66 - 33 MA
North America breaks away from the Pangea landmass, drifts and collides with the Fallon plate. New Mexico emerges from the North American landmass as a vast inland sea evaporates during a great drying period.
8,000 BCE
Humans, from the Clovis culture, first occupy the New Mexican territory settling in the Gila River basin.
1540
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado assembles and expedition and enters present day New Mexico to find the "Seven Cities of Cibolas."
1738
Edward Cave is the first to use the figure of Columbia as the symbolic representation of America. In his weekly publication, The Gentleman's Quarterly, Cave uses code names to represent the topics debated since the publication of parliamentary debates is illegal. Many of the names are taken from Jonathan Swift's Gullivers Travels. Columbia is used a code for America.
1832
The cut nail is invented and allows for the creation of balloon framing. The invention creates fast and cheap housing construction. Ballon framing is first implemented in a warehouse designed by George Washington Snow near the stockyards on the south side of Chicago.
1842
Lyman Bridge Co. begins to sell pre-manufactured housing kits, able to be shipped from Chicago to territories throughout the west.
1872
John Gast paints American Progress, an allegorical painting of the modernization of the American west. In the painting, Columbia floats above a pastoral landscape pulling a telegraph line. She pushes out darkness and cowering Indians while brining the instruments of cultivation and progress in her wake.
1874
Timothy O'Sullivan accompanies the U.S. Geological Survey mapping the western territories. His images are distributed as stereoscopes.
1886
The birth of my great-grandfather and the surrender of Geronimo in Skeleton Canyon, New Mexico.
1893
A photograph of Yellow Hair, a Hunkpapa Sioux credited with the killing of General Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn, shows him plunging a knife into the chest of Buck Taylor acting as General Custer. This photograph is made at the photo studio of the Second Leiter Building on State Street and Congress Parkway in Chicago, the former flagship store of Sears and Roebuck Company.
1924
Columbia is first used in the opening credits for George Seitz lost film, After the Storm.
August 6th, 1945
My grandmother's ninth birthday party is ruined of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
1993
A picture of my grandmother is taken standing next to her royal blue Buick LaSabre, the car I inherited after her death. When I was nine my grandmother takes me to see Walter Hill's Geronimo: An American Legend, in the Apache mall in St. Anthony, Minnesota, starring Wes Studi as Geronimo. She cried through the whole thing, telling me over and over that I was watching my great-grandfather. I guess Wes Studi and I are related.
Installation View,
Historical Timeline and Timothy O'Sullivan,
Block Museum 2014
Installation View,
Site of Surrender,
2k Video Projection,
Block Museum 2014