The Paseo Project hosted its first artist-in-residence, Laurelin Kruse, founder of the Mobile Museum of American Artifacts (MMoAA) in April 2018. Throughout the month, Kruse took the Mobile Museum to 16 stops throughout Taos County, engaging the community through stories and oral histories embedded in everyday objects. Five University of New Mexico art department students were selected for internships with MMOAA. Each received college credits. The interns were Tracy Bell, Heather Bergerson, Audrey Tipping, Savannah Summers and Jana Greiner. Learn more about MMoAA at www.theMMOAA.org.

The Mobile Museum of American Artifacts (2014-2018) is a participatory, evolving installation—an ever-changing picture of American life cast from the objects and stories contributed by those who encounter the museum along its journey. MMoAA looks at the everyday, the local—the lives we live and the places we inhabit. It sees the present tense on its way to becoming a story, a thing regarded, the first rough draft of memory.

Created by Laurelin Kruse in 2014, the MMoAA has since been to around 20 towns and cities throughout the country.

All 100+ objects in the collection were kindly donated by participants who shared their stories through a written questionnaire and oral interview. Laurelin writes an interpretive text for each object based on this information.

This process asks: how does narrative impose categories on stories? can stories refuse these categories? what happens when stories travel? when a personal story becomes an allegory? is it possible to feel into each other's lives through the intimate physicality of objects? (many of these ponderings have been cultivated from Amy Shuman's book Other People's Stories, among many others.)

About the artist: Laurelin Kruse is a writer and performer. For the past two years she has traveled the country as the Founder and Director of the Mobile Museum of American Artifacts, collecting and exhibiting people's personal objects and stories as a public intervention of hierarchical paradigms.

April 2018 locations:

Friday, April 6 TCA – Opening Reception Water is Community Installation
Sunday, April 8 TCA – Pecha Kucha Night Taos
Tuesday, April 10 - Questa Library
Wednesday, April 11 - Ancianos Senior Center
Saturday, April 14 - Taos Mesa Brewing / KNCE live remote
Sunday, April 15 - Penasco Theater
Wednesday, April 18 - Ancianos Senior Center & Men’s Homeless Shelter
Thursday, April 19 - Questa Library
Sunday, April 22 - Millicent Rogers Museum
Wednesday, April 25 - Enos Garcia Elementary School, classroom event
Thursday, April 26 - TISA, classroom event
Saturday, April 28 - Invent Event @ Enos Garcia Elementary Gymnasium
Sunday, April 29 - Harwood Museum of Art – closing artist talk 3pm