Margaret Curtis

“Three years ago, I picked up a book on Native American history and have been reading obsessively on the topic ever since. In 2015, I had the opportunity to visit the basement of the Carnegie Library in the 1880’s boomtown of Las Vegas, NM, where I was able to leaf through newspapers printed in 1879. Since then, I’ve been playing off of and exploring aspects of those newspapers— from their boosterism and sensationalism to layout and design—as a way to explore my feelings as a white American woman to the complex and suppressed history of our culture.

Initially, the work reflected feelings of sadness, shame, and regret—not only at our nation’s history but at my longstanding ignorance of it. Technique-wise, I mimicked the engravings of historical illustrations, maps, and newspapers though quill pens and frisket, hand-carved rubber stamps, and homemade feather pens. Histrionic verbal phrases and wordplay—“bending over backwards,” “at the end of my rope,”” burning bridges”— became visual metaphors. But not wanting to fall into the glib romanticization of the 19th century that characterizes so much of the hipster aesthetic, I decided to introduce elements of a more boisterous critique: to meet the absurd with absurdity and the obscene with the obscene. I created a feminist anti-hero, Anne Thraxe. She is complicit in the sweep of everyday white supremacist ideologies that built this nation—Calvinistic notions of God’s chosen people, American Exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, and the brutality of early unfettered capitalism and its lust for gold, etc.—but is determined to disrupt it all as well. She is paradox. She is ribald. She is uncontainable.

The larger pieces are complex drawings built of digital prints of the earlier work, stamps and new drawing on top of that. I consider the processes involved to all be the same thing—drawing—just in different layers or stages. The process of visual accumulation is itself a metaphor for the heaps of my own mental detritus and emotional shards that made digesting the historical record in a holistic way impossible. They are meant to be uncomfortable pieces, but not shrill. I want people to take pleasure in viewing them and have fun getting lost in the imagery and associations. With any luck, the viewer might walk away unsettled and asking herself, “What was that?” I can pose questions but can’t offer any answers.

I also hope, as the election approaches, that we are reminded that hucksterism and snake oil salesmen have a long history in our country, as does the mindset of the settler-colonist who used religious nationalism, a love of gun violence, and the quest for capital as justifications for extreme racial violence.”