December 4, 2018
Plaza Hotel by Behshad Yekkeh/Media Arts and Technology; mixed media, pen on paper / digital coloring
Las Vegas, N.M – New Mexico Highlands University media arts and technology students will showcase their work in the department’s annual fall exhibit December 11 at 5:30 p.m. in the university’s McCaffrey Historic Trolley Building at 1183 San Francisco Ave. The exhibit is open to the public.
“We welcome visitors to the Fall 2019 Media Arts and Technology Exhibit and look forward to sharing our hardworking students’ creativity this winter,” said media arts and technology professor Mariah Hausman Fox. “The show will feature cultural technology, physical computing, photography, videography, graphic design, digital painting, mixed media, and installations by undergraduates and graduates.
“We are especially excited to debut the work of our first MFACT (Master of Fine Arts in Cultural Technology) cohort, and special installations and personal projects will be on view,” said Hausman Fox, who coordinates the graduate student program.
“We really feel like the McCaffrey Historic Trolley Building belongs to the Las Vegas community and we welcome the public to see the variety of outstanding work our students consistently produce,” said Miriam Langer, department chair for media arts and technology.
One highlight is a multimedia exhibition created for the Manitos Community Memory Project, a collaborative initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Students in media arts and technology faculty member Lauren Addario’s Media Arts Seminar Class created the exhibit. It highlights 10 of the 500-plus stories Juan B. Rael collected in 23 rural New Mexico villages in the 1930s and 1940s.
“The goal of the Manitos Community Memory Project is to create a digital community archive of the cultural heritage of the region,” Addario said. “The exhibit features 10 panels that include the stories of 10 storytellers from all walks of life, with each story deeply reflective of its time and place. There is also an audio track in the exhibit, recorded by the students, as a way to immerse the visitor in the stories as they were told in Spanish.”
Estevan Rael-Galvez, director of the Manitos Community Memory Project, did the content development, translation and editing for the exhibit.
Highlands students who created the exhibit include undergraduates Samantha Gallegos, Darian Manzanares, Krislyn Padilla and Daniel Ulibarri. Graduate assistants include Behshad Yekkeh, Ashley Arellanes and Krista Marquez.
Shane Flores, media arts and technology graduate, is the teaching and research assistant for the exhibit. Natasha Vasquez, media arts and technology intern and Seabury Fellow, also contributed to the project.
Additional support for the Manitos Community Memory Project exhibit came from Celina García and Mimi Roberts.