The sacred and the mundane

The cross is straight and hard. He is stretched across it in a Y, his body thin and pale and nearly beautiful. And under a crown of thorns, like spokes on a bicycle wheel, Christ's eyes are almost closed. His cupped hands are pierced by rough nails, and thin streams of blood run to his elbows.

It almost hurts to look, and your eyes move on, first to ribs that look like rivulets in the sand and then to his knobby knees. You can picture the santero cradling this resigned figure in his arms as he carved, and then painted the kneecaps in distinct circles of bright red.

Like brake lights. Like clown noses. Like doll's cheeks.

"That, in itself, is a religious experience when you look at that object and imagine how it was used," says Tariana Nava-Nieves, curator of "Sacred Spaces" and the Fine Arts Center's 20,000-piece Hispanic and Native American art collection. "But you can't help thinking and imagining that at some point there was an intimate and private moment between the viewer and that work. Which is a powerful thing."

At a time of year when religious imagery is as common as our drive to gift gift gift, "Sacred Spaces" looks at faith in a very different context. The exhibition leans on the bedrock stories of Catholicism, but more important, it speaks to the delicate thread that connects us all: our humanity. The maker's. Christ's. Even that very human intersection of the sacred and the mundane.
Although much of the material hasn't been exhibited for years (if at all, Nava-Nieves says), the curator saw an opportunity to connect with museum founder Alice Bemis Taylor's passion - and her original vision for the focus of the museum. An avid collector of Southwestern art decades before most museums recognized it as worthy of acquiring, her collection became the heart of the museum's holdings when the center opened in 1936.

"I feel that I have her on my side. ‘This is exactly what you wanted, wasn't it?'" Nava-Nieves asks, almost as if Taylor were in the room. "This is exactly what this institution is meant to do."

Still, the curator knows that the material in "Sacred Spaces" may make some viewers uncomfortable. To help put these objects into context, she sprinkled a handful of images by New Mexico photographer Alex Harris among the old crucifixes, crosses and worn saints. Harris documented the homes of friends and neighbors of his rural New Mexico town over 20 years. In his photographs, life and faith mingle: A saint stands stiffly next to a box of Cheerios, a lowrider becomes an altar to car culture, and an old TV cabinet becomes a place of worship.

"It's actually something very personal, very intimate," Nava-Nieves says of the role of these objects in Catholic homes, "and that's something that anyone can relate to in their own way."
She laughs. "For me," she goes on, "it's something I understand very well. For example, I go to visit my parents in Puerto Rico and in my parents' bathroom, they have toiletries and they always have a ceramic virgin and a candle, which is always lit. It's part of that atmosphere, but also gives a sense of protection and enveloping love, a blessed life.
"It's amazing that an object can inspire that feeling."

THE BACK STORY
The religious objects in "Sacred Spaces" are small but draw a direct line to the monumental works made for European churches centuries earlier, says Tariana Nava-Nieves, curator of the Fine Arts Center exhibition. 
In the American Southwest, the Spanish conquistadors (and the religious orders that accompanied them) brought such material - or commissioned it locally - to decorate the churches they built in their mission to convert the Americas.

Nava-Nieves calls the works that began to appear in churches "17th- and 16th-century photocopies, in a way."
"Don't forget there was a language barrier," she goes on. "One way to teach Catholicism is through imagery. At that same time, they were working with indigenous artists. What you have is that marriage of the European images, sensibility and belief with those of the indigenous people. One example is the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is based on that European version but now based in the Americas."

Blending the old and the new, small-scale works emerged, speaking to both the long tradition of home altars among the Maya, Toltec and Mexica, and the distances many Catholics lived from a church.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS
In opposition to the religious objects themselves, curator Tariana Nava-Nieves included images by New Mexico photographer Alex Harris in "Sacred Spaces."

Over 20 years, Harris documented the lives of his neighbors and friends in a rural village in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Although no people appear in his images, the rooms and the detritus of its inhabitants' lives often paint a poignantly human picture. And in every image, you glimpse the quiet mingling of life and faith - in the bulto standing stiffly next to a box of Cheerios, or the transformation of an old cabinet TV into a nicho for sacred figures and bird figurines.
"You can sense that this is not a photojournalist stopping for a day to make a photograph," Nava-Nieves says. "You can tell someone made a personal connection that is palpable. It's brilliant."

By T.D. Mobley-Martinez