Walking Into the Broken Boxes Podcast

Did you ever want to walk into a podcast? The grand installation of Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue lets you experience large-scale work by some of the socially conscious artists that have been featured on Ginger Dunnill’s interview series. Enter, listen, and get inside the heads of 23 artists at the Albuquerque Museum through March 2, 2025.

The exhibition honors ten years of Broken Boxes conversations, which you can hear at various “listening spots” inside the exhibition. Ginger began her project as a way to encourage community among artists who were creating disruptive work that prompts viewers to imagine a different world.

Kate DeCiccio’s Blooming Abolition depicts formerly incarcerated community members who develop gardens. Created by local artists, Planting Justice, Hiroyo Kaneko, and Malaya Tuyay.

The show spills way beyond this main gallery into a theater showing artist videos, another space featuring a soundscape by Raven Chacon, and a courtyard reflecting artist-educator Kate DeCiccio’s vision for sustainable community gardens that give purpose and fulfillment to formerly incarcerated neighbors. 

Inside the main space, visitors wind through and around different installations, such as Marie Watt’s hanging jingle sculptures and her spectacular collaboration with Cannupa Hanska Luger. The jingle “clouds” take a traditional element of powwow and turn it into fine art that invites participation in the soundscape.

2023 dangling jingle sculptures Sky Dances Light: Revolution VII, VIII, and IX created by Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians). Courtesy: private collection

Across the way is an enormous canine created by Luger and Watt. As he’s done with other large-scale participatory projects, Luger sent out a call worldwide requesting people to embroider messages on bandanas and send them in. Visitors are fascinated by the Each Other collaboration, circling around the wolf to discover messages about rescue, shelter, and sustainability.

Guadalupe Maravilla’s installation draws inspiration from his own story and struggle. He assembled the piece from items picked up when he retraced his migration route from El Salvador to the United States when he was a child. But he made it to emit therapeutic vibrational sounds, similar to the sound therapy that brought him relief as an adult when he underwent therapies to cure his own cancer.

2020-2021 Each Other community bandana-sculpture created by Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Ankara, Lakota) and Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians). Courtesy: the artists
Guadalupe Maravilla’s 2021 Disease Thrower #17 – a therapeutic sound installation using materials found when he retraced his El Salvador-US migration route. Courtesy: the artist

Work by Ethiopian refugee Tsedaye Makonnen includes a performance video and installation that focuses attention on African refugees who risk dangerous ocean crossings to escape violence in their home countries. The blue fabric represents the ocean, and each mirror a life lost.

Tsedaye Makonnen’s Astral Sea Views video with Astral Sea Series mirrored fabrics – commemorating women migrants who perished attempting dangerous European ocean crossings. Courtesy: the artist. 

See some of our other favorite installations here in our Flickr album – a shrine by Mario Yvarra, Jr. dedicated to his Chicana-activist mother –Music My Mom Played While Cleaning House – and works by Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc) that are straight from her recent show at the Whitney.

2023 mixed-media sculptures by Natalie Ball – ribbon skirt: There’s Indian and than there’s Indian; (rear) Baby Board. Courtesy: the artist.
Music My Mom Played While Cleaning the House…, a parade float by California artist Mario Ybarra, Jr. that honors his mother, a Chicana civil rights activist.

Listen to the Broken Boxes podcast to hear Ginger and international artists talk about making art, building community, and meeting the challenge of the moment.

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