ARTSPEAK RADIO chats with Cristina Muñiz and Stephen Wallace Pruitt

Wednesday, May 27, 2020, noon – 1pm CST, 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, streaming live www.kkfi.org

Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd welcomes award winning painter/artist Cristina Muñiz and filmaker/director Stephen Wallace Pruitt.

CRISTINA MUÑIZ, native to San Antonio, went to Kansas City, Missouri in 2012 to finish her BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute. She was a recipient of the Charlotte Street Foundation Studio Residency program for 2014-2015, after which, became a resident artist with The Drugstore studios until returning to Texas last year. Her work has recently been acquired by the Nerman MOCA, for their permanent collection. Muñiz lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.

“My work draws from narratives, whether personal recollections, or stories I’ve heard growing up from my parents, or from people I’ve never met. I am interested in all sorts of family history as a way to fill in the gaps in my own. I am interested in familial ownership of any kind, whether it’s land, home, objects, stories, and how these are handed down over generations. The act of exchange and the things we exchange intrigues me. The dynamic of “keeping it within the family” intrigues me.
My family didn’t have that. We didn’t have possessions or objects of emotional weight to hand down. All we have are these stories. But life gets in the way. You get busy, or you get to a certain age where you don’t want to hear these stories. And then you come full circle. In my case, as a woman and artist without children, I have the privilege of looking back and slowing down in order to recollect, to ask these questions, and get these stories again.
I don’t have anything to hand down unless I take these stories and recreate them on a surface. My recent work focuses on reinterpreting these stories in a visual format that can be enshrined and passed on. If all we have are these stories and keep them close in our memories, and keep them active by retelling them, it would be worth as much as a plot of land.
I make work. I lay marks down. I put stories on a surface to make them tangible artifacts that can be held onto because the stories demand this of me. The work comes from a love for the history of painting, the love, and act of making, and the love of creating. I must tell these stories. I must preserve them. I must put them in a way that will tell my story, our story.”

Follow Cristina Muñiz on Instagram-driedpaintbrush and Facebook

STEPHEN WALLACE PRUITT/MARY SETTLE PRUITT- Award-winning Kansas City independent filmmakers Stephen Wallace Pruitt and Mary Settle Pruitt took the road less traveled. They began making movies at ages 50 and 47 while continuing their respective careers as a college finance and economics professor and a homemaker. Despite having no prior training in film, theater, photography, or creative writing, and working with a tiny cast and crew composed almost entirely of first-timers, the couple’s first film, “Works in Progress,” played at over a dozen film festivals nationwide and was picked up for distribution by Vanguard Cinema in Hollywood. Their subsequent efforts, “The Tree” (a Critic’s Choice at the 2017 Iowa Independent Film Festival) and their six-part “Terminal,” built on this early success and are available for streaming on Amazon. Stephen and Mary’s latest film, “The Land,” is currently available on Amazon Prime Video. The couple is currently hard at work writing the screenplay for their next production, “Dust,” to be filmed in 2020.

Losing the family farm is a story all too familiar but no less wrenching. From Kansas City filmmakers Stephen Wallace Pruitt and Mary Settle Pruitt (YES Audience Favorite award winners, “The Tree”, 2017) comes this story about a 60-something farming couple as they strive to hold onto the only life they’ve ever known. John and Mary Lou Martin (Herman J. Johansen and Kathleen Warfel) come face-to-face with mistakes from their pasts and an uncertain future. Together they face circumstances that leave them too old to start over and yet too young to give up — exploring the question: “Are we more than what we do?” Family friend Missy Franklin is played by former “Guiding Light” soap opera actress Joicie Appell (many plays and movies including “Santa’s Sack,” “One Eye Open,” ‘Terminal” and “The Tree.”)

Director: Stephen Wallace Pruitt
Writers: Mary Settle Pruitt, Stephen Wallace Pruitt

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