Sharon Stewart
Born in Edinburg, Texas in 1955, Stewart studied finance and economics at the University of Texas and Harvard University before becoming a photographer. Engaged with what she calls the "cultural landscape," Stewart has used the camera as a companion for investigating human relationships with the land. The artist comes from a family tradition of photography that includes her great-great-aunt and her great-grandfather. Her first major series, Toxic Tour of Texas, is a travelogue of man-made places of environmental distress in her home state, accompanied by commentary from employees of the industrial sites, government regulators, and from its neighbors, many of whose lives have been altered by their proximity to these locations. Using these grassroots activists as her guides, Stewart found that their commitment to safe land, air, and water crossed social, economic, and racial boundaries. The idea for the project originated with a journalist friend of Stewart's, who needed illustrations, but once his article was completed the photographer continued to explore the topic across the state, both visually and with oral histories. The Toxic Tour was circulated as a traveling exhibition by the Texas Humanities Resource Center and the Texas Photographic Society, and is archived in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Work from the project is also included in The Altered Landscape, Carol Franc Buck Collection at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno (see publication The Altered Landscape, ed. Peter Pool, 1999); John Szarkowski's American Landuse Collection for Paine-Webber; the Harry Ranson Humanities Resource Center at the University of Texas, Austin; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Worcester Art Museum.
As a result of her work and the publication of Toxic Tour of Texas (1992), Stewart was invited to join the Water in the West collaborative, whose members document the history and politics of water use in the American West; her work is part of their archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Stewart lived in Houston for many years and was an active participant in the photography community there, eventually becoming the founding Vice President for the Houston Center for Photography. While visiting New Mexico, Stewart was invited to visit the northern village of El Cerrito for the annual limpia, the cleaning of the community acequia. Inspired by this ancient example of gravity-flow irrigation, passed and maintained from generation to generation, the artist began photographing the limpia and its participants in 1992 for a project she initially titled El Cerrito y La Acequia Madre (The Little Hill and the Mother Ditch). "Seeing the universal in the specific," she writes in her statement about the work, "this exploration of a small village's survival gives insights to sustainability through cooperation." In 1994, the artist moved to New Mexico, where she continues to live in Chacón in the Mora Valley in the northern part of the state. Oral histories conducted by the artist in conjunction with this project between 1993-2003 are in the collection of the University of New Mexico, Center for Southwest Research. Expanding her inquiry to the larger community of El Cerrito, Stewart eventually renamed the project Agua es vida: A Village Life Portrait.
El Cerrito has been the focus of several studies, beginning with a 1939 Rural Life Studies Project (administered through the Bureau of Agricultural Economics via the U.S. Department of Agriculture) that featured photographs by Irving Rusinow (made around 1941) that are now in the collection of the National Archive in Washington, D.C. More recent studies include "Community Change and Persistence: The Case of El Cerrito, New Mexico" by Clyde Eastman and Richard S. Krannich (in the periodical Community Development, Taylor & Francis, Volume 26, Issue 1, March 1995, p. 41-52), an essay that emphasizes the revitalization of the village since its decline in the 1960s and evaluates nine published studies and one doctoral dissertation on the village, and El Cerrito, New Mexico: Eight Generations in a Spanish Village by Richard L. Nostrand (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
Stewart's black-and-white photographs connect with a long tradition of recording aspects of village life in New Mexico. In terms of photography, she continues the tradition of capturing small-town American life that is represented in the collection by Russell Lee, Margaret Bourke-White, John Candelario, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, and others working during the 1930s and 1940s. Like the artists Miguel Gandert and Delilah Montoya, Stewart explores the culture of a New Mexican community that was traditionally Hispanic. And, in sympathy with an artist such as Laura Gilpin, her images express an admiration of the people and way of life she photographs without making them heroic. Stewart's work also connects with that of other concerned landscape photographers in the collection, such as Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Robert Adams, and Mark Klett, in its engagement with human choices about how to use natural resources. Her work has been collected and published across the United States, and abroad, and Stewart has received grants and fellowships from organizations including the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Light Work. Six of the artist's photographs of El Cerrito are in the collection of the New Mexico Capitol Arts Collection.
