Fortitude features a new body of work portraying under-recognized people in unique environments. Natalie visits people in their homes or other resonate places to create intimate drawings of participants personal lives. These paintings are an exploration into the lives individual people, but also a recognition of the messiness and beauty inherent in our shared human experience.

About Natalie

Natalie Voelker is a visual artist working in Albuquerque, NM. She created a large-scale mural installation in collaboration with Reyes Padilla for the Harwood Art Center in 2017. She has created a limited-edition lithograph at the Tamarind Institute for the City of Albuquerque’s public art collection in 2014. That same year, her painting, Ethan Sleeping, was chosen as the featured work for the state of New Mexico, by Figure50.com, a national juried figurative art competition. Natalie’s work has been featured in multiple publications including the anthology, BARED, and the French-English magazine, VolUp. Her murals adorn nonprofits, businesses, and private residences; her paintings and prints are collected internationally. She has a BFA from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. “Using both representation and abstraction, I take a personal approach to the exploration of our shared human experience. Through the lens of the personal, I explore our search for identity and meaning through relationships with others and ourself. My portraits, figurative works, abstractions, and murals are the material result of an exploratory, process-oriented, approach to art-making.” – Natalie Voelker      

James Black draws digital caricatures, focusing on the people he sees daily in Albuquerque. His friends, family, and community. Random faces, memorable expressions, and unforgettable mugs. He is obsessed with creating a quick process for capturing likeness. He uses an iPad pro to create clean, cell shaded, animation like, stylized images and the process is recorded as he draws. The exhibition will feature prints of these caricatures juxtaposed with photographs of the subjects along with video loops of the recorded renderings.

About James

James Black graduated from UNM with a BFA in studio art in 2004 with concentration in printmaking, specifically working with Monotype relief prints, Intaglio etchings, and Serigraphy. James quickly adapted to the Serigraphy or Screen Printing process and began to work on a small studio to create prints. This small studio has grown into a larger artist collective with a strong interest in unique graphic design and production. James is an active community member, local artist, teacher, and published illustrator. James has led many workshops and tutorials for local youth and community centers, including Bosque Schools, Harwood Art Center, and the Hispanic Cultural Center. James started the screen printing program at Albuquerque’s, Warehouse 508 and is the head of the live screen printing event team T-Shirt Lab. He is currently visual art director of the ongoing, Rosenwald Building “We Are This City”, downtown collaborative beautification project launched in 2015. “I am Printmaker, Illustrator, Educator, and community member. I see people. Many times I will not forget their face until I have exaggerated it. I had a dream once that I drew all of my friends. I decided to keep dreaming that dream again and again.” – James Black

SURFACE is an annual juried exhibition, endowed awards and professional development program presented by Harwood Art Center, to support the creative and professional growth of emerging artists and to expand their visibility and viability in our community. We have received hundreds of noteworthy submissions over the five application cycles to-date; at the close of our 2017 program, we have served 66 exceptionally talented, committed artists. Applications for 2018 are due Sunday, March 18. Apply now > We are deeply grateful to The FUNd at Albuquerque Community Foundation, Bernalillo County, City of Albuquerque, The Geissman Family, McCune Charitable Foundation, New Mexico Arts and National Endowment for the Arts for their support of SURFACE: Emerging Artists of New Mexico, as well as to Marion & Kathryn Crissey and Reggie Gammon for establishing our endowed awards for this program. SURFACE would not be possible without our extraordinary local collaborators at Albuquerque Art Business Association, A Good Sign, The Grove Cafe & Market, Tractor Brewing Company and University of New Mexico School of Architecture & Planning.    

Cecilia’s installation for SURFACE explores the intersections between memory and place, and between bodies and dwellings. Found domestic artifacts and architectural fragments are embellished, inverted, and reworked, while their designed functions are playfully disrupted by traces of the handmade, the subjective, and the decorative. These time-intensive practices, rendered by hand, evoke the multitude of invisible acts and interventions with which an inhabited space is transformed into a home. The project investigates our day-to-day labors, which generally go unnoticed, such as mending, cleaning, and organizing. Identifying the process in these meditative and devotional acts allows us as individuals to cultivate a strong relationship to place over time. Cecilia received the SURFACE 2017 Harwood Art Center Solo Exhibition Award, presented annually for artistic excellence, originality of vision and dedication to practice.

About Cecilia

Cecilia McKinnon grew up in a family of theater artists in California, immersed in performance and music. She moved to New Mexico to complete a BFA at the University of New Mexico, studying sculpture and printmaking, and ultimately branching out into a broader intermedia practice while participating in the Land Arts of the American West program. She has studied puppetry and circus practices with the Bread and Puppet Theater in Vermont, and spent a year at Concordia University in Montreal studying textiles and performance. She is an active experimental musician, currently performing under the name of Star Canyon. She has been a member of several collectives, including noise performers Milch de la Máquina, women’s music festival organizers Gatas y Vatas, and most currently GRAFT collective, an art and curatorial collective based out of Barelas neighborhood in Albuquerque. “I currently work in the areas of sculptural installation, textiles, and performance, exploring the entropy of both memory and physical place through the lens of traditionally gendered fiber crafts. Construction remnants and domestic artifacts are salvaged from alleys, junkyards, and desert dump sites, and are subjected to “repairs” which ultimately render them useless. Found objects and materials are woven, wrapped, bound, and bandaged, accumulating a skin of fiber that blocks permeable surfaces and limits movement, mimicking the distortions and erosion of memories over time. These works constitute a material response to a culture of excess and upheaval, alluding via the personal and intimate scale of a home to the politics of scarcity and abandonment in the American West.” – Cecilia McKinnon

Frames weaves together personal narratives, familial relationships, historical trauma, and healing in a series of mixed media works and paintings. Through this work, Luanne thinks about what kind of relationship she will build with her son and explores her existing relationships with the people in her life. Good or bad, how have they impacted who she is and by extension what other events have shaped her family.

About Luanne

Luanne Redeye uses painting as a way to see others. Working primarily in oil she depicts the relationship between perception and experience of native identity through genre scenes, designs, and portraits. Born in Jamestown, New York, Luanne grew up on the Allegany Indian Reservation in Western New York. It is from here where she draws inspiration incorporating community and family members into her paintings, which gives her works a strong personal and emotional component. Luanne currently lives in Albuquerque, NM. An enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Indians and Hawk Clan, she studied at the University of New Mexico receiving her MFA in 2011. She has exhibited throughout the US and has been the recipient of various awards including most recently the Barbara and Eric Dobkin Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM. “As a figurative artist my work is an intersection of autobiography and community. Representation of Native peoples from a Native perspective is important to me. I want my friends, family, and community members to be seen through genre scenes and portraits. Sometimes that representation includes specific, identifiable things from our culture and sometimes it does not. The work asks the viewer to search further for the paintings meaning to wonder “why this image” or “why this person or these people”. Even though I don’t depict myself within the scenes I’m present because I made the work, I’m part of the work because it’s from my experiences. The paintings are from my gaze and become a window into the everyday life, domestic setting, and familiar surroundings of the participating figures. The works are visual narratives of the people’s histories capturing what it means to be Indian today.”– Luanne Redeye    

Barbara…Alzheimer’s. The viewer knows the outcome of this story. In this exhibition, Vincent introduces one woman’s (his wife’s) extraordinary struggle to live a decent life while facing down this murderous disease. With photographs and accompanying text, Vincent hopes the viewer will bond with Barbara, and learn something anew about grace under duress.

About Vincent

Vincent Frazzetta, a photographer working exclusively with black and white film was born in Bridgeport CT at the end of the Great Depression. In 1998, after his wife, Barbara, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s while living in Corrales NM, Frazzetta turned to photography to help deal with the expected 12 years of solo caregiving he committed to. Frazzetta’s photo work includes interiors, landscapes, people and work, typically seen in bold, high contrast black and white compositions which cut to the essence of a subject. They are made with a strong sense of art observed through his early decades of wandering through art museums and galleries. Frazzetta has exhibited in juried shows and solo exhibitions in Maine (where he retired to care for Barbara). He received the Ike Royer Memorial Award For Black and White Photography, was published in B&W Magazine, and has been selected to show at Amapola Gallery in Albuquerque. “I have a good eye and a strong need to document what I see, with an equally strong passion to record the subject with beauty, irony, or humor, and certainly with concepts of art in mind. I want the viewer to be pulled back for a second, more intense look as her brain processes features recorded below the surface of the mind. My black and white photography cuts to the essence of the subject, and with the Barbara/Alzheimer’s series, I have done just that while documenting her life affirming struggle to manage a murderous disease. Through it all, I see beauty and art–in her life, my work. Technically, I seek a certain signature look of my own, so my work is recorded on black and white film and with traditional darkroom processing. In this I follow my predecessors and models: Dorthea Lange, Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, and Tina Modotti.”– Vincent Frazetta

Harwood Art Center presents Bridge: Arts & Social Justice, our annual juried exhibition dedicated to themes of social, political and environmental justice through the eyes of artists.  

Dani and David both explore the idea of viewing the ground from above. Dani further abstracts the landscape using ceramics and enlarging the circular grid motif. The grids and circles appear to be different sizes depending on one’s distance from the ground. David explores landscape from above through topographic studies, contour models, aerial pattern studies, and small wall sculptures with an architectural eye.

About David

David Disko holds a BFA from the University of Utah (UU). From 1981-1983, he mounted one-person shows at UU and Springville Museum and participated in group shows at the Salt Lake Art Center, Springville Museum, UU and Ogden Union Station Galleries. Coming to Albuquerque in 1986, he turned to building construction. In 2000, his company, Innerspace, renovated the KiMo Theater winning a National Preservation Award. In 2009 a professional change allowed him to resume art making. In 2013 he exhibited at Casa Cultura. In 2016 he participated in SURFACE: Emerging Artists of New Mexico at Harwood Art Center. 2016 group shows included: the NM State Fair, “Atypical Topographies” at Adams State University and 12×12 at Harwood. 2017 shows include: “Gateway to Imagination” at the Farmington Museum, “Prospectus #246 Portfolio”, NM Department of Cultural Affairs and 12×12 at Harwood.

“I depict landforms in a way that an amalgam of a cartographer/architect might. I take apart the landscape, break it up and re-assemble it into objects that tell a story. The story can be personal; about an experience that I had at a particular place or its depiction, via account, maps or fly-overs.

In the late 70’s I spent several seasons working as a BLM firefighter. Often, I would be transported to fire sites via helicopter and I was able to view the landscape from the air where the land revealed unseen contours and trees and rock became patterns of color and shadow.

My art practice has followed my evolving understanding of the land. I’ve made renderings of dunes and domes and objects akin to contour models. Recently, I’ve assembled journal accounts, cartographic studies, paintings and sculpture that consider place as an accumulation of collected bits and pieces over time.” – David Disko

About Dani

Dani Jeffries is an artist living in her adopted home town of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and attended the University of Michigan – School of Art, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1987. After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles, Detroit, Phoenix, and finally, in 2001, to Albuquerque, where she found a welcoming community of other Albuquerque artists. Along the way, she has shown her artwork in galleries, art fairs, and competitions in Michigan, Florida, Washington D.C., Arizona, and New Mexico.

“In my ceramic tile mosaics I incorporate the imagery of the geometric patterns which are created by the use of pivot irrigation systems used in large scale farming. When viewed from an airplane, the patterns created on the ground look like a series of squares containing concentric circles that are bisected by diagonal lines connecting opposite corners of the squares. I have chosen a color palette for each piece that is representative of a specific place, time of day or season that I found to be exceptionally beautiful and harmonious.” – Dani Jeffries

Beautiful Unwanted deals with harmful invasive species and the impact they have when introduced into foreign ecosystems, usually for reasons of human greed or naïve fascination with the unfamiliar or “exotic.” The works in this exhibition are intended to acknowledge the destructive force of these species, while simultaneously honoring their aesthetic beauty and inherent value as life forms.

About Jessica

Jessica Kennedy is a painter living and working in Albuquerque, NM. Born in Michigan in 1982, she earned a BFA with honors from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2005. Jessica then moved west to Albuquerque in 2006 to pursue an MFA at the University of New Mexico, where she graduated with distinction in 2009. She exhibits her complex, process-driven abstract paintings nationally and locally, recently at Matrix Fine Art, Pacific Exhibits, and 516 ARTS. She was also a participant in the Harwood Art Center’s 2015 Harvest CSA program. Jessica is a faculty member at Southwest University of Visual Arts in Albuquerque, where she teaches a variety of courses, ranging from drawing, to painting, to color, to collage. See her work at www.jessicalkennedy.com “Love of process, action, and the physicality of paint are the driving forces of my work and the natural world is my major source for inspiration. In my paintings, I endeavor to depict, through abstraction, the physical experience of our world and the underlying metaphysical that links everything and everyone.” – Jessica Kennedy

Harwood Art Center presents 12×12 and PRELUDE, fundraising exhibitions that feature established, emerging and youth artists from New Mexico. The main event, our 12×12 exhibition, includes over 200 works that remain anonymous until sold – for the flat rate of $144 (12″x12″) or $36 (6″x6″). 12”x12” works by over 130 emerging and established artists, who remain anonymous until the works are purchased. Each piece is sold for $144 on the night of the 12×12 event, Saturday, December 1, on a first come, first served basis. 6”x6” and 12”x12” works by student artists from Escuela del Sol Montessori, Garfield Middle School and Hayes Middle School. These works also remain anonymous until they are purchased. Each 6”x6” piece is sold for $36 and each 12”x12” piece is sold for $44. They are first offered to the children’s parents and then to the public on the night of the 12×12 event. Prelude highlights the intersections of art, design and daily living. Prelude supports Harwood *and* our collaborating artists, who receive a percentage of sales. In addition to the exhibitions and auction, the 12×12 event will feature live music and food generously provided by over a dozen local restaurants. The event is family friendly and open to the public, with a suggested donation of $5 – $20 at the door. All funds raised support Harwood’s free community arts education, outreach and professional development programs – multifaceted, immersive offerings shaped by and for participants of all ages, backgrounds and perspectives.