 The "Mothers and Martyrs of the Americas" reception at Parks Gallery was a big hit. Just about everyone who is anyone in Taos was spotted milling about the old adobe rooms of Parks Gallery on Bent Street, with the vibrant, electric new works of Erin Currier on display, and with lots of little red dots on the labels indicating "sold". Erin's work is gaining international acclaim and is in many fine collections around the world. Her politically conscious themes remind us all that art is about evoking a response and this work does that.
 Erin Currier: Mothers and Martyrs
at Parks Gallery on Bent Street, thru August 29
Erin Currier is truly an artist of the world. She travels widely, primarily in Third World countries, learning about people and their cultures as she goes, filling sketch books with immaculate drawings and poetic reflections, and gathering paper trash, the discarded jetsam that incidentally reveals so much about the essential experience of a place. When Currier returns to her Taos, NM studio, the trash becomes a primary ingredient in the creation of portraits of great beauty and passion.
Mothers and Martyrs of the Americas is the title of her newest series and the subject of a solo exhibition opening August 6 at Parks Gallery in Taos. With material drawn primarily from five months of travel through South and Central America, the work includes homages to such humble heroes as the mothers of Sandinistas killed in Nicaragua, a group of Cuban school girls, and revolutionary poets of the region such as Nicolas Guillen, Ruben Dario and Gioconda Belli.
 Other pieces in the exhibition are devoted to mothers and martyrs of the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. Among them a wrenchingly beautiful portrait of Emmett Till, the black Chicago youth who was killed in Mississippi in the late 1950s, pictured by Currier as an infant in the arms of his mother, Mamie.
In a statement about the series, Currier writes: "’People are fulfilled only to the extent that they create their world,’ claimed Paulo Freire. Mothers and Martyrs of the Americas is a series of work about people who have done just that. It is political in the sense that every work of art created is a social act committed, but it is primarily about what it means to be human in a social world, and about human dignity and hope. It is about the martyrs who died for this hope, and about the dignity of mothers who have outlived their own sons and daughters, but who keep their hope alive.”
 Mothers and Martyrs of the Americas will be on view through August 29, Parks Gallery is at 127 Bent St., Taos. For more information, call 505-751-0343 or see parksgallery.com.
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