Photo credit: Brad Trone
Joanna Keane Lopez (MFA ’24) was recently featured in The New York Times article “The Southwest City That Turned Itself Into an Essential Art Outpost,” which explores the cultural vitality of Santa Fe and its surrounding region.
The article spotlights Lopez’s installation Batter my heart, three person’d God—a tripartite scene composed of a photograph of a nuclear bomb framed in tin, medicinal creosote branches, and a handmade bed draped in an intricate textile. The piece references the history of nuclear weapons development and testing in New Mexico, centered at Los Alamos and the White Sands Missile Range. On July 13, 1945, scientists working on the Manhattan Project gathered in the bedroom of an adobe ranch house 35 miles southeast of Socorro to assemble the plutonium core for the world’s first nuclear bomb. Three days later, they detonated it—an event now known as the Trinity Test.
Drawing from both personal and ancestral history, Lopez’s work reflects on the legacy of nuclear testing in the Southwest and its enduring environmental and cultural consequences.