BUILDING WORLDS: KEN FURY AND GARY MEDINA COOK

Fri, June 12, 2026 – Sun, January 3, 2027

Santa Fe, NM

The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) presents Building Worlds: Ken Fury and Gary Medina Cook. This exhibition brings together contemporary New Mexico Genízaro artists Ken Fury (Genízaro) and Gary Medina Cook (Genízaro) to foreground a history long obscured in the cultural narratives of the American Southwest. In his mixed-media paintings, Fury explores the environments of his homelands in southern Colorado and New Mexico alongside supernatural spaces inhabited by transformative beings—spirits and ancestors who merge human, animal, and elemental forms. Layering acrylic, spray paint, airbrush, and ink on paper, wood, and leather, he creates tactile surfaces that evoke both scarred terrain and embodied memory.

For his jewelry art, Fury sculpts otherworldly shapes and organic organisms, creatures, spirits, and trees. Each piece functions as a character with its own narrative, evoking growth, transformation, and rebirth. His jewelry practice extends from his mixed-media paintings, integrating elements of his Nuevomexicano and Indigenous Genízaro heritage rooted in southern Colorado and New Mexico.

Gary Medina Cook’s experimental video art extends this reclamation into time-based media. Through layered sound, landscape footage, and performative gesture, Cook animates ancestral presence within contemporary New Mexico, rendering memory as a living, flickering force that resists erasure and insists on visibility. His one-hour documentary The Genízaro Experience—Shadows in Light explores the origins of Indigenous slavery, Genízaros in New Mexico, and a variety of related themes, including cultural hybridity, equality, genetic genealogy, and Tribal recognition. “Genízaros embody duality in the human condition. This story is one of ethnogenesis and cultural hybridity. A blending of spirits,” says Cook.

Cook and Fury’s works confront centuries of enslavement, forced assimilation, and ongoing lack of federal recognition, while reclaiming art as a site of healing and resilience.

Museum link: https://iaia.edu/event/building-worlds-ken-fury-gary-medina-cook/