UNM-led artist collective receives MAP Fund grant
January 25, 2023 - Mary Beth King
New Mexico's fronteristxs collective has been awarded $30,000 for The House of An-Aesthesia, an experimental runway performance with ungendered looks designed to disrupt surveillance technologies in Albuquerque, a city with one of the highest police brutality rates in the nation. The grant is from the MAP Fund, the longest running private funding source for new performance works, which invests in performing artists and their work as the critical foundation of imagining and co-creating a more equitable and vibrant society.
fronteristxs is a collective of artists in New Mexico working to end migrant detention and abolish the prison industrial complex and imagines and fights for a world of liberation for all. The fronteristxs collective consists of The University of New Mexico associate professor of Art & Ecology Szu-Han Ho, UNM associate professor of English Bernadine Hernández, and UNM alumni hazel batrezchavez and Martín Wannam, who received their Master of Fine Arts degrees in 2020. Martín Wannam is currently assistant professor of Art at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; hazel batrezchavez is the 2022 Artist in Residence at Radford University Department of Art.
House of An-Aesthesia (HOAA) utilizes fashion as a tool to disrupt the collective numbness to the surveillance and policing we experience in everyday spaces, Ho explained. HOAA examines the intersections of fashion, race, gender, sexuality, ability, policing, and capitalism in order to build life-affirming communities through an abolitionist framework.
Read more at UNM Newsroom.
