Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.

SEEKING TO HEAL THE FRACTURED RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BODY, MIND, AND NATURE, DOCTOR KRISTIN ANCHORS REIMAGINES MEDICAL TEXTBOOKS INTO INTRICATE COLLAGES.

ARCHITECT ANTOINE PREDOCK DESCRIBES HIS DESIGNS AS A POETIC ENCOUNTER.

DIRECTOR OF THE ALBUQUERQUE MUSEUM ANDREW CONNORS SHARES JIMI HENDRIX'S SHIRT FROM 1970.

UKRAINIAN AMERICANS OF NEW MEXICO COMMEMORATE TWO YEARS OF WAR.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES CUT AND PASTE THE BODY >>Faith: Kristin, you transform medical textbooks into these very intricate collages, bridging the gap between the scientific and the artistic.

So I'm curious what inspired you to fuse these disciplines in your work?

>>Kristin: So in college, when I was studying life sciences, I was also studying philosophy.

And so when I studied philosophy, I learned a lot about the division of mind, body, spirit and the calculative nature of science and how it's dividing and mechanicalizing things.

And I kept returning back to the humanities and to the arts.

And so it's always been married for me.

And in medicine, especially emergency medicine, it's so chaotic and unpredictable and it's so based in the lived experience of people that you can't, you can't divorce it from life.

And so in residency when I was really stressed, because it's a long and arduous training process, many years I had this stack of books I've been carrying around from all my training textbooks, medical textbooks, and they were essentially useless.

They become valueless once a new edition comes out.

And I think one day I looked at them and I was like, how can I repurpose this?

And I was like, okay, I'm going to focus on this meditative act of marrying the lived experience back into the scientific body.

And so I just started cutting it up and putting it back together in a new way.

>>Faith: So this piece is titled Tree of Life.

So tell me a little bit about the inspiration behind the title and the imagery.

>>Kristin: My very first piece when I was on the floor, like very much not expecting to be a collage artist, but just like letting the work move through me has a plant coming out of the head, coming down through the esophagus as a bolus.

And it was already trying to interpret our relation with plants, like what does it mean to be interconnected?

And I'm sort of returning to that theme in my most recent pieces, which I'm now titling a series of Tree of Life.

And this one has at the very bottom dendrites, which is a name of wood.

It's essentially like the root system, but we use these words all the time in our body.

So dendrites are the end of neurons in our brain.

Our limbs are the same as tree limbs, and in the center is the intestinal system and the vasculature that feeds or pulls from that sort of representing roots.

So it's like food is moving through just as the trees are pulling nutrients up from the earth in relation already to all of the gut flora we have in our system, just like roots in the ground are in relation to all the fungi and other things that are helping them collect their nutrients.

In the background is the star material, which is continuing to reference the fact that we are made of star stuff in the vast void that we're flying through right now.

Space comes up in a lot of my work.

>>Faith: Why is that?

>>Kristin: I think some of my early work was looking at where did we come from, what are the leading hypotheses on the material that make us up?

And some of that is that these materials flew here in the collisions from space and that collision is necessary for life and that it's both infinite and wondrous and part of exactly who we are.

>>Faith: So you've talked about reconnecting the body with the lived experience.

Can you explain what that means and why it's important to you?

>>Kristin: It basically means I'm not just a body moving through world.

I'm a body who experiences a story like I was born into this family with these genetics in this culture, however that is, and my body's in relation to that.

And you can't just treat everybody the same way.

You have to look at the circumstances of their lives or our lives in order to move with that, to facilitate that along.

And I think furthermore, on a philosophical level, just remembering that we have this central experience, we have this lived experience, and it's valuable beyond the factual.

We need the poetic, we need the art, we need the life force that moves through us to shine through just as much.

A GIFT It's really hard to articulate where so-called design comes from.

I mean architecture is an art.

It's a poetic encounter every time out.

With client, with sight, cultural power, you never no its kind of a roll of the dice in terms of what's going to happen.

So, I just sort of look through the rear view, I look through the peripheral vision rather than a head on idea about something.

I let things sum up in my feelings.

You live your life and you get filled up with stuff in life, then there's some kind of poetic filter that selectively releases that experience.

Architecture is mysterious and if it's really architecture then It's not about, hey where are the bathrooms, how many square feet, all that.

That's so boring.

You could do that in two seconds.

You could figure that out, but the other deeper, deeper thing, way deeper thing is what defines architecture.

It's the first National museum out of Ottawa.

It's the Canadian Museum of Human rights.

So, It's very, very important building for the Canadian culture.

So, a human rights museum what do you do with that?

But I thought of roots engaging the Earth, like the building clutches the earth.

So, these pieces that come out are call them roots.

So, they establish a connection to the Earth.

The power of this place, the forks are where the Red River meets the Assiniboine River, a place of rendezvous for everyone from the earliest first nations peoples where there was great dispute resolution here without turning to violence on that very same place as the building.

So, it's got this anchorage in a human rights endeavor.

So, then the building aspires to the sky, to hope and optimism, and acknowledgment of the struggles.

So, the cloud that wraps the building is a glass cloud, cloud like.

Maybe you could read doves wings into it if you wanted to, you know, take and extrapolate the building to a human rights narrative.

You know, tower of hope maybe, the aspiration to the sky that we all kind of have and with our feet to the ground.

The aesthetic of the building just kind of happens.

You know there's no point where you say I'm going to put some aesthetics on it now.

You know what I mean right?

It's either there or it isn't.

But the process starts from a lot of research.

I mean this, that's an example that collage back there.

That's an example of my research process.

I was an action painter at UNM arts school, and it was paralleling architecture.

So, the idea of collage and physicality and the gesture.

Literally, the gesture in making something.

The gestural aspect, the research aspect, is in the mix, you know, that you're kind of stirring up all the time.

When I travel all around to do projects all around this country or internationally, the question arises well how do you tune into these different places and how do you empathize and do the things that I'm talking about when you're kind of coming out of nowhere?

New Mexico is the place to start.

Because I've been working here for, I don't know, 50 years or more, I've lost count and it's just so much in my system, you know, awareness of wind direction, you know with sun.

The importance of cultural diversity, this is the laboratory for an architect, for anybody.

I did the American Heritage Center, an art museum in Laramie, Wyoming and the lessons I've been talking about applied there.

You know, how you look at the place, and it is a geographical phenomenon called the Laramide Orogeny which means that the mountains are instead of wearing down and diminishing like the Rockies are doing, the mountains are coming up.

There's some kind of upheaval going on, so I thought, well let's make a mountain.

Let's think about making a new mountain for that horizon.

At its base I think is the position of rendezvous, crossroads.

So, there's some encampment, durability to its base.

So, there's this big mountainous form, and at its base a fragmented art museum.

So that's kind of the big idea, but working from within so the mountain notion had to work at the same time with programmatic, investigation into what they were presenting there, and storing there.

You know, when you talk about place it's kind of slippery.

What defines place, what is it?

In the information age it's so easy to even out cultural sensibility, to even out how things look.

So that's all the more reason to pay attention to the specifics of place and this is a good example of it.

When I went to work on my project in Qatar, an educational facility in Qatar for her highness Sheika Mozah, and she really controls kind of the cultural message.

Qatar's special if you know Al Jazeera is there and they said okay well you really got to go to the desert, and I found this Pepsi can.

I noticed that it had been in the sand and it's been really messed with.

Like somebody took a sand blasting machine and blasted one side of it off.

Well that's the desert sand doing it.

I really had to think about the wind direction for my project and how I would defend against it.

Architecture, with a capital A, is a poetic encounter, with a client, with a sight, with a place, with a people, a collective of people.

So, what's the role of an architect?

What's the mission supposed to be?

I think as with anyone, any individual in an endeavor, is to have your inner content, your deepest inner content made visible.

So then what you do when you make your work, if you happen to be an architect, then you let that be a kind of guide.

You trust that inner place and you have to find that inner place.

I mean that's up to, how do you figure that out?

I don't know.

Everybody's got their own way of doing it.

So, then the role of it is to be true to that.

The role of an architect, be true to that, and see what happens, you know, in your work.

I don't think a there's some master vision; oh, I'm going to do buildings that are changing society or anything like that.

Architects have done that too often and really screwed things up drastically by thinking they're masters of the universe and we're going to shape society and all that stuff.

Problem with architecture is what you put out there.

That's not going away you know.

It's not like a poem is sort of in the air, you know, in a book or in the air.

It's out there to mess with people.

So, some other impulse in that building should last.

Almost superseding its physicality.

I think a great piece of work, a building, a poem, a novel, music, a green enchilada, is a gift to mankind, if it's coming from a special place.

JIMI HENDRIX'S SHIRT All right this is COLORES and we're here with Andrew Connors, director of the Albuquerque Museum, hello Andrew, welcome.

Hello Devon.

It's good to talk to you.

Good to talk to you nice to see you in the museum.

So, we are looking at a Jimi Hendrix shirt, what about that shirt and Jimi Hendrix in particular sort of personifies this whole psychedelic rock poster aesthetic?

This is the shirt that Jimi Hendrix wore in 1970, in June of 1970 when he performed at the Albuquerque Civic Auditorium.

Obviously, Hendrix traveled all around the United States and he played here in Albuquerque in 1970.

And tell us what inspired you to put this shirt in the exhibition?

Well the exhibition is called Dreams Unreal: The Genesis of the Psychedelic Rock Poster and who personified that psychedelia better than Jimi Hendrix?

Uh we were just so pleased that we were able to get it for the Albuquerque Museum collection along with the poster that uh announced Jimi Hendrix playing in Albuquerque, tickets were available for $3 $4 or $5 at the Civic Auditorium, he played two sets that night.

Especially since the Civic Auditorium it doesn't exist anymore.

No unfortunately it was torn down uh it wasn't so great acoustically but as a piece of modern architecture it was really uh terrific.

It was the one piece of architecture that Frank Lloyd Wright when he came to Albuquerque said that he really liked.

Jimi Hendrix really had a look and you can see it on all of his covers this is uhh from the album the Jimi Hendrix Experience from '67 um and you can see here uh that he's wearing this incredible uh shirt with a face on it and two eyes and his band members are also wearing this sort of psychedelic look um, and Hendrix really decided that as a rock musician he could be a very different person uh from a mainstream United States musician and so he identified this look created this look for himself and it seems that almost every rock musician since then has felt the freedom to really create their own personality and their own identity uh the back side of the album shows this iconic uh portrait that was also used in the um, the poster uh two years later after this um album came out so it really became the iconic image of Jimi Hendrix um again wearing outrageous clothes and with his big afro backlit.

So there's this great look um, and it's not just about um performance, the performance skills but it's about being somebody and being proud of who you were and in the 1960's that very much was part of the psyche of young people.

The embrace of individual expression that we see in that shirt and we see in these posters, do you think that's what gives this art resonance moving forward?

Does it resonate with you personally?

I think the idea of something new and something innovative um really um is embraced by every young person, every young person wants to try new things, be adventuresome, uh be something different than anybody else had been and um in in this era in the 1960's, early 1970's there was there, very much that potential that we could be anything we wanted to be uh we in the United States we're strong, we're bold, uh this was our century, we could experiment, we could try new things and all of our friends if they're truly our friends are gonna welcome something new and welcome the identity that we choose for ourselves and I just love it because of that and I think that a lot of people return to the 60's with that seeking of "who am I?

Who do I wanna be?

And, how am I going to be that person?

I think it's a great moment of opportunity, of optimism and of celebration of personality.

I love it!

Thank you so much for your time Andrew.

Thanks for talking about these fantastic objects.

Thanks so much Devon we really appreciate talking about this.

TWO YEARS [AIR RAID SIRENS] >> CAN YOU IMAGINE OUR KIDS WAKE UP TO THIS SOUND?

OUR KIDS CARRY THE TRAUMA THAT IS BEING PUT ON THEM BY THE AIR RAIDS.

[MUSIC] >> FR BUBNEVYCH: WE ALSO PRAY FOR ALL THOSE WOUNDED, TRAUMATIZED BY THE HOSTILITIES AND ATROCITIES THAT GOD WILL -- [PRAYING] >> FR BUBNEVYCH: LORD HAVE MERCY, LORD HAVE MERCY.

LORD HAVE MERCY.

AMEN.

[SINGING PRAYERS] GOD GRANT THEM MANY YEARS.

GOD GRANT THEM MANY BLESSED YEARS IN HEALTH AND HAPPINESS, IN HEALTH AND HAPPINESS.

GOD BLESS THEM MANY BLESSED YEARS.

[SINGING PRAYERS] [SILENCE] The award winning arts and culture series ¡COLORES!

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Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.