Memorial

Artist Donald Beauregard was commissioned to paint the six murals that appear in the Museum's auditorium and that depict the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He completed the sketches but died in 1914 after having painted only two of the murals. Joanne Lefrak’s memorial to Beauregard rests on the stage, a heavy, somber reminder of a life taken too soon.

On the top surface of the tomb, a complex interplay of imagery appears. Onto a piece of Plexiglas are etched daisies growing amid grass and pebbles, which brings to mind the saying “pushing up daisies,” a reference to death and burial. The daisy imagery is most visible as a shadow that is cast of the incised surface. It is further revealed or obscured as a video of the artist’s hand burying and unburying to tomb in dirt is projected onto the same surface. In the video, as the dirt is wiped away, an ashen sky is uncovered.

Lefrak’s installation functions not only as a memorial for Beauregard, but as a tangible remembrance of various individuals whose lives and deaths have intersected with this site. The remains of founding director of the Museum of New Mexico Edgar Lee Hewett are buried in the patio, for example, and when the museum was first built in 1916, excavation of the grounds revealed a skeleton with a shattered arrow embedded in the spine, as well as other human and animal skeletons.