Mexico, Florida and Europe: Work/Travel in 2024

My recent trip to Europe was part fun, part work. I spent time with family and friends in Hamburg and Glüeckstadt, Germany; Ferragudo and Lisbon, Portugal; also London, England. Naturally, me being me, I visited art galleries and museums in the majority of these places. Perhaps the most powerful of these experiences was my visit to the Museu do Aljube in Lisbon. Here the rise and fall of the dictator Salazar, whose nationalist party came to power in 1926, is documented in detail. The exposition culminates in the overthrow of Salazar’s dictatorship in April of 1974. Could such a dictatorship occur in the United States of America, I wondered. Other museum visits were more upbeat, such as London’s fabulous National Portrait Gallery and the Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon. This houses the vast collection of British/Armenian collector Calista Gulbenkian with works dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans to contemporary art. In Cascais I explored the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego. I liked Rego’s early mixed media collages best. The only other country I can think of that has an entire museum dedicated to a female artist is the Irma Stern Museum in South Africa.

Germany was my first destination, London my second. After leaving the third of my destinations, a week-long family reunion in Ferragudo on the Algarve coast, I spent a blissful month at an artists retreat, Avíario Studio in Ferreira do Zêzere. I stayed in a lovely home on a lake surrounded by mountains that I shared with another Avíario Studio artist. We’d be driven into the studio each weekday morning where we worked until evening. We had several dinners out with all the artists (most of whom stayed in a house in town) and a few staff members, and explored nearby towns, especially Tomar with its vast fort overlooking the town and fascinating history dating back to before the days of the Knights Templar. Tomar is where I conducted my second workshop on our ongoing multimedia project about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women of North America,They Had No Time to Say Goodbye, during this trip. The workshop was held at T’Inspirar Cooperativa Integral where, once again, I showed the video of the pilot project created at an artists’ retreat in Guadalajara early last year. Since then I’ve teamed up with Patricia Yazzie, a retired educator who has dedicated much of her life to “working with her people,” the Diné. Here’s her take on the #MMIW crisis: As a Diné woman and mother of a young daughter, I am particularly grateful for the various forms of the MMIW movement that is helping to educate the public about this ongoing crisis. In thinking about brutalized family members, personal and Tribal, it is heartbreaking that my memories must include the brutal as well as the wonderful. What can I do? I can decide to remember and learn, share, and help myself and others live the best lives we can, free of violence and aggression.

 

 

 

The first workshop of the trip was at Collage Arts in London. An article, including an interview with me, was published in a local paper. Also, at Collage Arts, we had a   pop-up exhibition during the weekend after the workshop. During the course of the exhibition  I gave a very well received presentation to approximately twenty young theater students, one of whom said we should write a play about the #MMIWG crisis. What an excellent idea!

During a break between my two residencies I spent ten days in the historic Alfama district in Lisbon. This was the only area not destroyed by the earthquake in 1755. Alfama became my headquarters as I explored the area around Lisbon learning about Portugal’s complex, and sometimes dark, history dating back to the Roman era through the Medieval period and the centuries during and after the Moors invaded Portugal. I also learned more about its history as the first and major slave trading nation.

My second residency was South of Lisbon at Buinho FabLab in the village of Messejana. At Avíario Studio I had added red paint to each image on an x-ray created during the two European workshops, as well as those not already painted during our paint party in my Albuquerque studio before I left for Europe. No wonder my luggage was heavy—I was traveling with the work resulting from three workshops: both European workshops (plus one I had previously conducted with Libros New Mexico Book Arts Guild in Albuquerque). Also that created by my students and former colleagues during a three-week visit to St Petersburg in the spring of ’24. At Buinhofab I stitched the x-rays together to create long scrolls to be included in our final installation. Towards the end of my stay at Buinhofab I gave my final presentation on my work on They Had No Time to Say Goodbye to the director, his wife, staff and volunteers.

Images, clockwise, L to R: Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais; a typical azulejo with a religious theme. Azulejos are another remnant of the Moors; view from the village of Messejana; the Christmas tree on the plaza, Messejana; The patterns on sidewalks in Portugal are “calçada portuguesa” (Portuguese pavement), which are intricate mosaic designs made from small black and white stones, typically arranged in geometric patterns, creating a distinctive art form visible on many pedestrian areas throughout the country; essentially, you can consider them as “walking on art” due to the detailed designs.

Photos showing the progression of images of Indigenous women’s faces scratched by artists the world over on 9” x 8” x-rays in the process of turning them into long scrolls. These will be incorporated into our multimedia installation, They Had No Time to Say Goodbye. The installation includes several elements including a book of the same title. To learn more view a short video.

 

 

Losing my only child was the impetus for publishing a book A Leaf in The Wind: Poems by Jaro Majer, Artwork by Rose Marie Prins then, after I moved to New Mexico in 2022, starting work on They Had No Time to Say Goodbye. I can empathize, in a manner that recognizes no boundaries of race or creed between us, to the experience of loss that Indigenous mothers who have lost their daughters must feel.

But life must go on…At the end of January, 2024, I returned from three months at an artists retreat in Guadalajara where the work you see on the video of the pilot project of They Had No Time to Say Goodbye on my website was created and exhibited in a pop-up exhibition. A few weeks later, I was in the Tampa Bay Area visiting old friends and teaching two painting workshops at the Morean Arts Center. I’m currently teaching painting on Zoom through the Morean Arts Center.

I first traveled extensively in Europe when I was twenty. I hitch-hiked around the Continent with a couple of art school friends for three months and saw many of the wonders (plus tragedies, and soon-to be tragedies, such as East Berlin and the then Yugoslavia) of mid Twentieth Century Europe. Many decades later, I made what may have been my last trip to Europe. And what a trip it was!

When the time came for me to pack up and leave this diverse and beautiful country, I had fallen in love with it and its people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This striking image of an Indigenous woman scratched on an x-ray is one of the many created by artists world wide. If you’d like to participate in our project, DM me on social media or reach out to me through the Contact form on my web site. Every participant will be acknowledged in the final exhibition(s).

I’ll leave you with a quote from the article in London’s Haringey Community Press mentioned above: According to Amnesty International Indigenous people “experience the same harsh realities all over the world.” The charity adds: “Their human rights are routinely violated by state authorities, and they face high levels of marginalization and discrimination.” New Mexico, as the state with the highest rate of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the United States, has a large Indigenous population that has been battling marginalization and discrimination for centuries—the federal government, the media and law enforcement continue to pay nothing but lip service to the crisis of #MMIW.