From the Field: Nuclear Legacy

Curatorial Statement

• Sofie Hecht: A Matter of When: Stories of New Mexico’s Downwinders

• Meridel Rubinstein: Critical Mass

• Jane Whitmore: The Bikini Project

• Will Wilson: Connecting the Dots: For a Just Transition

“How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?” – Terry Tempest Williams

According to Indigenous Pueblo narratives, the land of the Pajarito Plateau surrounding San Ildefonso Pueblo is an ancient and sacred fire site. Ironically, these lands are the same lands that the scientists of the Manhattan Project selected as the perfect place to sequester the secret laboratory and town of Los Alamos in which to design and build the first atomic weapons using uranium and plutonium. Scientists in Germany had discovered fission in 1938. In 1939, Albert Einstein and Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard warned US President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the dangers of unbelievably powerful bombs that could result from splitting the nucleus of an atom. In response, Roosevelt created the Advisory Committee on Uranium, which met for the first time in 1939. In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves established Los Alamos in New Mexico as one of three isolated rural sites, the others being in Washington and Tennessee, each a key component of the covert national Manhattan Project to design the very bombs that Einstein had warned against. Ushering in the nuclear age, the United States dropped the first nuclear bombs on Japan in 1945, forever changing the world. The legacy of nuclear armament and its reverberations continues.

Einstein and Oppenheimer, along with other prominent University of Chicago scientists, invented the “Doomsday Clock” in 1947. Nearly 80 years later, the threat of nuclear annihilation is possibly the closest it’s ever been to catastrophe. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the 2025 Doomsday Clock is set at 89 seconds to midnight.    
     
What does that mean? On their website, (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2025-statement/), the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin has this to say, “The Doomsday Clock is set every year by the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes nine Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies. In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned the Science and Security Board continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course.”

There are many photographers, writers, thinkers, and artists who have important things to say about the insidious global impacts of nuclear legacy. For their inaugural exhibition, CENTER has chosen to highlight the work of four alumni and past award winners based in New Mexico who are looking at that legacy and its ongoing impacts on life as we know it in the world today. This is an appropriate choice given that the first nuclear bomb was detonated at White Sands Missile Range, just one week after it was established. White Sands National Monument (now a National Park) was established in 1933, a mere 12 years earlier. The National Park Service’s website (https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/lawsandpolicies.htm) reminds visitors: “The National Park Service carries out its responsibilities in parks and programs under the authority of Federal laws, regulations, and Executive Orders and in accord with policies established by the Director of the National Park Service and the Secretary of the Interior.”

Jane Whitmore’s on-going series, The Bikini Project details her ordinary, every-day father’s participation, along with 40,000 other Americans, in the detonation of the fourth and fifth atomic bombs unleashed on the world targeting Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1946. Whitmore asks why her father would have participated “voluntarily as a civilian in Operation Crossroads, a project that brought suffering to others and set the stage for nuclear proliferation and intensified the threat of nuclear war?” As a clinical psychologist, archeologist, writer, and photographer, Whitmore is haunted by the devastation to that small island, the displacement of the Bikini Islanders, and the impact the bombings continue to have on their way of life, as well as many others who increasingly find themselves in similar untenable situations.

Documentary photographer, Sofie Hecht, also looks at the lingering effects of the earliest atomic bombs by documenting the tangible and intangible consequences of the robust nuclear industrial complex. Nearly 80 years after the detonation the “Gadget” at Trinity Site in Southern New Mexico in July 1945, astonishingly high rates of various cancers and other unusual illnesses continue to plague the communities living within the closest 50-mile radius of the Ground Zero test site. Hecht interviews the “Downwinders who say, ‘We don’t ask if we are going to get cancer, we ask when.” The artist reports that “the Downwinders are currently fighting to be included in the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act ("RECA") despite numerous political setbacks.” She continues, “As the urgency of receiving financial support for an entire community’s suffering only increases, A Matter of When is a project of preservation amidst the precarious landscape of nuclear contamination.” The RECA program expired in June 2024 after stalling in the House of Representatives. The Department of Justice has since stopped processing claims.

Diné artist, photographer, sculptor, educator, writer, and activist, Will Wilson, has always been Connecting the Dots: For a Just Transition. Combining photography and a keen understanding of history and geology to document the tracings—the radioactive remains of uranium mining—Wilson exposes the lethal nuclear legacy of ongoing illnesses in his communities both for the People and their next-to-human kin. Wilson writes: “Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition intends to shape a platform for voices of resilience, Indigenous knowledge, and restorative systems of remediation while bearing witness to a history of environmental damage and communal loss on the Navajo Nation. This innovative plan is based on a photographic survey of the over 500 Abandoned Uranium Mines (AUMs) located on the Navajo Nation. … The project develops new strategies of remediation that center Diné ways of knowing as it weaves together the interdisciplinary expertise required to address this pressing concern.” Wilson is uniquely skilled in the Indigenous practice of Deep Listening – to his people, to the voices in his land, and to the larger culture that encompass them. He is a man who moves mountains. Australian singer/songwriter and eco-arts collaborator, Dr. Laura Brearley, aptly describes Wilson when she writes: “Deep listening and community leadership foregrounds our interconnectedness and embeds leadership practice in relationships, respect, and reciprocity.”

Internationally renowned multi-media installation artist and photographer, Meridel Rubenstein, has been exploring the nuclear legacy in her creative work based in environmental social practice for years. Her first showing of Critical Mass, a collaboration with the video artist, Ellen Zweig, with technical support from Steina and Woody Vasulka was in 1993. Thirty-two years later, Rubenstein’s creative legacy continues as a necessary voice challenging the field of nuclear legacy. Her looming missiles are as ominous as ever, if not more so, with the possible advent of World War III that if it happened would likely include the widespread use of nuclear weapons. Indeed, evaluating the potential not only of nuclear annihilation, but the putative renaissance, particularly with regards to the increasing demands of AI-related technologies and cloud service providers, necessitates an understanding of multiple nefarious safety concerns, the half-life of toxic waste longevity, as well as visible and invisible environmental damages.

These four artists join the ranks of many others invested in the idea that peace is more than the absence of war and that the visual arts can make a strong contribution to creating awareness and positive change, especially in collaboration with the earth sciences, education at all levels, donut economics, and concerned citizens globally. Together we can discover what kinds of collaborative creative working practices help us find sustainable responses to complex problems. CENTER’s commitment to socially and environmentally engaged lens-based projects includes hosting exhibitions crafted toward creating positive change for communities and imaginations around the world.   

– Mary Anne Redding, CENTER Program Advisor and Curator

View the Curatorial Statement PDF • Read the extended Artist Statements