Rose Marie Prins

After returning to New Mexico, I was confronted by a billboard: the face of a Native woman and the word HOMICIDE. As a mother who had lost her child six years earlier, the image haunted me. It felt personal and collective, a stark reminder of loss too often ignored. Partly inspired by The REDress Project by Jaimie Black (Métis) and Jordan Marie Daniel’s (Kul Wicasa Oyate) red hand symbol, I felt compelled to take action. I found antique doll parts and saw a powerful connection between the dismembered dolls and missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW). The fragments became metaphors for Indigenous females, historically devalued, objectified, and treated as disposable within mainstream culture. From this realization, the ongoing project They Had No Time to Say Goodbye emerged and later evolved into an artist’s book. The work also includes a series of scrolls composed of 9” x 8” etched x-rays featuring Indigenous women’s faces, enhanced with red paint—the color of the MMIW movement. These elements form a multimedia installation incorporating doll parts and scraps of red women’s clothing, symbolizing absence, violence, and remembrance. Our collective now consists of five culturally diverse artists/activists: Native, Anglo and Black, each committed to the cause of MMIW. We invite artists around the world to contribute by etching x-rays. Every participant is acknowledged in our exhibitions. To date, artists from Asia, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and across the USA have contributed.

Prins’ mixed-media paintings, sculptures and installations have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout North America, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Jonson Gallery at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; the Bayly Art Museum at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; the Polk Museum of Art; the Gulf Coast Museum; the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe and the Woman’s Building, Los Angeles. Her work is in public, corporate, and private collections in the US, Canada and Europe, including, most recently, the Museum of Encaustic Art, Cerrillos, NM. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Specific Cultural Projects Grant from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, 2018; an Individual Artist Grant supported by the St Petersburg Arts Alliance, 2018; and a 2016 Creative Pinellas Individual Artist Grant. Residency fellowships include Avíario Studio, and BuinhoFab, Portugal; Wild Rose Farm Artist Retreat, Canada; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Virginia and Moulin à Nef, France; the Sanskriti Kendra, New Delhi; Casa Jupiterfab, Mexico; and the Hambidge Center, Georgia. Our collective: Kimberly Wahpepah (Diné), sex trafficking survivor and survivor activist; Sandi Ludescher, NM portrait painter; Lorrisa Orosco (Diné Apache), sex trafficking survivor, now a counselor; Linda Piper, Black activist/writer/storyteller and theater director; and our lead artist, Rose Marie Prins.

2-D, Assemblage, Book Arts, Collage/Mixed Media, Drawing, Installation, Interdisciplinary/social engagement, Multi-Media, Painting (all materials), Sculpture