2024: Inanna event at CONTAINER Santa Fe

A year ago, our Project Director Meridel Rubenstein received the Anonymous Was a Woman (AWAW) Environmental Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts to bring the Goddess Inanna back to the Mesopotamian Marshes.

Inanna, later called Ishtar, is one of the prominent Mesopotamian goddesses of love, fertility, flood, and war. Inanna is revered worldwide as a powerful icon. Inanna apocryphally founded Uruk, not Gilgamesh. She was the subject of poems and hymns, the first cuneiform translations, and the first signed texts by an author. The writer was Enheduanna, a priestess in c.2000 BC. It’s not possible to make or exhibit public images of women in Iraq but ancient and historic images are acceptable. At the main entrance to the Garden we will honor the independent strong marsh women with two tile works depicting them in an ancient and historic style, beginning with a tile representation of the goddess Inanna. A second panel which will be created in 2025 will feature a 19th century historic marsh woman. Both panels have been created based on examples from antiquity and historical photos.

Image of tile artwork depicting the goddess Inanna surrounded by marshlands and people

Above: The completed artwork “Inanna Returns to the Mesopotamian Marshes”

The AWAW grant supported Meridel in working closely with Nawar Ihsan, artist and conservator at the Iraq Museum in Baghdad and Shel Neymark, renowned ceramic artist in NM, to create the first tilework of the goddess Inanna. It has been a labor of love for the three to create these ceramic relief tiles for the entrance to the Eden in Iraq Wastewater Garden in the Mesopotamian Marshes of S. Iraq. Meridel began with collages, cutting and pasting researched images from antiquity, then sending them to Nawar in Baghdad. Nawar then responded by sending drawings back and forth from Iraq to New Mexico and back, until the artistic collaborators agreed on the final drawing. We were then ready for Meridel to take Shel’s canoe across the Rio Grande river, to work with him at his studio in Embudo, New Mexico, translating these drawings into relief tiles.

Shel and Meridel with completed tile work

Above: Shel and Meridel with the completed tiles (left), Artist Nawar Ihsan (right)

Above: Planned placement of the two tile artworks at either side of the gates to the Eden In Iraq Wastewater Garden Project

As part of the Eden in Iraq Wastewater Garden Project, the completed tilework Inanna Returns to the Mesopotamian Marshes was presented at Turner Carroll Gallery’s [CONTAINER] space in Santa Fe, NM on June 29, 2024. We are grateful to Turner Carroll for their support of this work. We hope to travel to an arts festival in Ur in March of 2025 to further speak about the process and show slides of this work. You can learn more about Meridel’s artistic work at https://meridelrubenstein.com/.

Image of people attending an opening reception for the Inanna tilework completion

Above: The first of two completed tile artworks presented at CONTAINER in Santa Fe, June 2024