Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium, a recent exhibition curated by Emmanuel Ortega, Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at UIC’s Department of Art History, has been featured in several publications—including Hyperallergic and Southwest Contemporary. For the exhibition, Ortega commissioned 15 contemporary Latinx artists to respond to ex-votos from NMSU’s Mexican Retablo Collection, the largest of its kind in the US. Traditionally, ex-votos are small devotional paintings made on tin depicting miracles; however, for the exhibition, Ortega encouraged the artists to work beyond this traditional medium, and the results were a range of abstract and conceptual installations that helped bring this artform in conversation with the ideas of devotion, resilience, and un/belonging.
The exhibition is on view at the University Art Museum at New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, New Mexico) through December 22. Learn more »
11.28.2022