not as a way to escape the reality, but as a radical practice of being able to think beyond the rules, the systems, and the structures that we’ve inherited.”

Through art, she imagines a future “coded through a lens of fantasy and fem.” For Flowers “Fem” is a way to talk about queer femininity beyond gender identity.

She says, “When I’m using ‘fem,’ I’m talking about a queer experience and queer existence on a feminine spectrum, which usually means that it breaks the laws and the rules and expectations of femininity. At least that’s how I’m meaning it in my work.”

Besides acting as co-curator, Dunnill wrote an essay for the exhibit’s companion piece: an art book that also contains a creative response by artist Maria Hupfield and an introduction by Lopez. In addition to being a podcast host, Dunhill is a manager for artists and musicians, a DJ and an experimental sound artist, composing scores for film and video. So naturally, music plays an important role in the Broken Boxes exhibit.

“All that informs the questions I asked on the podcast that I think other artists will benefit from knowing,” she says. “Pulling back the curtain of Oz is what I like to do with the podcast. How does this really work? How do artists really make it?”
Oglala Lakota artist and composer for Reservation Dogs Mato Wayuhi will play a free show on the opening weekend at the Albuquerque Museum amphitheater. Mario Ybarra Junior, whose art is also featured in the gallery, will perform a DJ set for one of the third Thursdays — a block party — and it will include an installation which is an homage to his mother who was a Brown Beret during the Brown Power Movement in L.A.