From Trash to Transcendence

The Humanist Portraits of Erin Currier

Romo González entered the San Juan de los Lagos seminary in 1912, where he was purported to be a happy seminarian who loved to joke. In 1922, he was ordained as a priest. He was said to have been extraordinarily faithful, fearless, austere and compassionate to the point of depriving himself of basic necessities in order to alleviate the sufferings of others.

In 1927, religious persecutions began with the onset of the Cristero War. At dawn on February 23, 1928, government troops broke into the factory in Tequila, where Romo, his sister and brother (also a priest) had taken refuge. A soldier woke Romo from his sleep shouting: “Here is the priest, kill him!” To which Romo replied. “Here I am, but do not kill me.” The soldiers shot him and he died.
Many undocumented Mexican immigrants crossing the perilous border into the US have since claimed to have been visited, assisted, and guided by Santo Toribio Romo. He often appears driving a blue pickup truck.

In the spring of 2004, Erin Currier was flagged by a customs officer as she returned to the US from a 7-month journey through South America. The suspicious customs agent exposed her bag opening paint tubes, unspooling socks, while constructing a pyramid of the bag’s contents on the table that was heavily skewed toward almost no clothes and plenty of art supplies and a lot of trash. “Is this garbage?” he asked. Currier reached into her shoulder bag and produced a small collage she had constructed on her journey. With a slightly uncertain smile he said, “You know it’s always been my dream to be an artist.” And with that he returned the contents to her bag, zipped it up and sent her on her way with a even bigger smile.

Currier’s “The Friendly Skies” series focuses on the metaphor of travel paying special attention to the airport, an antic and sublime site for Currier’s broad social questions. Through a process of sketching, painting, gluing, stripping, glazing, sealing and waxing, Currier arrives at her destination.

Recently questions have been raised about technology’s role in a fully realized “Global Future” and the presence of biometric scanners. The trend toward scanners becoming the norm in public places is the subject of Erin Currier’s Passenger Safety series. Currier investigates connections between technological savior-faire and a growing willingness in the public to “humiliate themselves for safety”. The source of the powerful display of the technology of suspicion we now see in public places around the world, but especially in airports, may be rendered in Currier’s painting “Terror”.

Born in 1975 in Haverhill, Massachusetts, Currier showed an early inclination toward art, drawing and making things alongside her mother. At eighteen she moved to New Mexico, a decision that shaped both her life and her practice. She studied theatre design at the College of Santa Fe, graduating with a BFA magna cum laude. After school she supported herself as a barista and waitress in Taos. Her first exhibition took place in 1998 at the café where she worked. The response was strong enough to encourage her to commit fully to painting.

Erin Currier has spent more than two decades building a distinctive body of work that sits at the intersection of portraiture, social observation, and environmental awareness. She is best known for mixed-media paintings that combine acrylic paint with carefully chosen fragments of discarded packaging, wrappers, and printed ephemera collected during her extensive travels. Her subjects are activists, workers, cultural figures, dancers, and ordinary people rendered with a combination of graphic clarity and quiet reverence. She has described the practice as practical, spiritual, and political at once: artists have always used what is at hand; the act of reworking trash into something beautiful carries a sense of transformation; and the materials themselves speak to shared patterns of consumption and discard across cultures. Currier has consistently described herself as a humanist artist for whom art and the social world are inseparable.

Today Currier continues to divide her time between the studio in Santa Fe and further travel, gathering materials and stories that feed the next body of work. Her career remains rooted in the belief that the common threads of human experience outweigh the differences that so often separate us, and that even the most ordinary discarded objects can be transformed into something that honors dignity and connection.

Shop Erin Currier >>

Visit our Reviews page to leave a review >>

Exterior view of Chimayo Trading gallery with adobe architecture, featuring an open sign and a sunflower in the foreground.

Come to the gallery to see where History Meets Art in Taos..

#1 Saint Francis Church Plaza
Ranchos de Taos, NM 87557

575.758.0504

Get more info on Art Acquisitions >>

From Trash to Transcendence

Share this: