Kim Stringfellow
Gypsum Cave, Las Vegas, NV
, 2020
Archival pigment print, edition 1/5
24 x 36 in.
$1,500
Part of Zzyzx Redux, organized by Bernard Leibov
On view at Intersect Palm Springs, February 10 – 13, 2022

Certain remote desert caves are significant ceremonial ancestral sites for Southern Paiutes. Sacred caves in the Mojave Desert, including Mitchell Caverns, are places where “Paiutes sought and received spiritual powers from specific, named spirits…sometimes be [sic] revealed in the form of songs.” One of these “Music Caves” known today as Gypsum Cave, located east of Las Vegas, Nevada, is one such ancient ritual site. This cave is filled with invaluable indigenous artifacts left over a long period of human occupation; archeologist Mark R. Harrington first excavated the cave during the 1930s. Unfortunately, in more recent years, reckless recreationists have completely desecrated what little remains in the publicly-accessible areas of the cave. 
 
Kim Stringfellow is an artist, educator, writer, and independent curator based in Joshua Tree, California. She is a professor at San Diego State University’s School of Art + Design. She received her MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. Claremont Graduate University awarded her an honorary doctoral degree in 2018. For the past twenty years, Stringfellow’s creative practice has focused on the human-driven transformation of some of the American West’s most iconic arid regions through multi-year, research-based projects merging cultural geography, public practice, and experimental documentary into creative, socially engaged transmedia experiences. Kims’s work has been exhibited widely nationally and internationally and is included in many prestigious collections including Yale and the Nevada Museum of Art. She is a 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography. amongst other awards.

 

Artist website: kimstringfellow.com