Yo Tengo Nombre

-Karson Schenk, GSP Blog Team Contributor

This semester, my studio class called “Marking Memory” visited the exhibition “Yo Tengo Nombre” at the Institute of Humanities. Marking memory is a class about how we understand the past visually; what we use and how we choose to measure, understand, depict and commemorate the past.

Ruth Buentello’s work encompasses these themes so well. She is visually depicting an issue that can be hard to understand as an onlooker. We can listen to the news, read articles about the “facts,” but what is often missing in the hard truth of a problem is the relationships and emotions people have around this issue. It is this element of art that fosters understanding.

When listening to Ruth speak, she talked about how she has her family members to pose for her paintings, and that she imagined her own Mother in the position of a woman that was attacked by a police officer, in another painting. And the children - the photographs of the children on exhibition were another layer of family to her. Teary eyed, she said, “I don’t know where any of these kids are now.”

Walking through the exhibition was like walking through a family home, an interconnected web of people she loved, pulled taunt by the threat of violence and danger all around. This web motif further reiterated in the silk curtains used to segment off spaces, and a mind map of her life in another space to show her relationship to border policy issues.

Ruth was willing to share this emotion so intimately with strangers, who are often used to seeing a human rights issue like this at a far away distance, with binoculars that can’t see the whole issue.

Ruth made me realize the weight of stress, anxiety, loss, and fear pulsing through many communities now with the rise of this new border policy, and the confusing, dehumanization and criminalization of people that are family to so many.

Learn more about Ruth Leonela Buentello by clicking the link down below:

Ruth Leonela Buentello