Delighted to reveal, The Mud Kin Project: “A Lightning Score,” an upcoming curatorial intervention by Tracy Fenix, opening on Friday, June 13- Sunday, June 15th at the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, NM✨
A Lightning Score is a short exhibit and performative intervention that honors the monsoon season. This gathering will showcase the powerful work of six artists rooted in Los Angeles and New Mexico, exploring light, sonic, and film interpretations and emotional overtures of ancestral lands. Participating artists include: Eva Aguila, Star Feliz, Margarita Paz-Pedro, Edson Reyes, Doza Mendoza, and Marcus Zuniga✨
An interactive performance by Eva Aguila & Star Feliz will happen on Friday at 6:30pm followed by Saturday day-long interventions including a Mud brick making workshop with Margarita Paz-Pedro, curator-led artist talk, and an evening forest group hike on Saturday, June 14th, show closes on Sunday, June 15th at 6pm.
ARTISTS⚡️
Eva Aguila @evaguila
Star Feliz @priestusssy
Margarita Paz-Pedro @pazpedro.clay
Edson Reyes @micoyotito
Doza Mendoza @dozadiaries
Marcus Zuniga @marcuszunigaofficial
Curated by @tracyfenix@mudkinproject
Designed by @danhy.o 🔥
The Mud Kin Project: “A Lightning Score” is currently self-funded and in the June “Community of Practice” residency at SFAI @santafeartinstitute .
The Mud Kin Project is a Land-based curatorial mapping project focused on Native and Latinx projects. RSVP for Sat events at [email protected] and Mud Brick Workshop on Eventbrite. Link in bio✨
Such an illuminating weekend of heart-warming devotion to the monsoon szn, land & all its elements for “A Lightning Score” exhibit weekend at @santafeartinstitute !💜
So much gratitude & thanks to @santafeartinstitute , all the participants artists, my friend Dan who designed the gorgeous flyer, Margarita for all her diligent & kind energies facilitating the mud workshop, Eva & Star for their transcendent performance, my siblings Alyssa & Freddy for their consistent support, Doza for their tender care hosting us, my SFAI cohort for their enthusiastic participation, community members who drove hours to witness us, and the amazing SFAI staff❤️✨
Such a beautiful viewing of “A Heart and a Land” exhibition by NM-based artists, Jordan Ann Craig and Joanna Keane Lopez, curated by Allison Glen at The Library Street Collective in Detroit✨ Joanna invited Maryssa Chavez to showcase one of her repurposed tin-framed “Mitote” works documented at one of Joanna’s adobe-making workshops back in New Mexico✨
Thankful to have serendipitously gathered with my friends Joanna & Yvette together with other Detroit art/ activist baddies💓
Wonderful weekend in Ann Arbor / Detroit to present a lecture on the Mud Kin Project at University of Michigan organized by the Global Postcolonialisms Collective ( @yvettegramirez , Nathan Omprasadham, & Deeksha Pareek) ✨
Many thanks & gratitude to my dear friend Yvette & the collective for the kind invitation and the participants for sharing reflections throughout the discussion on their emotional & ancestral connections to land & their mapping projects🙏🏽Read their responses throughout the slides💜
Such a generative & warming gathering for our “Native Mapping Strategies of Resistance” talk at SFAI with Daisy Quezada Ureña, Shayla Blatchford & Jeremy Dennis yesterday✨Thank you to SFAI for hosting us and all who joined us in person and online❤️🙏🏽
Hi friends, join us in Santa Fe or virtually this Fri, Nov 7th for “A Convening: Native Mapping Strategies of Resistance with artists Shayla Blatchford (Anti-Uranium Mapping Project), Jeremy Dennis (On This Site Project), and Daisy Quezada Ureña for a roundtable dialogue moderated by Tracy Fenix, curator of the Mud Kin Project at Santa Fe Art Institute! See y’all there or DM for zoom link✨💜
This conversation brings together artists whose creative practices utilize mapping as a strategy of resistance—countering state violence, erasure, and land dispossession. Together, they will discuss the challenges of hyper-surveillance, share methods for reclaiming place and narrative, and explore how collective mapping can mobilize power and visibility in the face of ongoing systemic oppression.
Audience members will have an opportunity to engage with presenters via Q&A and mapping questions engagement portion.
Free. Event link in bio✨DM for zoom link.
Conceptual map Image created by GAUCHE collective (Rayting Liang, Juan Madrid, and Freddy Martinez) on behalf of the first Mud Kin Project publication. @agauchething
My fam as creative collaborators holds one of the devotional keys to the @mudkinproject 💜 My siblings, Freddy / Elifete with his partner Ray and Juan Madrid for @agauchething collective provide editorial and creative design direction. My sister, Alyssa Chandelle has contributed photographs of our mom in her childhood adobe home in West Tejas and support with interview transcriptions at the early phase of the project.
Together, we’ve collaborated with over 20 artists and I’m excited about the next iteration of land-based and ecological based artist projects and relationships we’ll continue building together in community of artists, curators. scholars, land stewards, & kin 💜
Come pick up the second edition print of Mud Kin Publication at the New York Art Book Fair with @agauchething@printedmatter_artbookfairs in Sept 11-14✨
Thank you so much to @danhy.o for sharing this analog photo of my siblings and I back in June at SFAI ❤️
Read more about the project at tracyfenix.com/mud-kin-project
Many thanks to emerging filmmaker and rising star, Edson Reyes for showcasing his two films, “Xitlalli,” 2025 and “Relampagos entre mis manos,” 2025 ✨
“Xitlalli is a short experimental film that explores the various light textures and distorted images to
portray a fragmented vision. The images are accompanied by Mitiz Licona’s composed music
that evokes a dreamlike memory. Xitlalli means Star in Nahuatl. The film was named after
researching nebulas in other galaxies that resemble the retina. Coming across nebula IC 4066,
a dying star, it resembles the eye. The film intends to create the imagery of transformation, from
darkness to light, blindness to sight. Commencing with internal blurred visions, to fire, to
strobing lights, the sensation is interpretive. All the while we see a traveler throughout the film,
portrayed by Lizette Hernandez. This light practice reveals a reflective moment in the lives of
our own.”
Many thanks to Eva Aguila & Star Feliz for their stunning and spirit moving, “Echos Between Earth & Sky” performance last Friday❤️🔥
“Performing in between the glowing stone sculptures, Star Feliz and Eva Aguila awaken ancestral and sonic technologies, drawing on Indigenous cosmologies that guide them through ritual presence. The Earth recordings hum beneath our feet, slow vibrations of earth echoing like bells in our chest. Energy lingers in the air, haunted by mortality, rooted in memory.
Audio sourced from Michoacán lands pulses through the space, mapping out frequencies that speak to the land’s story. Through live performance, we are learning to listen—not only with ears but with our bones, skin, and breath. Grounding in nature becomes an act of reverence, a way of being present with the land. These vibrations invite us into a transition, balancing the paradoxes of being human: fragility and strength, silence and resonance, forgetting and remembering. Haunting, yes—but also healing. In this sacred exchange, we become conduits of sound and spirit, held gently in the invisible architecture of listening.”
Many thanks to amazing Margarita Paz-Pedro @pazpedro.clay ✨for facilitating this wholesome & playful mud brick making workshop on Sat at @santafeartinstitute ! 💜
We made 24 bricks together that will be sourced for Margarita’s upcoming large-scale public art seeded earthen project alongside the Rio Grande River with the NM ALMA org ! So happy & grateful to support you moving a bit closer to reaching your 300 brick goal for the project ✨Tysm to the community who showed up & joined us!
I’m happy to share that @mudkinproject@tracyfenix is a “Community of Practice” resident at @santafeartinstitute for March & June 2025 sessions! Come out to our “Open Studios” tomorrow in Santa Fe, where you can snag some native flower seed bombs. I’ll also present the working curatorial digital map of this project for community dialogue ✨ Stay tuned for more curatorial interventions & programming in June 🫶🏽
