Critical Mass takes as its subject the meeting of the Nuclear Scientists and Pueblo people at the home of Edith Warner during the making of the first bomb at Los Alamos. Rubenstein created Critical Mass with her collaborators, performance artist/poet-(now video artist) Ellen Zweig and video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka between 1989 and 1993, as an acclaimed New Mexico Museum of Art exhibition that toured the United States through 1997. The Amarillo Museum of Art’s exhibition of Critical Mass follows that at the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe in summer 2023. This the first time in decades that the majority of this extraordinary work has been on public view.
Presented at Amarillo Museum of Art are Meridel Rubenstein’s photoworks and the artists’ book, They Spoke to the Angels, with Ellen Zweig’s poetic text. Most of the works presented in this exhibition are complex portraits: some of the people the artists came to only know through historical records; others they were privileged to meet and to photograph, which allowed them to record their memories of Edith Warner, the Manhattan Project, and the many ways their lives were affected by both.
These works are on display at the Amarillo Museum of Art in Amarillo, Texas from September 16 – December 3, 2023, with a talk by the artist on November 30th, 2023 at 7:00 pm.
Learn more at: https://www.amoa.org/critical-mass-photoworks-by-meridel-rubenstein.