Escarpment, 1987

Narrator: Smith made Escarpment and a number of other works nearby during a battle to save a sacred site near Albuquerque, New Mexico, not far from her home and studio. Developers wanted to build a highway through the area, destroying access to the ancient petroglyphs there. In this work—and many others in the exhibition—Smith’s activism became a driving force behind the content and her compositional choices. Josie Lopez is the Head Curator at the Albuquerque Museum.

Josie Lopez: You can feel this frenetic energy that's coming from the work, and that's really about the entrenched struggle that was happening. And then of course to the left you see these line drawings that are echoing the glyphs that are carved into the rocks in this particular park that are what makes them sacred land, but also is what draws many Indigenous people to those lands in order to practice different beliefs and rituals.

Narrator: Thanks to the work of Smith and other activists, Petroglyph National Monument was created in 1990, though the site remains vulnerable to development.