Patrick Nagatani
Koshare/Tewa Ritual Clowns, Missile Park, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

Koshare/Tewa Ritual Clowns, Missile Park, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

© 1989 Patrick Nagatani, courtesy Andrew Smith Gallery, Tucson

Koshare/Tewa Ritual Clowns, Missile Park, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico
Koshare/Tewa Ritual Clowns, Missile Park, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico
CultureAmerican
Titles
  • Koshare/Tewa Ritual Clowns, Missile Park, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico
  • from the series Nuclear Enchantment, 1988–1993
Date1989, printed 1993
MediumChromogenic print
DimensionsImage: 27 15/16 × 37 1/16 in. (71 × 94.1 cm)
Sheet: 30 × 40 1/16 in. (76.2 × 101.7 cm)
Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Joan Morgenstern
Object number2021.77
Non exposé

Explore Further

Department
Photography
Object Type
Description


After moving to Albuquerque from Los Angeles in the late 1980s, Patrick Nagatani became increasingly concerned with New Mexico’s role in the development of nuclear weapons and its contemporary ramifications. In his Nuclear Enchantment series, he used a highly saturated color palette and imagery borrowed from Native American and East Asian mythologies to construct scenes emphasizing the absurdity of living in the age of nuclear proliferation. In this work, Nagatani superimposed images of a Koshare clown figure onto the White Sands Missile Range, creating a scene where the figures appear to dance, oblivious to the weaponry behind them.



ProvenanceThe artist, d. 2017; Estate of the artist; [Andrew Smith Gallery, Tucson, Arizona]; purchased by MFAH, 2021.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks
[No inscriptions]

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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