Opening: Mariah Garnett: The Pow’r of Life is Love

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Santa Fe is proud to present The Pow’r of Life is Love, an exhibition by artist and filmmaker Mariah Garnett, featuring video works, archival elements, and regular screenings of her 55-minute film Songbook.
Developed over several years, this project traces Garnett’s engagement with the archive of her great-great-aunt Ruth Lynda Deyo—a composer who lived in Egypt from 1924 until her death in 1960. While in Cairo, Deyo transcribed spirit communications and composed an ambitious opera about Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, which remained unfinished and unproduced.

In response, Garnett collaborated with opera singers Breanna Sinclairé and Christopher Paul Craig, experimental musicians in the U.S and Egypt including Holland Andrews and Jordanian playwright Raphaël Khouri to reimagine the lost work. These partnerships—with artists of color and queer and trans visionaries—foreground the distinct creative approaches each contributor brings, recasting the project through a shared ethos of experimentation, embodiment, and expanded narrative possibility.
The resulting film, Songbook, weaves together Deyo’s diaries, interviews, and diaristic footage from Garnett’s 2021 research trip to Cairo. Departing from the colonial frameworks of Deyo’s original project, Songbook becomes a portrait of artistic inheritance, creative obsession, the spirit world, chosen family, and sustaining all of the above at the margins.

The installation at ICA Santa Fe brings these themes into physical space—featuring video works that emerged throughout the process and references to Deyo’s archive—inviting viewers into a layered meditation on voice, transmission, and the endurance of creative vision across time.

As part of the exhibition, ICA Santa Fe will present special screenings of Songbook, offering audiences a unique opportunity to experience Garnett’s acclaimed film—recognized for its inventive form and nuanced reflection on queer lineage, cross-cultural memory, and collaborative process.