The Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the arts has opened its doors for two new projects, the 2024 Annual Juried UTEP Student Exhibition and “You’re Meant to Be Here” featuring the living exhibit by Marcus Chormicle.
Chormicle, the Las Cruces-based artist, showcased the legacies of masculinity within his family during his first solo museum exhibition. He is a lens-based artist that focuses on family, memory, and the intersections of class, race, and history in the U.S. Southwest.
“My Grandfather’s Blood and Their Mark on Our Skin” tells the story of police brutality that Chormicle witnessed. He brings together national and regional histories with evidence of their devastating impacts and legacies on his family. The result is a meditative, and sometimes startling, reflection on grief and the lived experience of entangled histories.
Recently, Chormicle closed the Cristian Anthony Vallejo Memorial Gallery in Las Cruces. The gallery is an art space dedicated to his late cousin, who passed away in 2020. During its two years of operation, the gallery hosted 15 exhibitions of primarily Indigenous and Latinx artists.
Henry Sholtzy, Assistant Curator at the Rubin Center, helps the artists achieve their vision. Sholtzy debuted as a curator with Chromicle’s first solo exhibition.
“Chormicle’s first solo museum exhibition was also my curatorial debut here at the Rubin, which means I got to work with the artist, plan out where all the images were going, make selections of the works, and help them achieve their vision,” Sholtzy said.
The exhibition opened at the end of the spring semester and was created for undergraduate students enrolled in the Department of Art during the 2023-2024 academic year. Painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, metals, printmaking, and graphic design are all different types of media that are represented in the department.
The Rubin Center invites nationally and internationally recognized professionals in graphic design and fine arts to judge the exhibition and award prizes in each medium represented.
For example, Martin French is an illustrator, designer, and educator from Portland, Oregon whose work spans over a diverse media context including postage stamps, street murals, album covers, picture books, visual essays, and animated commercials.
The Fine Arts juror, Annette Dimeo Carlozzi, is an independent curator from Austin, Texas, hired in 1979 by Director Laurence Miller as the first professional Curator at Laguna Gloria Art Museum.
“Student show is a great opportunity for students at UTEP to get some experience with working in an institution as an artist,” Sholtzy said. “It is a juried exhibition, meaning we bring people in to come make selections of the work, and then from that, as a member of the curatorial team, I worked on where that placement was going to go.”
Both exhibits are still currently open and free to the public to come checkout.
Israel Garcia is the multimedia editor and can be reached at [email protected].
