Reverberations of a Detonation

Trinity: Reflections on the Bomb explores the cultural shifts and artistic responses to these world-changing explosions.

THE WORLD’S FIRST ATOMIC BOMB was detonated approximately 60 miles north of White Sands National Monument on July 16, 1945. “Gadget,” as the nuclear device was called, caused a brilliant flash, an intense shock wave, and a giant, ballshaped cloud. It left a half-mile-wide and eight-foot deep crater in the earth. Less than a month later, “Little Boy” exploded over Hiroshima, and three days after that, “Fat Man” leveled the city of Nagasaki.

The impact of these nuclear events reverberates 75 years after the detonation at the Trinity site. To acknowledge that fateful event, the Albuquerque Museum presents Trinity: Reflections on the Bomb. The exhibition presents 75 years of artistic responses to radioactivity, Trinity, and its continuing effects. Additionally, the Museum will offer educational programming to expand the content of the exhibition. More than 50 artists will be represented, including Emil Bisttram, Karsten Creightney, Leigh Anne Langwell, Raymond Jonson, Bea Mandelman, Patrick Nagatani, Bruce Nauman, Anne Noggle, Tony Price, Meridel Rubenstein, Hideo Sakata, Yukiyo Kawano, Will Wilson, Tom Joyce, and Eve Laramée.

ON VIEW

MAY 23 – SEPTEMBER 6, 2020

Trinity: Reflections on the Bomb

Left: Hideo Sakata, Untitled (Memory of Nagasaki August 9, 1945), oil on canvas, Private collection. Above: Yukiyo Kawano, Fat Man Folded (The 1945 Oregonian), 2019, newspaper, kakisibu-dye, adhesive, bamboo grass, wire, fabric (polyester), Polyethylene rod, nylon rope, 10 x 5 x 5 feet, lent by the artist.

DAVID GREBER

While New Mexico museums frequently touch on nuclear science and technology topics, this exhibition looks at the ushering in of the nuclear age, and the resulting cultural shifts, from artists’ perspectives.

Joseph Traugott, retired curator of twentieth-century art from the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, curated the exhibition. Traugott’s long been fascinated with nuclear issues and the intersection of art and science. “I’ve been working with this material for a long time,” he says. “This is a case of responding to the other museums in the region that display work on nuclear issues but from a military or science perspective. ... What we’ve tried to do here is focus on the way artists respond to science and technology and history.” Trinity takes a more complex and broader view, Traugott says, by including Japanese and Native American artists as well as the downwinders perspective— those who lived nearby but whose plight has been largely ignored. They are still fighting for compensation and recognition of detrimental health impacts.

Traugott says he likes to show objects that may not be thought of as “works of art.” These objects provide historical context. For example, Trinity features an ashtray made with a uranium oxide glaze to make it orange. The viewer of the object can see it from multiple perspectives—is it just an ashtray, with its inherent link to cigarettes, or is it representative of something more? Similarly, the exhibition includes four covers of Life magazine from August 1945. That was the month the bomb was detonated, but the iconic images of the mushroom cloud did not make the cover.

Artist Hideo Sakata was just ten years old when the bomb exploded over Nagasaki. Both his father and sister were killed. His undated abstract painting alludes to the destruction of multistory buildings, painted in orange and red hues representing the explosion. Another Japanese artist, Yukiyo Kawano, created replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy, constructed with pages from Hiroshima newspapers from August 1945, and pieces of her grandmother’s kimono.

Traugott has many favorites in this exhibition, but the items that stand out