"The Desert was Red and Red the Dust was Raised"
"The Desert was Red and Red the Dust was Raised" is an exhibition at the Las Cruces Museum of Art by five female artists who live and work in Las Cruces and El Paso - Sharbani Das Gupta, Zoe Spiliotis, Isadora Stowe, Laura Turón, and Amy Vensel. As colleagues, these artists have formed a community in their border region that affects their practice and imagery in varied ways.
The Desert was Red and Red the Dust was Raised takes abstraction as its foundation, and the literal landscape as the thing that connects all five artists - either as a reference, as language, or simply location.
The exhibit is on display through March 23, 2024 at the Las Cruces Museum of Art, curated by Leslie Moody-Castro.
Interview with the Curator
Curatorial presented via video.
Isadora Jackson’s "Grain of the Earth" series bursts with vibrant color and an exuberant sense of joy, transforming the desert landscape into an abstract celebration of form and hue. The work moves beyond literal representations, using the bright, saturated colors to represent the energy and warmth of the desert, while the fluid, organic shapes suggest a sense of movement and growth. Jackson’s use of color and abstracted forms pushes past the traditional boundaries of the desert as a fixed space, instead embracing it as a dynamic, ever-evolving landscape.
In this series, the rigid lines of the natural world dissolve, and the desert becomes a place of possibility—a vibrant canvas that blurs the borders between earth and sky, past and future, strength and fragility. The vibrancy of color on delicate rice paper invites viewers to reconsider the desert not as a barren, desolate space but as a place of rich, emotional depth and endless transformation.