Artists Against The Bomb

RAVEL’s Spring 2025 course, Environmental Art and Regenerative Ecologies: Healing Sacred Relations, focused on the ongoing effects of nuclear colonialism in New Mexico and how Peoples, communities, and the environment have continued to be impacted without consent. Working with cultural leaders and elders from the Communities for Clean Water Coalition, Tewa Women United, Honor Our Pueblo Existence, and Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, students learned about Los Alamos National Laboratory’s (LANL) colonial legacy in New Mexico. Our course critically engaged with topics ranging from the mismanagement of toxic waste and negligence to prioritize remediation to identifying dominant cultural narratives that normalize and justify these harmful actions. We also partnered with Northern New Mexico College and the Northern Stewards Program to practice counter mapping techniques to introduce anti-colonial perspectives into our ways of seeing and relating to the world. Our partnerships align our intentions and articulate ways in which artistic practice can work together with communities and other disciplines to affect cultural narratives. Students drew on emplaced research and participation with these themes to create posters for the Artists Against the Bomb project, organized by Estudio Pedro Reyes in collaboration with ICAN. Reyes warns, “According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, we are currently at 89 seconds to midnight.” Which means, we have never been closer than we are today to the possibility of nuclear war.”Building from the incredibly rich resources from the past spanning arts, literature, and activism, Artists Against the Bomb is a global collection of historic and contemporary posters calling for the abolishment of nuclear weapons production and deployment. Join us to learn more about these critical and timely issues and to celebrate the resiliency and vibrancy of New Mexico’s communities.