Art teacher remembers victims of Mexican femicide in exhibit

When Hawken art teacher and Amnesty International advisor Anne Kmieck visited Juarez, Mexico in 2004, she walked into a grim, murderous reality. At that point, over 400 women, ranging in ages from 15-30, had been abducted, raped and murdered since 1993 in what has been called the \"femicide capital\" of world, which sits across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Kmieck`s visit with the Mexico Solidarity Network, a human rights organization, revealed, however, that little had been done amid police corruption and bungling, drug cartel infestation and a public assumption that the victims were \"bad girls,\" who deserved their brutal ends. It was a topic, she admits, that as an artist she had no intention of exploring. But a visit to Rome, which surprisingly evoked many of the same feelings she felt in Juarez, and an invitation to create an installation for an exhibit at Cleveland State University had Kmieck revisit those images of lost lives, weeping mothers and oppression. From that came Kmieck`s \"Naming the Rose,\" which debuts on Friday, May 18, in the \"Skinning the Eye\" exhibition in the Cleveland State Art Gallery. \"In both places, I felt the depth of human limitation and tragedy, one openly festering, the other commingled with sacred rituals and transcendent art,\" she said. \"But the most profound sensation, in both places, was an oppressive vacuum, a ponderous silence or silencing of the female both in body and in spirit.\" Kmieck`s mixed media installation features hanging, waxed garments on clotheslines, which are a ubiquity in the squalid barrios of Mexico, and is accompanied by milagros, small votive offerings, which name some 200 of the 400 women who have perished. \"Skinning the Eye\" will run through Saturday, June 16.