This exhibition explores the complex conversations between land use and water rights, focusing on cultural continuity and fracture. Informed by research, Christine Howard Sandoval’s artworks explore the structures, materials and communities involved in managing agricultural waterways known as acequias. Working collectively, contemporary Indigenous and Hispanic people retain their water rights in New Mexico through the continuous use and maintenance of the acequias. Beyond serving as infrastructure, acequias shape the social life within communities.
Central to this exhibition, the sculpture Channel maps place, time, and ideas about the democratization of scarce resources. Through multi-media projects that challenge the boundaries of representation, access, and habitation via an experiential and community-oriented practice, Howard Sandoval examines her connections to her own ancestral land as well as how the extensive network of existing acequias carries forward an ecological ethos of land-based survival within the realities of anthropogenic forces.
Christine Howard Sandoval is an Obispeño Chumash and Hispanic artist based in New York. She is a multimedia artist who challenges the boundaries of representation, access, and habitation through the use of performance, video, and sculpture. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at New York, Oakland, Taos, and Berlin.
Image above: Christine Howard Sandoval, Channel- A Cartography of Thirst, 2019 (detail)
FAC Member Tour – Saturday, June 1
FAC curator Polly Nordstrand and contemporary artist Christine Howard Sandoval will lead a discussion of Howard Sandoval’s installation Channel, the artist’s research, informed practice, and the ancient water democracies of New Mexico that are central to this work. No RSVP required; check in at the front desk. More
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