This year’s jurors were Laura Augusta, Ph.D., curator at the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso; Carlo McCormick, curator and critic based in New York City; and Nancy Rivera, artist, curator, and Director of Planning & Program at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. A total of $70,000 was awarded.
Santa Fe Noise Ordinance // Santa Fe
Santa Fe Noise Ordinance organizes monthly concerts featuring experimental sound and performance art by artists based in New Mexico and the broader Southwest. SFNO works with rotating venues around Santa Fe including art galleries, artist-run and DIY spaces, and provisional or temporary venues. SFNO solicits a broad spectrum of practices including site-specific performances, sound collage and field recording, handmade analog and digital instruments, and hybrid audio-visual work.
Alas de Agua Art Collective // Tlacuilo Neo Codex Makers // Santa Fe
Tlacuilo Neo Codex Makers is an exploration of asemic writing, neo codex-making, poetry and creating abstracted language. Free public workshops will explore ancestral connection to language. It will be critical of cultures and cultural appropriation and examine the space in between in language, memory, ancestors, future and culture. This project is a healing of our ancestors at a time with such conflict needing reconciliation.
ACVilla // Murals of Nani Chacon // Alcalde
Murals of Nani Chacon is a unique film of Nanibah Chacon’s (Diné/Chicana) overarching vision of Life, illustrated by her murals spanning the US, and narrated with interviews by Nani and mural organizers. Visual artist ACVilla’s (Chicana) footage and soundtrack by Thollem accentuate the depth and inspiration of this artist’s work. Fulcrum Fund will support the artists’ fees, the NM-based (confirmed) post-production crew fees, and marketing of the film premieres in January 2025 in Española and Las Cruces. Post-screening Q&A with the artists and local public arts organizations will inspire conversations and strengthen the importance of the local public art movement.
Apolo Gomez // Tracing Queer Chicano and AIDS Gay Rights Movements Through Art // Albuquerque
This Zine project explores the interconnected narratives of the Chicano Queer and AIDS Gay Rights Movements during the 1970s and the 1980s. Using art as a primary lens, it uncovers shared ideologies, visual expressions, and the transformative power of creative activism. The project seeks to contextualize these movements within their socio-political landscapes. Connecting the threads through interviews, and photographs of New Mexico queer activists and survivors of the epidemic.
Marcus Chormicle // Prayer for My Triste // Las Cruces
Prayer For My Triste is a photographic and multimedia project that documents the ocotillo on Tortugas Mountain, also known as “A Mountain” in Las Cruces, an important pilgrimage site for local Indigenous and Catholic people. I have grown up visiting the mountain, and since the death of my grandmother, Yolanda Triste Rogers Chormicle in September 2022, I have climbed Tortugas to photograph the ocotillo at dawn as a form of prayer and as a way of coping with her loss. I plan to continue the work this year, and exhibit it in September 2024, in Las Cruces.
No Name Cinema // Santa Fe
No Name Cinema is a microcinema, gallery and community-gathering space that exists as a no-profit, non-business, anti-capitalist operation. Our programming mission is to select works that usethe filmic medium as an art form rather than passive entertainment, encourage an open dialogue and the presentation of marginalized voices and perspectives. NNC was founded on the understanding that the transformative power of art is capable of overstepping societal boundaries of class, religion, and higher education. Through dedication and focus we’re developing an artistic community that exists outside of the museums, beyond the schlock of Hollywood and is truly a people’s cinema.
Fourteenfifteen Gallery // Albuquerque
Fourteenfifteen Gallery is a non-commercial, collective-run exhibition space in the Barelas neighborhood of Albuquerque on Tiwa land. Fourteenfifteen’s objective is to cultivate accessible opportunities for experimental, underrepresented, emerging, and established artists. For five years, Fourteenfifteen has served as an incubator for progressive, challenging, empathetic, and thoughtful contemporary art. Located in a 4th street storefront, Fourteenfifteen Gallery is the continuation of the building’s twenty-year legacy as a vital site for experimental art in Albuquerque. Fourteenfifteen comprises two distinct exhibition spaces (Fourteenfifteen and Alpaca) and, in addition to monthly art exhibitions, hosts workshops, film screenings, and charitable events.
Thea Storz // A Fertile Season: Reproductive Lists // Truth or Consequences
Reproductive rights are under siege. Choices surrounding child-making and child-rearing have been central in importance since the beginning of humanity. Many adults and teens have their own powerful story about birth, abortion, parenthood, or the choice to not parent. Artist and educator, Thea Storz, relays her experiences with reproductive dilemmas in A Fertile Season: Reproductive Lists. Thea will create a limited-edition artist book, as well as lead a bookmaking and storytelling workshop. Workshop participants will create their own book and share tales of parenting and reproductive choices.
Best Western // Santa Fe
Housed in a former sheet metal shop, Best Western is a 600 sq ft artist-run space dedicated to hosting three or four exhibitions annually. The programming strives to create a national context for local artists through curated group and solo shows that identify threads parallel to larger narratives. Best Western is a tongue and cheek way of acknowledging the hubris of starting an art gallery in Santa Fe, which already has 250 galleries. Our core mission is to elevate the visual art discourse in Northern New Mexico through accessible and free public programming.
Jocelyn Salaz // Curando Con Nuestras Manos // Albuquerque
Curando con Nuestras Manos is an exhibition and catalog of embroidered quilt pieces organized around the question of, “how can the things we make with our hands nurture people we encounter?” In light of anthropogenic climate change, the pandemic, attacks on women’s and trans individuals’ bodily autonomy and blatant displays of abuse in national politics, artists must imagine alternative ways for healing and agency for the collective fate of human, animal and plant life. This work explores the connection between fiber arts and remedios (remedies) plants and animals, in healing and care practices in New Mexico, historically and contemporarily.
kelechi agwuncha & mika castañeda // amplifies it, doubles, trebles it // Santa Fe
amplifies it, doubles, trebles it is a multimedia site-specific installation for a performances centering QTBIOCtransgenre, experimental sound artists. kelechi agwuncha will imagine a new schema for restaging sound through public activations – in line with experimental spatial approaches of disco, punk, and Jamaican dub that crafted unified air spaces (as cited in “Figures in Air” by Micah Silver). The project will incorporate multimedia such as video installation, poetry, sound, and lighting to communicate a language of possibility that engages with nature. This produces new spatial conditions for how we imagine listening.
Nick Larsen // Old Haunts, Lower Reaches // Santa Fe
In 2021, I discovered the largely untold story of Stonewall Park, a failed planned queer community proposed on the site of a ghost town near Death Valley. Since then, I have been working on a series of speculative collages that draw on this and other fantasies projected on to the desert landscape. As the next iteration of this work, I am proposing a publication that weaves these collages with material mined from the Stonewall Park archives. The publication would be offered for free during an artist talk/reading at a shared artists’ and writers’ studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Karl Orozco // Signs of Life // Albuquerque
Signs of Life is a video installation project which considers the life cycles of the urban landscape through a study of abandoned roadside signs. I began photographing, mapping, and archiving 100 out-of-use signs across the state of New Mexico (Assets #07, #08 & #09). I then recreated each signs using the 3D modeling and animation software Blender as an attempt to crystallize each object in the condition I originally saw them and places each sign in a perpetual state between death and rebirth. Through the collective imagery of these signs, I aspire to conjure visions of the afterlife.