S.T.E.A.M. @ the NMA 

Mother of All Bombs 
in the 
Skyroom 

2 p.m. 
Saturday, 
February 24, 2018

Nevada Museum of Art

A workshop framing perspectives in the
interest of disruptive technologies and their implications for human survival.

Lessons + Primary Sources:

Fierce Mother: Andre Breton and the Dawn of the Atomic Age: 

Left to right: Jacqueline Breton, 

André Masson, André Breton  and 

Varian Fry. 

Photograph Musée Cantini, Marseilles. 

Photo credit: Ylla and ©Pryor Dodge

Divorce decree for Andre Breton + Jacqueline Lamba, 7.31.45, Reno, Nevada.

Have you kissed a bomb today?

Mother Of All Bombs Zine

STEAM Biochar Lesson

Korea, Zero Sum Theory and the Prisoner's Dilemma

Posting Additional Lessons + Primary Sources Soon:

Dovetailing the Frames on being the Bombed and the Bombers

John Hershey's Hiroshima + Pressure Comp Questions

DIY Zine Making Lessons

A New National Historical Park in 3 Radioactive Pieces

Anchorworks

Student Galleries: Paintings + Video

  

The rods in Reactor 4 at Fukushima.  These are those they need to extract.  David Suzuki, esteemed Canadian scientist, has likened the job to pulling cigarettes from a crushed pack.  These rods cannot be taken out of the water in the cooling ponds, can't touch one another, and can't be subjected to or withstand any earthquakes.  This is all of our problem, and if an earthquake does hit, scientists are predicting the evacuation of the entire west coast of North America (Japan too).

Open-sourced Guggenheim digital Gutai exhibit:  

Nevada to North Korea


Word for the day: omnicide

Drawing #2542
go online, 
click out of my image 
+ draw your own!

ABQ Cultural Conference

Histories of Social and Community Activism

Margaret Randall, Hakim Bellamy, 
Michele Welsing, Roberto Rodriguez, 
John Crawford
Albuquerque Cultural Conference, 
Sunday, August 28, 2011

Love Letter to Albuquerque

Love Letter to All the Kansas City Plants

Love letter to all the Kansas City plants To the workers from the old Bendix plant Where the congressional representatives call on them To return their complaints about exposure to radioactivty To their offices Making nuclear bomb parts never meant to Our families that we would wait the Excrutiating hospital wait For diagnoses and uncertainty To name the origins of un-nameable dis-ease To document the slow, agonizing deaths of loved ones And to wait for a check There is no trade for rising Freshened by sleep Ready to work, play, love, garden There is no payment possible No dollar sign to erase The ravages of the daughters of uranium The dollar is not a cure for 35 and 40 years of Successive service The dollar cannot bring back our dead Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles, sons.... "I miss you", she whispers... She lays on top of his grave In the sun And tries to remember Their first and last kisses The photographs Are losing their colors And her dreams begin in black and white now They are always truncated She wakes up startled And sits up wondering Desperately searching the smooth sheets next to her Falling back to the abyss Of loss In tears Now they're building Another Kansas City Plant And the same congressman who wants Her to report her loss to him Has paved the way by selling Bonds and tax breaks And with nausea She instantly realizes that if It continues She will not be the last woman widowed to Mysterious illness She will not be the last mother Who cannot explain to a daughter Why her sacrifice has a price A dollar amount Attached to incomprehensible loss All the Kansas City Plants Have leaf bugs All the leaf cutter bugs Reproduce more rapidly Than you And I So that when radiation leaks When human precautions against Something unseeable Unsmellable Unfeelable Intangible Omnipresent Fails Well, you see, then that is when The suffering begins The leaf cutter bugs Will start to lose appendages Or have shorter antennae Their wings shriveled or Spotted with dis-ease And we brush the aside They are so tiny, and their relationship To the Kansas City Plants So ordinary So unnoticeable We don't have so many lightning bugs They used to carpet the evening In bursts of phosphorescence Now they are occasional And I no longer have the heart to Run to catch one Its truly like the hippies Who used to blanket the shores of 47th street Resisting the massacre in 'Nam Greying now, some lineup to be arrested One by one At The Kansas City Plant And I fancy those brave enough To resist Are also those brave enough to heal To a person, they are our heroes To each of them there is a time and rythym Of the heartbeat of survival There is the comittment to see through The layers of dollar bills piled On the top of an industry Unspeakably littered with the Carcasses of soldiers unprotected Marshall Islanders and Shoshone and Japanese  And those from Maralinga Whose ancestral homelands and reefs were Literally exploded into radioactive dust That fell, softly killing them and all that grows And they asked me why I do this work Why I stick with this theme Why I have allowed the political To become my artmaking And it is one story The story of a beautiful Shoshone man Married to my sweet sister Their eldest boy a few months older than my own The story of a father who wrote brilliantly About environmental racism Who, as a child, on that day July 6, 1962, was outside playing In his aunties garden In Duckwater Nevada When the United States military Conducted the Sedan underground nuclear test And blew a bomb buried in the sands of the desert In the heart of the Ruby Valley Sending a radiactive pink cloud Northwards Towards the center of Duckwater Aunties green garden turned black that day And that little boy Would grow to be a husband and father And leave a widow and a four year old son To remember him always To mourn that indescribable loss My sister is full of a sweet sadness That keeps her quietly struggling For justice But because her husband was Shoshone And not an engineer At Bendix Or Honeywell Because he was an indigenous child And not a Navy recruit with welding goggles Observing the explosion And then sweeping radioactive coral dust From the ships deck with a broom.... She cannot prove that her suffering and Loss in the face of leukemia Will ever be worth any of the Congressman's Dollar bills So this love letter to the Kansas City Plants Asks simply that there be no more sweet sadness That we make no more widows And orphans That we pay attention to that Which we can neither feel, hear, or see Let Kansas City plants refer Only to that which grows green Provides the bounty of fresh Survival True wealth Health So that there are no more sisters, sons, brothers, mothers In mourning Crumpled onto grave sites Ready to trade all the dollar bills In the congressional stores For just one more hour A day A single kiss

Tonight at The Wine Gallery

7:00 pm, 1911 McGee, KCMO

The Museum of Atomic Surrealism Presents:

Contributions from the Native Sons on the indigenous perspective on the history of nuclear testing

Special guest Dr. Fred Whitehead will read from his Bendix Poems

and

A new spoken word piece, titled 

A Love Letter to All the Kansas City Plants

by 

Mother Uranium

Hope to see you all there!

A Love Letter to all Kansas City Plants

Hi Kansas City Peace Activists and Nuclear Resistance Leaders!

I'm in town from Nevada (I grew up in Independence and helped found the City Movie-Center in KC in the 1980's)...I first became interested in nukes when I made a documentary at KC Public Access; Chernobyl One Year Later:  It Could Happen Here after interviewing Dr. Robert Gale, who treated the firefighters at Chernobyl.  I met my husband doing work for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and was one of the first KC ACORN organizers hired in '87...

 

I'm doing a show for the Fringe Festival titled "The Museum of Atomic Surrealism:  The Place Where Nuclear Bombs and Nuclear Power are Inseparable"...it represents the culmination of five years of research into the collective artists' response to, and the responses of the Hibakusha and Indigenous Peoples affected by the history of the birth of atomic technologies.  Its an installation at the Wine Gallery at 1911 McGee.  

There is a short performance art piece this Wednesday at 7:00pm :  "A Love Letter to all Kansas City Plants"...presenting 'Mother Uranium and her Native Sons'  (my kids are half-Washoe, and we live on the Washoe Indian Reservation in Dresslerville, Nevada...)

I'm presently a K-12 art teacher in a rural Nevada public school, and have developed an interdisciplinary curriculum based on these ideas with my colleagues (in a very conservative community)!  Two years ago, I established an organic school-to-table garden there, and am on the board of our local food cooperative.  I so want to reach out to leaders and activists here--we are all so war-weary, and yet there is still so much resistance necessary.  Chris, a young math teacher, came by on Sunday, and I gave him the floor to speak about the petition and legislation you all have going before voters.  I'm proud to hail from this place, and to call it home.  Please come out so that I can meet you!

I have a gift for you as well:  an 8' x 2'  banner that shows the places where radiation leaks from nuclear power plants--the one in Callahan, the three in Nebraska, and two from the coasts:  Diablo in Cali (we're particularly worried about that one because its built on an earthquake fault) as well as one I picked on the Jersey shore to illustrate that these radiation leaks are a coast-to-coast reality.  

Please, come share insights--I welcome collaboration and a chance to learn from one another!  

Solidarity,

laura fillmore