Mano Blanco
Jane Abrams
Created : 1991
Purchased : 1995
Medium : Painting/Oil
Dimensions: 48 inx88 in
Located: 2nd Floor
Mano Blanco (1991)
Oil painting
Jane Abrams (b. 1940)
Albuquerque
Capitol Art Selection Committee Purchase
Capitol Art Collection, Capitol Art Foundation
Beneath the beauty of Abrams’ luminous and lush painted surfaces lie crucial messages of truths about terrible things. Her exquisite colors and forms reveal not only the lavish beauty and density of the landscape, but also expose horrors and truths. “Mano Blanco” comes from the name of the death squad, the White Hand. The figures lying underneath the foliage represent the spirit of all those murdered in the jungle. These figures are silhouetted, like impressions in the earth. They recall the human presences that have lived and died there. What remains is the spirit, the shadow of the human presence. “We leave our traces,” Abrams explains, “that tell a story for good or bad.”
She continues:
“My paintings are not about a given part of the world. They are about my responses to what I read, think about, and the feelings I have, and the evolving awareness about the relationship between human beings and the world we live on. The jungle becomes a metaphor for the complexity of that relationship.”
Abrams began her artistic career as a printmaker after coming to Albuquerque from Indiana in 1971 to teach at UNM. However, she found herself getting sick from the toxic chemicals used in printmaking. At the same time, she had been awarded an artist-in-residence grant in Roswell as a printmaker. But her health continued to be adversely affected, so she returned to painting, which she hadn’t really done in 15 years. Her favorite way to work is to begin by closing all her books (which include the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and various Latin American poets) and cleaning up her studio. “It’s a little ceremony — to close all the books and stack them up neatly and coil up the hose on the vacuum cleaner, sharpen all the pencils, and get everything neat. And then I may have three large canvases out. I love to sit in my grandmother’s rocking chair and look at the canvas… I’ve been reading and thinking and responding and feeling… that colors my reaction to the surface of the canvas. There might be a shadow or a mark on the canvas that will set me off. And something will occur…”
The inspiration for much of Abrams’ work is Central America and Mexico. Abrams paints from photographs, but mostly from copious notes she makes while traveling.
It continues to be the goal of the Capitol Art Foundation to build a permanent collection of New Mexican master artworks that reflects New Mexico’s rich and diverse cultural and artistic tradition.
