The new art of atomic critique, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
February 17, 2025
“Familial ties to irradiated landscapes also motivate Joanna Keane Lopez, an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in New Mexico. Keane Lopez’s father, the activist, academic, and depleted uranium expert Damacio Lopez, was two years-old the morning of July 16, 1945, when the world’s first atomic bomb, Trinity, nicknamed the “Gadget,” was exploded some thirty miles from his family’s home near Socorro, New Mexico. The region has since been subject to depleted uranium weapons testing by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Keane Lopez’s mother, Colleen Keane, directed The River That Harms, a 1987 documentary detailing the catastrophic 1979 Church Rock uranium mill tailings spill on the Navajo Nation, which released more radioactive material than the Three Mile Island accident earlier that year but received comparatively little media coverage. Keane later spent a decade as a reporter for the Navajo Times.”