Ten years of podcast guests contribute to this multimedia exhibition at Albuquerque Museum, foregrounding the playful possibilities of socially engaged art.
Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue
September 7, 2024–March 2, 2025
Albuquerque Museum
My little sister was not keen to go to the museum. Who can blame her? It seems many exhibitions aren’t created with attention to the measure of enjoyment they might give, but only their patent ability to teach you something. And that can be very dull. As the distorted guitar kicked in while we watched Black Belt Eagle Scout’s 2023 music video My Blood Runs Through This Land it was clear that Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue is not one of those exhibitions. This is art with substance—that doesn’t need to lecture.
Artists Ginger Dunnill and Cannupa Hanska Luger’s (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) Broken Boxes podcast is the springboard for the exhibition, which Dunnill curated with Josie Lopez. The podcast brings artists together in far-ranging conversations that honor the complex lives and processes from which art emerges as a place of safety and freedom. The exhibition features work from twenty-three of the artists featured on the podcast, including large-scale installation, sculpture, and video, with excerpts from their interviews humming through speakers at various stations.
Broken Boxes takes aim at entrenched norms including colonialism and institutional hierarchies, bucking the traditionally sedate aura of the gallery, because art is most challenging when it is most vital. Take for example the first piece visitors encounter, Original Fragments of the Lost Girls Treasure Map (2024) by Amaryllis R. Flowers. This nonlinear map joyfully traverses everywhere from the “astral plane” to “the (de)basement,” using drippy comic book fonts and girly pastels. It’s an unabashed good time that nevertheless doesn’t lose sight of its purpose—to imagine liberated ways of navigating art and the world around us.
Similarly, Marie Watt’s (Seneca, Scottish, German) suspended sculptures Sky Dances Light: Revolution VII, VIII, and IX(all 2023) invite us to inter-act with luminous, floating jingle clouds and listen to their twinkly response. Watt’s work is playfully evocative of the living, shared nature of time and space while adding to the ambient sounds of the show, the commingling of voices on which it is centered.
I had dragged my sister into the museum, but we ended up lingering. Broken Boxes is full of meaning, but hasn’t sacrificed any of the fun.
