“How do we create space for valuing rest, contemplation, contemplation, and connection to the land?” This is a fundamental question asked by artist and Sleeping Huts creator Mira Burack’s within Bigger Than This Room, now on view at form & concept. Join Burack alongside fellow Bigger exhibiting artist Diego Media, historian, educator and poet, for a deep-dive into their immersive, tactile projects that explore materiality as a method of relating to the natural world.
Can't make it in person? Stream the talk live on form & concept's Instagram.
Mira Burack is an artist, mother, and educator learning from the high desert landscape where she lives in the Ortiz mountains of New Mexico on the unceded land of Pueblo peoples. She is engaged by the materials and living beings in her daily life—plants, textiles, animals, and family—and the interior and exterior spaces around her where meaningful life experiences take place—the bed, the landscape, the table, and the home. How do these elements of daily life teach intimacy, engage the senses, provide comfort, heal, invite rest, and elicit pleasure? Burack was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up on the coast of Maine. She received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and BA in Studio Art and Psychology from Pepperdine University. She has exhibited her work internationally, and has lectured, taught workshops, and was a faculty member at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. She received a Community + Public Arts Detroit grant for The Edible Hut, a community space with a living edible roof, and in 2020, she was selected for the Women to Watch exhibition at the National Museum for Women in the Arts. She has been nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors grant and the Anonymous Was A Woman Award. She recently received the SITE Santa Fe SPREAD 7.0 micro-grant and the Shmita Prize for her Sleeping Huts project.
Diego Medina is a member of the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe, an artist, poet, historian, and educator whose family is one of the original Native families from the historic Mesquite district in downtown Las Cruces. As an artist, Diego’s work illustrates intricate metaphors that combine cultural knowledge and ancestral wisdom with fantasy and poetics. Diego also creates cartographical and poetic fantasy illustrations that bring together ecological and cosmological knowledge within the process of prayer. For Diego, prayer is the finest art because it informs our conscious will, our expressions of love, connects us with sacred ancestral wisdom, and strengthens our spiritual kinship. In addition to creating art, Diego has a deep passion for archival research and borderlands Indigenous history and currently serves as Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Piro-Manso-Tiwa tribe.
