Courtesy Axle Contemporary
After thousands of miles, as many photographs, sojourns through every single New Mexico county and numerous exhibitions and books, Santa Fe-based mobile art gallery Axle Contemporary announced this week that it will end its long-running E Pluribus Unum photo project with a final series of exhibits at various locales dubbed E Pluribus Unum: Mogollon before its contents head to the archives at the New Mexico Museum of Art and a forthcoming exhibit at New Mexico State University in 2025 or 2026.
The elevator pitch has ultimately been simple: to gather portraits of New Mexicans holding objects they consider important. The resultant images were then plastered on the exterior of Axle Contemporary itself—a one-time delivery truck that pops up around Santa Fe and beyond—every two years alongside accompanying books about the project. And now, after 12 years, Wellman says he and Chase-Daniel are ready to bring the project to its natural conclusion.
"We wanted to cover the whole state, and we did it," Wellman says. "Actually, we have this little map where we outlined every road we traveled through the state, and it's pretty fun to look at that, because it has been really good. One thing leads to another, it's exciting, you follow the leads, and I'm pretty happy with how this has gone and the culmination."
Chase-Daniel agrees.
"We started in Santa Fe...thinking it would be a Santa Fe project, then we were invited to redo it as an Albuquerque project, which we thought was a good idea," he adds. "We realized it could be bigger, so we got it in our heads to do the project all across New Mexico; now there's nowhere left to go in New Mexico."
Wellman says he and Chase-Daniel were able to conduct E Pluribus Unum thanks to funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and New Mexico's Department of Cultural Affairs, as well as logistical support from New Mexico Mainstreet, a government organization dedicated to helping communities foster economic viability.
The name of the project signifies its impetus, Wellman says.
"E Pluribus Unum—Latin for 'out of many, one,'" he explains. "That was kind of the impetus; a social, cultural and metaphysical understanding of what that might mean."
That mission brought Wellman and Chase-Daniel to well over 40 communities across the state for events in Roswell, Española, Hobbs, Dulce, Clayton, Chama, Grants, Lordsburg, Belen, Santa Fe, Albuquerque and the Navajo Nation, at which they were able to obtain between 5,000 and 6,000 images.
"And people were into it from the start," Wellman continues. "They understood it both as an art project and a concept. I would say, and this might sound odd, that people are generally more sophisticated than we give them credit for, and the curiosity and willingness to participate...the social engagement—I'm overstating it slightly, but it was almost a daily occurrence that it was amazing."
Patterns emerged over time, for example
"There were certain things that were very poignant, like people holding the ashes of a loved one in a locket or a mason jar," Chase-Daniel says. "For others, it's a picture of a loved on on their phone—or it's the phone itself, which is not so very interesting now, but in another 100 years, I think it will be interesting when historians see how we communicated."
Or, Wellman notes, consider the case of the small-town sheriff who arrived for the shoot in civilian clothes, dressed like a folk singer and carrying a guitar.
"A lot of children, a lot of pets," he says, "but at the same time, there has always been, like in this last iteration, 'nobody ever brought that before!'"
Surprises or no, the project ending is a bit of a relief for Wellman and Chase-Daniel.
"Jerry said he feels like a dog chasing a car, and the car stops and he doesn't know what to do," Chase-Daniel says. "For me, it's a little more...the idea from the beginning was about our uniqueness as individuals and the universality of our sentient being. I feel we've completed this beautiful group portrait of New Mexico in the early 21st century."
You'll find Axle Contemporary across town in the coming weeks and, as always, it's a great idea to visit the gallery website on any given day to be certain of its location.
