Collective Constructs: The Podcast

Steven Hurley never planned to work in art—he moved to Albuquerque to run a coffee cart, but the more he worked in galleries, the more he came to find the work continually exciting and deeply meaningful. Hurley has now been at the University of New Mexico Art Museum for 18 years, working his way from curatorial assistant to his current role as Exhibitions Coordinator, and in that time he has installed countless exhibitions. In this conversation, we talk about all the work that goes into putting on exhibitions, how there are teams of people involved in making any show possible, and how all that work, ideally, is invisible to the museum visitors.

A museum is a huge institution, and often comes with decades of baggage—navigating that history, and making it relevant to audiences today, is no easy task. Arif Khan knows about this challenge: he's been the Director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum since 2016, overseeing exhibitions, raising funds to keep the museum growing in strength, and making sure everyone feels welcome in the space. In our conversation with Khan, we gained insight into the challenges of university museums in general, and a little hindsight about what makes UNMAM special.

Mary Statzer is a curator, an art historian, and an artist herself. In her current role as Curator of Prints and Photography at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Statzer oversaw the genre-spanning exhibition Hindsight/Insight 2.0: Portraits, Landscapes, and Abstraction from the UNM Art Museum. This experimental exhibition series is devoted to complicating existing narratives about racism, decolonization, and gender stereotypes within the museum's collection, and Statzer has chosen to work with a series of collaborators to decenter her own curatorial voice. In this episode, we talk to Statzer about her role at the museum, how she came to be a curator, and what excites her about the possibilities that collaboration opens up.

The artist Betty Hahn has never taken the conventions of photography for granted. Her playful work often combines photography with other craft and fine art media, including embroidery and printmaking. A prolific creator, Hahn was also a photography professor at the University of New Mexico from 1975 - 1997 and continues to exhibit her work nationally and international. Collective Constructs had the privilege of visiting Hahn in her studio in Albuquerque, where she generously shared her thoughts on her work, her current practice, and the lessons she learned from decades of teaching.