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BURNING
UP THE STREETS OF ALBUQUERQUE AXLE CONTEMPORARY'S PROJECT E PLURIBUS UNUM SEEKS A PORTRAIT OF
THE CITY. Where is the heart of the city exactly?
It's really big. It's a very big heart because it starts somewhere
up that way and it goes all the way down. We're working with 516 arts in a project called
Heart of the City about downtown Albuquerque. This is Axel Contemporary. It's a mobile art
gallery. It's a place for people to show their creativity.
It's an experiment in art distribution. It's something that we began building together
not really knowing if we'd do one show or two shows, or one show a year, or how it would
go, but it seemed like something that would be really fun to do.
The idea is to promote experimentation in the arts, maybe more importantly it's to bring
art to people who may not normally experience art.
I find that a lot of times artists are working with galleries that are tied into doing one
kind of art. And so it was a way to see, both for myself and for others, a diverse body
of works. Installation projects. Performance arts. Promoting
the idea of things outside the van. We did a Haiku Road Sign project. We asked the poet
laureate out of Santa Fe to select 32 of these. It's a really great way of seeing the community
and allowing them to express themselves. Some artists we show have never shown before,
some have been showing for 40 or 50 years. We are able to expose a lot of people to artwork
who chose not to go to galleries or museums for whatever reason. A lot of people are coming
to our gallery because the truck looks really cool and they love trucks, and then they see
the art and they find that very interesting. This is called E Pluribus Unum. What we have
been doing is taking photos of each person and they bring in an object that they have
resonance to or that is of consequence to them. So it's not just a picture of somebody
it is a picture of somebody and something. >>soundbite>soundbite>soundbite>soundbite