News

ASWM is delighted to announce that Laura Fragua-Cota will be a conference keynote speaker for Saturday, March 29th.

Laura Fragua-Cota is a noted Southwestern artist with many awards and exhibitions to her credit, among them, the Patrick Suazo-Hinds Award at Santa Fe Indian Market, a Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts (New Mexico’s highest arts honor), and the 2013 Pueblo Of Isleta Award of Excellence:  Honoring the Talents of Pueblo Arts and Culture.  Her work has been exhibited in places as varied as the New Mexico State Fair and the Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Art in Russia.

She speaks through many of the “languages of art” creating through words, movement, and both two- and three-dimensional pieces.  Her images of life in the Pueblo Indian villages are inspired by deep connection to her communities, her sense of place, and her knowledge of their ceremonial life which celebrates the cycles and seasons.

The image of corn is prevalent in her work because of its centrality both as symbol and as major crop in her village.  Cornmeal offerings as daily prayer in the home and the fields of corn that are planted in the surrounding countryside together feed body and soul.

As she says, Corn “has been and will always be one of the many ‘Mothers’ that care and nurture all her children.”

Growing up in the Jemez Pueblo in central New Mexico, Laura Fragua-Cota always wanted to be an artist but was initially discouraged because it was not deemed a practical aspiration.  She hold degrees both in Art and in Art Therapy.  She paints and sculpts using both limestone and alabaster, creating works both abstract and more traditional.

She says, “In my art, as in my heart, there is a marriage of the traditional and the contemporary.  As an artist, a woman, and a Native American, my eyes are focused inside on what I feel and outside on what I perceive to be the realities of today. Each day of my life I thank the Creator for it has been a blessing to be able to share my vision through various media.”

Imagination, authenticity, creativity, spirituality, divinity, archetypes and symbols, dreams and synchronicities emerge from and take us into the borderlands of liminal experiences—limen is Latin for “threshold.” Borderlands connotate wilderness and transition zones. Borderlands can also be represented by the almond shaped mandorla formed by two overlapping circles in the vesica piscis. In this keynote, Jean Shinoda Bolen will serve as a guide to the borderlands—where creativity emerges. Crossing to Avalon, Close to the Bone, Ring of Power and Goddesses in Everywoman came out of unexpected borderland experiences. To write from soul invites synchronistic help.

Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD. Is a Jungian analyst, psychiatrist, feminist, internationally known author and speaker and principal advocate at the UN for the 5th World Conference on Women. She was a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at University of California San Francisco and is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. She is the author of thirteen books (including Atalanta: the Indomitable Spirit of Artemis, fall 2014 pubdate) in 85 foreign translations and has contributed to 24 anthologies. Her most recent books,The Millionth Circle, Urgent Message from Mother, and Like a Tree bring activism and archetypes together.  To learn more about her work, see jeanbolen.com

ASWM is pleased to announce that Sylvia Marcos will be a conference keynote speaker for Friday March 28th. Her presentation, entitled “Duality and Divinity: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Spirituality” is highly anticipated.

Sylvia Marcos is a scholar committed to indigenous movements throughout the Americas. As a university professor and researcher she has proposed a new vision in the field of feminist critical epistemology, Mesoamerican religions, and women within indigenous movements, while promoting an antihegemonic-feminist practice, theory and hermeneutics. She is the author of Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions (Brill, 2006), and editor of Women and Indigenous Religions (Praeger, 2010), and Dialogue and  Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Dr. Marcos, who is the founder of the Anthropology and Gender Institute of Anthropological Research at the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), is a research associate in Religion and Society with the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia (ENAH) and has received several awards and scholarships in Women’s Studies in Religion at Harvard University. She has been a visiting professor, scholar in residence, and guest professor at universities around the world, including Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst, Hampshire, and University of Massachusetts, University of California, Harvard University, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Claremont University, and University of California at Riverside, among others. She has been a guest lecturer at several universities in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago and Cuba. In the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, United States, Japan, South Korea, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Turkey, Egypt, Jamaica and Kurdistan.