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Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.

Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.

In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.

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The contested landscape of New Mexico

September 17, 2015

This is a current that runs through much of my work- you need to go to these fraught landscapes, where people’s histories clash, and talk and try and understand the granularity of the violence that marks every square inch of North America, Europe and Asia…

Race and history in New Mexico are contested in a way unique to the United States. This has to do with discrete historical events that took place in the Land of Enchantment and the layers of conquest the state deals with today. What you had in 16th century New Mexico was a lot of small, semi-sedentary tribes (the Puebloan peoples) with some larger, raiding tribes on the edges like the some of the Apache groups and the Navajo. When the Spanish sought to expand their control north of the central Mexican silver regions, they followed the same basic trail that indigenous people used in their trading networks, going up the Rio Grande and originally establishing a capital at what the Spanish would later term San Juan Pueblo (unlike the other Pueblos, the people of San Juan have reclaimed their indigenous name and now are referred to as Ohkay Owingeh. This just happened in the last few years). The Spanish were led by Juan de Oñate, a would be next-Cortes or Pizarro who hoped to find gold and silver farther north. When Oñate arrived in New Mexico, he kicked the Ohkay Owingeh out of their homes, expected the native peoples to feed and house and work for them, and basically treated them like conquered people. When they resisted, he responded harshly, particularly at Acoma Pueblo. On a mesa west of modern-day Albuquerque, the Acoma had a great natural defense and thus took a major toll on the Spanish forces. But the Spanish eventually conquered Acoma. Several hundred Acoma were killed. More notoriously, Oñate ordered a foot cut off of all men over the age of 25 to show Spanish resolve, although only 24 actually received this punishment. The Acoma were sent into slavery, although they eventually returned and the pueblo exists today.

From the excellent blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/09/race-and-history-in-new-mexico

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