Screening of The River that Harms and Under the Cloud with a Virtual Q&A by Pedro Reyes
Wednesday, August 30th 2023, 6:00-8:00pm
Rio Grande Theatre in downtown Las Cruces
211 N Main St, Las Cruces, NM 88001

Public Zoom Link for Q&A starting at approximately 7:10 pm mst:
https://nmsu.zoom.us/j/83723973552

Screened in conjunction with Cara Despain’s Specter and Branigan Cultural Center’s juried show Trinity: Legacies of Nuclear Testing, filmmaker Colleen Keane’s The River That Harms and artist Pedro Reyes’s Under the Clouds consider the duration and devastation of uranium mining and nuclear waste on Indigenous territory in the U.S. After the screening of these two films (Prior to), the UAM will host a virtual Q&A with Pedro Reyes and Joanna Keane Lopez.  Joanna Keane Lopez, the daughter of Colleen Keane, is a multidisciplinary artist who seeks to investigate the history and ongoing reality of land contamination, specifically that of nuclear colonialism that has shaped the landscape of the Southwestern United States and beyond.

The River That Harms (1987, 45 minutes) written, produced, and directed by Colleen Keane, documents the largest radioactive waste spill in U.S. history—a national tragedy that occurred on Navajo Nation lands and received minimal attention. In 1979, the storage dam for the United Nuclear Corporation's Church Rock uranium mine failed, releasing 94 million gallons of water contaminated with uranium waste into the Rio Puerco in New Mexico. The toxic flood had devastating consequences to the main water supply for Navajo residents who live along the river, and a tributary of the major source of water for Los Angeles, California. Navajo ranchers, their children, and farm animals waded through the river unaware of the danger of radiation exposure. The River That Harms tells the story of the spill and how it impacted the land, health, and economy of the Navajo.

Under the Cloud (2023, 25 minutes) by artist Pedro Reyes investigates the ongoing history of nuclear tests, uranium mining, and nuclear waste disposal on Indigenous lands in North America. Commissioned by SITE Santa Fe for the exhibition Pedro Reyes: DIRECT ACTION (2023), the video expands on existing dialogues around harmful nuclear effects, elevating the voices of those who have witnessed and experienced the consequences of nuclear colonialism and those who continue to resist it. A special thanks to filmmakers Colleen Keane and Pedro Reyes, and SITE Santa Fe for allowing the UAM and Rio Grande Theatre to host these screenings.

Pedro Reyes (Mexico City, 1972) studied architecture but considers himself a sculptor. Although his works integrate elements of theater, psychology, and activism. His work takes a variety of forms, from penetrable sculptures (Cápulas, 2002-08) to puppet productions (La Revolución Permanente, 2014), (Fabricando travesuras, 2018). In 2008, Reyes initiated the ongoing Palas por Pistolas project in which 1,527 guns were collected in Mexico through a voluntary donation campaign to produce the same number of shovels to plant 1,527 trees. This led to Disarm (2012), where 6,700 destroyed guns were transformed into a series of musical instruments. In 2011, Reyes started Sanatorium, a transient clinic offering brief unexpected treatments mixing art and psychology. Originally commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Sanatorium has been in operation at Documenta 13, Kassel (2012), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2013), The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2014) and OCA, São Paulo (2015) among 10 other venues. In 2013, he presented the first edition of pUN: The People's United Nations at the Queens Museum in New York. pUN is an experimental conference in which ordinary citizens act as delegates from each of the UN countries and try to apply techniques and resources from social psychology, theater, art and conflict resolution to geopolitics. The second edition of pUN was held at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2015).  The third pUN General Assembly took place in December 2015 at the 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa, Japan. In 2015, he received the U.S. State Department Medal for the Arts and the Ford Foundation Fellowship.

In late 2016, he presented Doomocracy, an immersive theatrical installation commissioned by Creative Time. He held a visiting faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the fall of 2016, and held his residency at MIT CAST as the inaugural Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist. In addition, continuing his work with firearms, Pedro Reyes presented Return to Sender (2020) at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, which consists of a series of music boxes constructed from gun parts. Each box reproduces a well-known classical piece from the country of origin of the respective manufacturer. For Austria, a music box made from Glock gun parts plays Mozart; for Italy, Beretta guns play Vivaldi, etc. Alluding to the fact that the problem of violence begins in the factory where the guns are made.

Recently, Pedro Reyes was commissioned by The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists together with ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, winners of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, to raise awareness of the growing risk of nuclear conflict, for which he developed Atomic Amnesia to be presented in Times Square, NYC May 2022. For his work on disarmament, Reyes received the Luxembourg Peace Prize in 2021. At the same time, he inaugurated his largest exhibition to date in Mexico, at the Museo Marco in Monterrey. In 2022 Reyes had his first solo exhibition in Europe, at the Marta Herford Museum in Germany, where he presented a large body of his early work.

Joanna Keane Lopez (b. 1991, Albuquerque, New Mexico) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is informed through adobe, paper, clay, wood, textiles and song. She inherited the practice of working with adobe, a mixture of mud and straw, from her family who constructed, maintained, and lived in earthen homes and she continues the teachings of enjarradoras and adoberas, women who specialize in the traditional craft of earthen architecture. Keane Lopez’s practice restores the loss of vernacular land-based building methods through the production of contemporary sculpture, installation, collaborative performance, storytelling, and hands-on educational workshops that navigate loss, fragmentation, and post-colonial materiality. Her practice also investigates the history and ongoing reality of land contamination, specifically that of nuclear colonialism that has shaped the landscape of the Southwestern United States and beyond.

Keane Lopez has exhibited nationally at institutions which include: Lisson Gallery, SOMArts Cultural Center, The Momentary of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, SITE Santa Fe, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, Sarasota Art Museum, and has been supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

She is the daughter of The River that Harms director, Colleen Keane, and the nuclear weapons activist against depleted uranium, Damacio A. Lopez.

Colleen Keane (b. 1949, Detroit, MI) is a journalist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Keane wrote, produced, and directed the award-winning film, The River That Harms, an investigative study of the largest radioactive wastewater spill in U.S. history, which occurred on Navajo land in 1979. Since 1973, Keane has worked with Indigenous communities in the Southwestern United States, including the Navajo Nation, Acoma Pueblo, Santo Domingo Pueblo, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Tribe, and the Los Angeles Indian Center as a radio and television producer, grant writer, social worker, teacher, and journalist for the Navajo Times. Throughout the 1970s, Keane directed educational programs to implement the Indian Child Welfare Act to reunite Native American children with their families and tribes and taught broadcast journalism at the Alamo Navajo and Rock Point community schools in Arizona and New Mexico. She holds a Masters in Social Work from Arizona State University and a Masters in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Southern California.