About

Spring Reception, Saturday, March 22, 2025, 3:00-6:00 pm

Professor Meggan Gould, who teaches photography within the Department of Art at UNM and serves as the Associate Dean of Research, is a contemporary photographer whose work often explores the rhetorical, semiotic, and material ways in which photography and its tools—namely, cameras—have been socially constructed. She places under the lens facets of camera technology that usually reside comfortably outside the resultant image—the varying structures and functions of viewfinders, film frame counters, and camera icons—questioning the particular ways in which these seemingly natural and neutral attributes shape the photographer, and the medium itself.

During the creation of her series “7 Pictures Remaining,” the artist’s images of camera counters took on a surprising new dimension when she discovered that many of the cameras documented contained rolls of undeveloped film. Gould opened nearly all the cameras in the collection and discovered hundreds of never-before-seen images residing within. This yielded fascinating discoveries and intimate moments connecting cameras, and former camera owners, to their images, effectively operating as a “shadow archive” within the California Museum of Photography (CMP) technology collection. A selection of prints made from these anonymous images are presented alongside Gould’s own work, attributing personal histories and biographies to these otherwise mute objects.

Reception: Friday, April 25, 2025, 5:00-7:30 pm

Join the free public reception celebrating the opening of the exhibition, Voces del Pueblo: Artists of the Levantamiento Chicano in New Mexico, curated by Ray Hernández-Durán, Ph.D. and Irene Vásquez, Ph.D.

This is an exhibition 7 years in the making that features a group of New Mexican artists who were among the earliest generation of Chicana and Chicano activists in the state. All 6 artists, 3 men and 3 women, were students at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) in Las Vegas in the early 1970s when Chicano scholar Pedro Rodríguez was hired as the inaugural Director of Chicano Studies at NMHU. It was at NMHU that these young men and women became politically active and proceeded to paint murals, produce art, and organize in New Mexico as part of the nascent Chicano civil rights movement that was unfolding nationally. The artworks on display capture a distinctly New Mexican Chicana and Chicano experience that has received little attention in Chicano art history.