Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art—Human Resource Exploitation: A Family Album

Detail of Elena Brokaw’s Human Resource Exploitation: A Family Album. Original photograph by Ramiro García (d 1980).

• Exhibition Dates: Friday, September 24, 2021 - January 15, 2022

• Closing Event: Friday, January 14, 5 - 8 pm

• Museum Hours • Tuesday - Saturday 10 am - 5 pm

Content Notice
Human Resource Exploitation: A Family Album focuses on the violent effects of government policies.
The exhibition contains dehumanizing language and language related to death and torture.

In 1980, when Elena Brokaw was four and a half months old, the Guatemalan government assassinated her father, the artist and activist Ramiro García. In Human Resource Exploitation: A Family Album, she uses the photographs and ephemera she inherited from him to illuminate the context of his death. Enlarged to a confronting scale, the photographs have been altered by Brokaw to include text from the Human Resource Exploitation Manual — a torture guide published by the CIA, the organization that trained the Guatemalan authorities who conducted the murder. By juxtaposing the evasive euphemisms of the book with the direct warmth of the photographs, she evokes the clash between violent historical events and the reality of everyday people whose lives are changed by forces beyond their control.

This program is supported in part by Nevada Humanities. Learn more