Community Calendar

Join us for the University Art Museums premier exhibition Motherhood & Art in 2020 (Labor), in conjunction with the Devasthali Hall grand opening, at New Mexico State University (NMSU) (1308 E University Ave, Las Cruces, NM 88003). Labors co-curators Marisa Sage and Laurel Nakadate aim to expand upon the diverse and complex conversations regarding motherhood in today’s desperate socio-political climate. Through video, painting, installation, sculpture, film and photographic works by a diverse group of artists, themes of empowerment, empathy, intimacy, selflessness, vulnerability, failure, anxiety, and choice are examined. Situated in the Borderplex region of Southern New Mexico, Labor confronts and challenges the historic, traditional and contemporary ways mothers and mothering have been represented in both art and popular culture. This exhibition strives to create a laboratory of inclusiveness and support that offers opportunities not only for internationally celebrated artists, but also for the regional community, through local programming and the exhibition of work by New Mexico based artists who speak to their own experiences relating to motherhood. The grand opening also includes a special performance by Jessica Jackson scheduled to begin at 7:15 pm. For Hutchins’s site-specific punk performance, dancers turn ceramic objects into wearable sculptures using their bodies to scoff at prescribed rituals, seeking to recreate the euphoria and pain children and mothering bring to one’s body and creative life.

We are thrilled to invite the full regional community to our first Mama Create-Up! Author Michelle Hackney and Illustrator Mia Ortiz-Gandara will present their children’s book Mama’s Leche and their mission to normalize breastfeeding by approaching the story of breastfeeding from the perspective of the child. Various members from the New Mexico Breastfeeding Task Force (NMBTF) will also share information on breastfeeding support groups and lactation professionals to our mothers in the Las Cruces community. 

*Lectures are free and open to all with or without children, this also includes babies.

Our first OutsmART children's workshop will utilize Labor artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s artworks SAP and Lascaux Reprise as inspiration. After visiting Hutchins’s works in the Contemporary Gallery, the children will create a clay sculpture using recycled materials as a framing device to represent their mothers. This workshop will explore various images and ideas of a mother as the focal point for their child, as the source of food, transportation, comfort, and understanding. The clay sculptures the students create will showcase how they view their mothers.