Now in its third year, The Medium and Springdale’s Creative Exchange Fund support local artists by providing financial support and a space to take creative risks. KUAF is partnering with The Medium to profile some of this year’s 37 multidisciplinary artists. We’ll hear about their art, their process, and what it means to be a creative in Northwest Arkansas.
Today we hear from Xanat Condado Howe, who is blending ancestral heritage with contemporary forms to explore memory and cultural identity.
“My name is Xanat Condado Howe, and I am a visual artist — and I am particularly a ceramicist. The work that I have at The Medium right now is called Dissonance, and it is an installation. I have around 50 pieces of ceramics displayed it’s a mixture of tile and masks. I also have a small sculpture that is a guardian creature, and then I have a giant mask that is broken in half. You can look inside, and inside the giant mask you have a couple of ceramic vases and some more masks.
“So, it’s a lot of different components, but it’s also an immersive installation. We have a film being projected, and we also have a soundscape that plays alongside with all of the work.
“The stuff that I’ve been making for the last couple of years have been about preserving Indigenous traditions, and more specifically, Indigenous medical traditions from Mexico. My great-grandmas were both curanderas, so they were traditional healers, and that was their practice all of their lives. It was very beautiful to grow up in that environment and to really lean into ancestral wisdom for help and for health.
“That was something I was unfortunately disconnected to when I was growing up and then moving to the U.S. and migrating over here definitely pushed me even further away from those practices. All of my research for the last couple of years has been on the preservation of these plants and plant knowledge.
“The stars that I had that I added to this piece all have the molecular structure of la planta de susto. La planta de Susto is a plant that was brought from Africa into Mexico, where it developed and mixed into Indigenous traditions and colonial traditions in medicine.
“There’s an understanding that when you experience something that startles or scares you, your soul leaves your body, and you have to do something physical to bring it back.
“When you’re scared, you’re not yourself anymore, and you have to do something physical to bring back yourself. This plant is used in many tinctures and cleanses to invite the spirit back into yourself. Again, there are many ways to do this, but a common thread is this plant.
“So, I took the molecular structure and put it in these stars, almost to serve as a quilt for many pieces of my work. Because I’m also addressing something very relevant right now — that we are consuming so much, so connected, able to hear so much awful news, be connected with strangers, learn about their lives, also be overwhelmed by brands trying to sell things. It’s so fast that we don’t give ourselves enough time to process the feelings we get with each scroll.
“This focus on me trying to research on this specific plant was one time I just opened up my phone. And first thing in the morning the first thing I saw on Instagram was a child bleeding to death in a war zone. That was the first thing I saw when I woke up, and it hit me that this is not OK. This is not normal. There’s so much pain and suffering in the world, and I didn’t know how to process it. Also, I felt like I couldn’t do anything about it.
“I made this piece. It’s an arch, where the top part is made of tiles with the plant, and on the columns I have a performance piece where I am cleansing myself. I showed it to my friends, and it started a lot of conversations. A lot of people felt the same way — they didn’t have an outlet, or couldn’t talk in real life with people about the things they’d seen online. So, that is how this project started. I wanted to create a place for the community.
“The Creative Exchange Fund has been an incredible opportunity for me. The grant I received was to do an installation in this space, and one of the requirements was that I collaborated with other artists. So the installation that’s up now has a film and a soundscape.
“I collaborated with two main artists: Ben Drane, who’s from the area and an incredibly talented musician. It’s very isolating to be an artist, because he will be working by himself on his projects by himself on his computers. I will be working in the studio by myself. And we'll hangout sometimes, but nothing really crosses. And then, Justin Howe is a cinematographer from Oklahoma. He’s a Cherokee filmmaker, and he’s also my husband.
“It was definitely challenging to communicate all of these thoughts and feelings to these two friends and trust that they would understand what I was saying and create these two beautiful pieces that worked so well with my work.
“I also collaborated with a performance artist named Hilda and she is from Mexico City too. It was really awesome to get to do that.
“Ceramics is a very physical, so it was very labor-intensive process. I was able to hire two assistants — two undergrads from the ceramics department at the university, Jade and Kade. It was a lot of people coming together to help me.
“I really wanted to guide people through almost like a meditation — to reach a height of meditation and then be brought gradually back to reality. It would be beautiful if they could also take a step back and think about the media they’re consuming — maybe take a break, talk to a friend, go outside, and staring at the sun. Just pause for a little bit.”
That was Xanat Howe. The Creative Exchange series is produced by KUAF Public Radio in partnership with The Medium. Support for this project comes from the Tyson Family Foundation. The Medium and the Creative Exchange Fund are projects of the Creative Arkansas Community Hub & Exchange (CACHE).
For more on this project and the 2025-26 recipients, you can visit The Medium.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
