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Photographer Paul Turounet and artist-physician Robert Campbell shared a fascination with Latin America. Empathy with the dispossessed led them on journeys there, Turounet to the Arizona-Mexican border to experience the migrant path and photograph fragments of their stories; Dr. Campbell to Guatemala, where he operated free clinics providing basic medical care. Both artists’ work comes out of, and is inseparable from, their humanitarian paths.

The words Elizabeth McBride wrote about Robert Campbell could easily be said of both artists:

“He was an artist who involved social activism in his art, yet without protest, rather with humility and sincerity.”

Paul Turounet, Estamos Buscando A, 2017

Bajo La Luna Verde (Under the Green Moon)
Photobook, prints, self-published 2014
Paul Turounet

In 2004, Turounet travelled to the US-Mexican Border in Arizona to walk twelve-miles of dirt road south of Sasabe. Intending to photograph migrants, his journey turned out to be one of extreme solitude due to the danger of the journey. Skirting smugglers and navigating the treacherous conditions of the Sonora Desert, Turounet’s photographs are interspersed with prose describing his journey of a day and a night, marked by rhythmic repetitions: taking a sip of precious water; the experience of the violent daytime heat and nighttime cold.

Of the night spent sleeping in some brush, Turounet said “I have never felt so alone… I just wanted to go home.”

Paul Turounet, Bajo La Luna Verde, 2014

Estamos Buscando A (We are looking for)
Photobook, prints, self-published 2017
Paul Turounet

Later in 2004, Turounet returned to the border/ Sonora Desert, this time in the company of Grupos Beta, a Mexican organization that advises migrants and registers minors attempting to cross.

Traveling by truck through the desert, they passed points known by migrants and “coyotes” (human smugglers): “La Ladrilla” (the Brickyard), where migrants congregate to make travel plans and find a coyote to take them across; and Arroyo de Coyote, a pit filled with discarded clothes and other possessions, where migrants are robbed and the women raped. The journey ended at Rancho La Sierrita, another point for pickup and smuggling.

Turounet’s photographs document these places, and the migrants he met along the way.

Paul Turounet, Bajo La Luna Verde, 2014

Paul Turounet, Estamos Buscando A, 2017

Tierra del Vida
Robert Campbell
Exhibition Catalog, Diverseworks, Houston, TX
December 10, 1994- January 29, 1995

Born in 1955, in Claude, TX, Robert Campbell was a neurologist with a medical degree from Baylor. He was also an artist entranced by the beauty of colors and textures, and a Catholic inspired by the Latin American church’s “liberation theology” teaching on living a simple life and helping the poor.

“Art feeds into medicine and medicine feeds into art. Art should be socially responsible and it is a part of the healing process. Medicine is more technical, and having lost a lot of its humanity, regains it through art,” Campbell said.

Dr. Campbell founded the Sociedad San Martin de Porres, a network of free clinics in Belize and then Guatemala. All proceeds from his art went to fund these clinics, and many artist friends were volunteers.

Campbell was inspired by the people he met in Guatemala and the Mayan/Catholic rituals he experienced there. His work involved fragile materials that changed over time: dried flowers, fabric soaked in plaster, and candle wax. He wanted to expand art to the point that it could hold the deep spiritual aspirations and empathies of people.

This exhibition catalog features work that took shape in the now-defunct Commerce Street Studios in Houston and were exhibited at Diverseworks before Campbell’s death from AIDS in 1995 at the age of 39.

This exhibition was curated by Jenkins Library Supervisor Brooke Bailey.

Robert Campbell, Pan de Vida, 1992 and Homenaje a San Juan de la Cruz, 1990

Robert Campbell, Feast Day of San Martin de Porres, Mass and Daily Novenas. Partial view of installation, November, 1989.