Community Celebration: Saturday, March 3 from 5 – 8pm
Exhibition Runs: March 3 – 29, 2018
Harwood Art Center and Escuela del Sol Montessori are pleased to present Encompass, a unique multi-generational art event that takes place annually in March. Featuring four gallery exhibitions, open artist studios, hands-on art making projects, live music by Eugene, food trucks, and activities for all ages, Encompass is both a reflection of and an offering to our community.
We have all, at times, felt disillusioned. The state of the world can seem bleak, and we can feel weary. But in community, we bloom resilience; we create visions for our world that are grounded in hope; we dream more beautiful realities into existence. This year Encompass offers artistic reflections upon these “Dream Spaces,” inviting shared (re)inventions and intentions for tomorrow. We are considering what our magical future can look like, nurturing spaces in which everyone can feel connected, supported, welcomed and loved.
About The Exhibitions
Reverie
Katya Crawford & Mira Woodson: Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends – Virginia Woolf
Reverie honors the power of friendship to transform darkness into light, the mundane into the magical. This is a story of two friends embarking on day trips to escape the spiraling political, social and environmental climate. Drawn to aging and technological infrastructure set in the sublime New Mexico landscape, they conjure up a world where technology and nature coexist in harmony. They finally turn their attention back to the city, and use design as an act of defiance and a reclamation of hope.
Regrowth
In a dystopian yet wonderous future of perpetual night, the world has become so polluted that the population has had to leave the earth – building sky cities that float far above the pollution line. But a solution is taking seed. Some brave citizens have returned to the surface and have started to regrow the environment. They have built a giant hexagonal biome in which plants and trees are slowly growing, cleaning and restoring the destroyed atmosphere. In the hexagon, plant life flourishes, and the light has returned. Regrowth is presented by Escuela del Sol Montessori elementary students.
Collected
An exhibition of work made by Harwood Art Center’s extended community, Collected includes Escuela del Sol Montessori teachers, administrative staff, teaching artists and studio artists that support our organization’s mission to nurture a passion for lifelong learning, creative expression and engaged citizenship.
Connected
Harwood’s outreach program, Creative Roots, celebrates 25 years of community art engagement with this exhibition. Featuring the works by participating students and the Collective Memory installation, following a year-long city-wide collaboration.
The Collective Memory project is designed to bring our community together to share stories of loss and survival through art. Participants have reconstructed cardboard templates of disappeared fish from the Rio Grande, adding artistic embellishments to enhance their fish and communicate their own stories of loss, challenge, recovery and survival. As a community, we have practiced healing and hope by making something beautiful. After Encompass, fish will return home to reside with their makers to remind us of who we are – and what we’ve survived.
Open Artist Studios
Since 1991, Harwood Art Center has provided creative workspaces, exhibition opportunities and professional development programs to local artists. Our Harwood Studio Artists invite you into their studios to visit them, view their artwork and purchase their beautiful wares. Studio Artists retain 100% of the sales made.
Expanding Sequences: Joanna Keane Lopez
Commissioned by Harwood with support from our funding partners. Expanding Sequences is a site-specific installation that engages the landscape and audience in repetition and reflection. The public art work is made of adobe bricks that mirrors the historical usage of adobe architecture in the neighborhood of Albuquerque Old Town and beyond. Expanding Sequences supports, reminds, reinforces, creates and holds space for dreaming.
Joanna’s work investigates the natural environment by reenacting geometrical forms, engaging natural materials and placing the work and the viewer into the landscape. Repetition and reflection are concepts she explores though the use of multiple iterations and the use of mirrors as reflective surfaces. The materials of the installation are expanded through the act of reflection, making the landscape, the sky and the audience a part of experience.
Hands On Art Making Projects
Just Dream Jars
Make and take your own dream in a jar with the Jr High students of Escuela del Sol Montessori.
Action Upon Arrival
Create hand-held flags collectively that will share our dreams of people’s place in our community. Using screen printing and hand written notes, we will assemble paper flags that will be placed publicly throughout Albuquerque. Presented by Spirit Of Service.
Music & Food
Encompass will also feature a live music performance by Eugene, as well as delicious dinner and dessert options from our favorite local food trucks.