Early in the summer of 2008, my husband, Rick Yasko and I rented an adobe apartment in Santa Fe, New Mexico for three glorious weeks which afforded us both our typical “go, see, and do” vacation with the bonus of plenty of time to wind down, regroup and relax.
Santa Fe is a grand “art town” with world class galleries, museums and art centers everywhere. The delicious food, varied cultural traditions and unique architecture show a strong mix of American Indian, Mexican, and Spanish influences. The high altitude and desert landscape provide dramatic vistas, beautiful flora and fauna, and diverse weather patterns.
We spent most of our days traveling on foot, exploring the city from one end to the other. Other days we wandered through the beautiful New Mexican landscape by car. We particularly enjoyed happening upon The Sanctuary of Chimayo, a sacred Catholic shrine with a tiny town built around it. Though the tri-cultural influences are engaging, I am most drawn to the Mexican influences in Santa Fe. Nowhere outside of Mexico, have I seen more devote reverence for Our Lady of Guadalupe, than I did in Chimayo and Santa Fe. Also enticing was the abundance of “Milagros” available for purchase everywhere – food for my collection. The Museum of International Folk Art is on my “top ten” list of favorite museums with a fabulous gift shop that gave me the pleasure/pain experience of wanting to take everything home with me.
This trip influenced two bodies of work: Small Offering Journal – Santa Fe and Small Offerings – Hearts. Small Offering Journal – Santa Fe is a collection of collages made in the evenings during the trip and in the months following the trip in response to our meandering adventures. For exhibition purposes, each collage is made on an individual sheet of paper while archival digital images of the collages are incorporated into my collage journal. Small Offerings – Hearts is a series of small, detailed, highly textured ceramic hearts made from mid-range brown clay and painted with underglaze. These hearts were directly influenced by the all pervasive devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe and the abundance of “Milagros” in New Mexico. The hearts’ surfaces are covered with symbols and imagery that have appeared in my work before and will continue to do so in the future.
In the fall of 2006, I exhibited my sabbatical work on campus in the exhibition, Angi Curreri - Small Offering and Silvia Lizama - Photography. In order to include the collages from my Tuscan Journal in the exhibit, sixteen images were scanned directly into the computer and printed actual size. The original journal was exhibited opened to the final collage, Frutta Bella, in order to show the difference between the actual collages and the scans. Sadly the journal was stolen from this exhibition.