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Dear friends --
Please join the Los Alamos Study Group, the
Axle Contemporary gallery, and CloudCliff proprietor Willem Malten for a reception with artist Chip Thomas, aka
jetsonorama, this Saturday August 3rd, from 2-4 pm, at the Cloud Cliff Building (1805 2nd Street, Santa Fe,
map), where Chip and a crew of local volunteers have been working since last Thursday to install a powerful new mural in support of our community’s resistance to nuclear weapons production.
Dr. Thomas also has work in Axle Contemporary's current exhibition, Art & Activism, which will be on-site Saturday. From Axle's introduction:
Chip was working as a doctor on a remote area of the Navajo Nation for the past 36 years, and making compelling and important wheatpaste installations for fifteen years. He began these on abandoned roadside buildings across the Rez, but has gained more and more exposure and recognition in the past years, and now travels to make work in places far away from his home (Brazil, California, Colorado, North Carolina...). Last year Chip retired from his job at IHS, and is now making art full-time.
Chip’s mural is about the promise vs. the reality of nuclear energy and weaponry, and serves as a critique of the bomb factory being built in Los Alamos, and a call-to-action for the Santa Fe community to rally together in opposition to this imminent reality. In addition to Chip’s imagery, the mural presents information from The Los Alamos Study Group, providing information on how people can take action towards a better future for our community, locally and planet-wide.”
You can see more of Chip's very interesting and beautiful work
here.
We were gratified to see so much of the community come forth to register opposition to the new arms race on July 22 at the NNSA/DOE Town Hall at Buffalo Thunder.
Please keep speaking out, in public, especially in comments, letters to editors, and guest editorials in the local papers. Our private opinions aren't visible to political and bureaucratic actors unless we make them visible. Write, speak, act, make art! Make it visible! Make it with others!
It's really important to realize that absent structural changes in government -- not just a different face in the White House, say -- we will never have a secure future, let alone a prosperous one. The future is being served up to the military-industrial Moloch. There has been a real sea-change. We are in a very different world than even 10 years ago. Our politics are deeply debauched, to the extent we have any. Our democracy is by now quite gone. To reclaim that territory we need to be quite firm now.
Plutonium pit production at LANL -- which has yet to start up -- will be temporary. It will halt. But when? And how big will it get? With what impacts, locally and globally? With what impacts on our governance and our psyches? On our economy?
Even before LANL production gets started, there are many
voices in Washington calling to
double LANL's planned output of pits, in order to build up the U.S. arsenal faster than currently planned. Doing that would be quite hard but if ordered to do so by Congress, NNSA would have to try. What looks like nuclear policy in Washington is (anti-)economic and (anti-)social policy in New Mexico.
We have more events in the planning stages. Meanwhile -- resist, and encourage others. We are very far from powerless.
Come on Saturday if you can!
Best wishes to all,
