THE CENTER AWARDS: Personal Award: Arista Slater-Sandoval
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, Scoldsbridle
Congratulations to Arista Slater-Sandoval for being selected for CENTER’s Personal Award recognizing his project, Parable for Hysteria. The Personal Award recognize work engaging in the exploration, expression, the power of self-representation and/or underrepresented experiences.
JUROR: Danyelle Means, Executive Director, Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe shares her thoughts on this selection:
Identity, place, family, and the pandemic–this year’s submissions for the Personal Award focused inward recognizing that societal pressures would follow them there. Career versus caregiver, conforming versus chaos, COVID has helped redefine relationships allowing for the normally quiet introspection to become a cacophony of social media updates. Stripping away the sound, the images submitted test the nuances lost in the noise of the new normal.
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, Brazen Bull
Danyelle Means is the Executive Director of the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Means has served as the Director of Advancement at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and the Executive Director of the IAIA Foundation. During her tenure at IAIA, like many in the philanthropic sector, Means and her staff shifted all efforts online during the pandemic, bringing IAIA one of the most successful fundraising years ever.
Means draws from her museum experience at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) where she oversaw several exhibitions at the New York venue. The newly formed Women of Color in Fundraising and Philanthropy recognized her work in the philanthropic sector with the inaugural Shine Award for lighting a path for other women of color in the field.
Raised on the Rosebud Reservation and proud member of the Oglala Lakota tribe in South Dakota, Means hopes to inspire other BIPOC philanthropic and non-profit professionals to strive for greatness, remembering that she and so many others like her are their ancestors’ greatest hopes and dreams for the future.
Arista Slater-Sandoval was born and raised in Grand Rapids Michigan and moved in 2007 to Washington D.C. to pursue a BFA in photography at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. While there she completed a 5 months Teachers Assistance and residency program in New York city at the Center for Alternative Photography. After completing a BFA, she moved to Cambridge MA, and attend the College of Art and Design at Lesley University where she obtained a MFA in Fine Art Photography in 2013. While in grad school she pursued issues in communication, identity, love and romance thought alternative photographic processes.
Since moving to Santa Fe in 2016, she teaches full time at the Institute of American Indian Art while balancing studio time. She continues to work in alternative photographic processes and approaches while tackling large issues in feminine and multi-racial representation, domestic spheres and intimate relationships.
Portrait of Arista Slater-Sandoval
Parable for Hysteria
The threat, and eventual demonstration of physical pain is a strong coercive act. The listener may not be able to trust the confessions given but the pain is real.
Parable for Hysteria is an introspective examination on culturally conditioned aspects of femininity within the domestic sphere. Contrasting the realm of the home with photographic images alluding to mental or physical pain, the two fold nature of domesticity in contemporary life is exposed as mundane and burdensome, yet self-enforced. With no one else present, the subject becomes their own judge, jury, and executioner.
Aptitude in traditional feminine faculties are tied to the ability to maintain hearth and home. The ideal of “True Womanhood” may have been abandoned or radicalized for many, yet numbers are still indoctrinated with ideals held from the 1800’s. Self-imposed expectations learned from the dominate cultural subconscious is louder than feminist inclinations. The subject is not told what to do but is compelled. Like a captive, she falls into her own Stockholm syndrome; agreeing to go along with domestic duties to pacify the psychological distress and waning self-worth that goes along with too many dust bunnies left under the couch. The work is not an impulse for martyrdom, as that implies a self-righteousness within every action of the domestic sphere, but a desire to pick apart the cacophony of contradictory voices speaking all at once.
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, Oublette
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, The Rack
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, Pulling
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, Untitled
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, Zig Zag Girl
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, Guillotine
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, Piene Forte et dure
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, Wall Art
©Arista Slater-Sandoval, Shrouded
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](https://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
