Articles

If classical ballet isn’t quite your thing (and even if it is), leave it to Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, presented this holiday season by Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, to reintroduce you to the art form. Somewhere between high art and lowbrow camp, this all-male ballet... By Southwest Contemporary

Dec 01

The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility

516 Arts and the Albuquerque Museum: The US-Mexico border has come to occupy an intellectually and emotionally charged space as well as a territorial one. Much of the creative production around the border unearths ways in which artists, architects, designers... By Southwest Contemporary

Dec 01

Michael Bergt

Studio Visit

Michael Bergt has been in deep dialogue with art history over the course of his more than thirty-year career. Working across drawing, sculpture, and primarily egg tempera painting, Bergt has engaged art’s long history of grappling with representational and abstract sensibilities... By Clayton Porter and Lauren Tresp

Dec 01

Getting Lost in Portals Bermuda

Vince Kadlubek is running late. When I arrive at the repurposed bowling alley, I inform the desk clerk I have an interview appointment, and he promptly tells a colleague. She approaches me, a walkie-talkie hanging from her belt, looking authoritative and efficient. “And you are?... By Chelsea Weathers

Dec 01

December 2017/January 2018

From the Editor

Happy Holidays from all of us at THE Magazine! This issue will span December and January, and as such, it contains several very special features and additional content. However, we are now publishing new content online, please sign up for our newsletter and... By Lauren Tresp

Nov 01

How to Carve a Turkey

The Printed Page

This Thanksgiving, learn how to carve a turkey, illustrated by designer and illustrator Chris Philpot... By Chris Philpot

Nov 21

Dispatch: Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA

News

Cruising on foot down the packed blocks of downtown Los Angeles where open-air storefronts advertising their services in Spanish face the amblers of the sidewalk, I am struck by how much this dense corridor reminds me of Mexico City. Indeed, perhaps the whole of the nation's second biggest city... By Maggie Grimason

Nov 28

Thais Mather’s Reckless Abandon

News

Alert arts community members may remember Thais Mather as one-third of the Victory Grrrls, who performed at form & concept earlier this year as part of the gallery’s programming around an event featuring feminist pioneer artist Judy Chicago. I’ve been keeping my eye on for this artist... By Kathryn M Davis

Nov 07

November Book Reviews

Books + Literary

Jenn Shapland reviews three recent book releases: The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco (nonfiction), Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (fiction), and For Want of Water: And Other Poems by Sasha Pimentel (poetry) ... By Jenn Shapland

Nov 01

Guerrilla Tactics: Art, Performance, and the Politics of Resourcefulness, 1967-1987

Faye Gleisser, the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center’s current postdoctoral fellow, finds inspiration in the work of scholars and artists who disrupt linear historical periods. Fred Wilson is particularly influential. Gaining renown in the early nineties, Wilson juxtaposed... By Alicia Inez Guzmán

Nov 01

Future Shock

SITE Santa Fe: The future is now, at least in the context of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. When the book debuted in 1970, the year 2017 was a figment of the journalist-turned-futurist’s locomotive imagination. He daydreamed personal spaceships and underwater cities for us, but also ... By Jordan Eddy

Nov 01

The Alchemical Trace

Sanitary Tortilla Factory: In Lesbian Art in America, Harmony Hammond asks a number of questions about what, precisely, is “lesbian” about lesbian art. “Is the quality ‘lesbian’ embodied in the art object, the sexuality of the artist or viewer, or the viewing context?... Is lesbian art ... By Jenn Shapland

Nov 01

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In Forty Questions

Books + Literary

Sometimes a writer’s subject finds her. Valeria Luiselli, a novelist and essayist from Mexico City, was waiting for her green card when she and her niece started working as interpreters at the New York immigration court. Luiselli had heard from her own immigration lawyer that after... By Jenn Shapland

Nov 01

Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art

Few artists have explored flatness as deeply as Kota Ezawa. Using digital tools, for the past several years Ezawa has transformed appropriated imagery into deceptively simple compositions. A Rembrandt loses its impasto and atmospheric perspective to become a series of... By Chelsea Weathers

Nov 01

2007 Riofavara Nero D’Avola “Sciavè”

One Bottle

Dionysus stood at the end of the stone pier in Chios. He was watching the sky, the horizon, and the light on the water. He watched the pirate ship as it made its way into the bay. It was an old, solid ship with a black hull and a frayed white sail. There were twelve pirates on... By Joshua Baer

Nov 01

New Mexico Museum of Art Centennial Celebrations

Join the New Mexico Museum of Art for a “once-in-a-century community birthday party,” as the institution turns one hundred on the day of the celebration. From 10 am to 5 pm, the museum will re-open after two months of building renovations with a plaza-wide party with events... By Southwest Contemporary

Nov 01

Kinesthesia: Latin American Art, 1954-1969

National Spotlight

The Palm Springs Art Museum, as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, is exhibiting two major installations. Kinesthesia: Latin American Art, 1954-1969 features... By Southwest Contemporary

Nov 01

Constance DeJong: Measure and Light, 30 Years

One of humanity’s most important accomplishments, after the invention of written language, is the application of systematic measurements to things like distances, weights, codified sizes of this or that object. Applying number to the concept of a standard measurement has at its... By Diane Armitage

Nov 01

The Portable Dorothy Parker

With its script by Santa Fean Annie Lux, The Portable Dorothy Parker is almost as good as being a fly on the wall while one of the most popular writers and oft-quoted wits of the early twentieth century holds forth. It also serves as an excellent example that good art gets ... By Kathryn M Davis

Nov 01

Laurie Tümer: Clouds

Photography

This series began lying in bed lazily photographing the clouds tripping along the horizon of the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, home to Los Alamos National Laboratory... By Southwest Contemporary

Nov 01

Field Report: Marfa

TravelTexas

To borrow a word used by Peruvian artist William Cordova to describe a wall-sized projection of open ocean in a screening room within his show, I think of Marfa as a portal... By Jenn Shapland

Nov 01

Jill O’Bryan

Studio Visit

Jill O’Bryan spends her winters in New York and her summers perched high in the desert on a remote mesa outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico. She has been trekking back and forth, from coastal city grid to off-grid entirely, for twenty years, and for twenty years has sought a personal, physical relationship with the desert, its big skies... By Clayton Porter and Lauren Tresp

Oct 19

Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, Preview #2

Independent films often have a freedom that larger studio films just don’t permit; without the money of a big studio also comes license to explore themes that might not make millions at the box office. This freedom is apparent in the many documentaries and feature films that... By Chelsea Weathers

Oct 12

Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, Preview #1

The Santa Fe Independent Film Festival begins on Wednesday, October 18, and will run through October 22 in theaters all over town. The festival opens with The Square (dir. Ruben Östlund), which won this year’s Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Set against the backdrop of... By Chelsea Weathers

Oct 01

Redescribing the Desert: Vija Celmins in the Southwest

Vija Celmins has long been known as an “artist’s artist,” in part because she attends to her drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptures with meticulous detail. Centering on the expanses of the moon’s surface, the desert, ocean, and night sky, her works always ... By Alicia Inez Guzmán

Aug 01

New Myths of Santa Fe

It’s March and Thais Mather sits in her Eldorado living room with a great firmament of inky constellations hanging above her head. She recently completed the artwork for a solo exhibition titled The Anonymous Author, and its centerpiece is a series of densely detailed pointillist... By Jordan Eddy

Oct 01

New Releases: One Sentence Book Reviews

Books + Literary

New fall book released in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are reviewed with one sentence and one quotation of each from Jenn Shapland. Titles include The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt, Katalin Street by Magda Szabo, The Mountain by Paul Yoon, Letters to his Neighbor by Marcel Proust ... By Jenn Shapland

Oct 01

Theatre in Santa Fe Comes into its Own

There is something pulsing through our thin mountain air. Something electric and exciting and I’m not describing the lightning-filled monsoon season. Instead, I am talking about the growing and energetic theatre and performance scene that is currently emanating from all over ... By Jonah Winn-Lenetsky

Oct 01

Way OUT West Film Fest

Celebrating its fifteenth year, the Way OUT West Film Fest (formerly the Southwest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival) in Albuquerque will include thirty-four screenings over ten days, from October 13 through October 22. Chavela (2017), a music documentary directed by Catherine Gund and ... By Jenn Shapland

Oct 01

Monsters of the Santa Fe Art Scene

The Printed Page

Monsters of the Santa Fe Art Scene: illustrations by Chris Philpot By Southwest Contemporary

Oct 01

Portraits from Standing Rock

Tom Harjo’s Portraits from Standing Rock provide insight into an event that was difficult to see. Using still photography, he portrays the people, the emotions, the interactions, and the violence that law enforcement in South Dakota tried to shield from public view in 2016. Harjo’s... By Jenn Shapland

Oct 01

2007 Domaine Les Pallières Gigondas “Les Racines”

One Bottle

In prehistoric times, the line that connected people to each other was regarded as one of [...] By Joshua Baer

Oct 01

Steve Barry: Wave

The thick metal door swung shut behind me, and the momentum of its thud closed off the thrum of traffic from Coal Avenue, quieting the world inside the gallery. In the small exhibition space of Sanitary Tortilla Factory, machinery began to whirr, set off by the movement of my body in... By Maggie Grimason

Oct 01

Frida Kahlo: Her Photos

In the new documentary that accompanies the exhibition Frida Kahlo:Her Photos, curated by Mexican photographer and historian Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, reference is made at the very beginning to Kahlo’s horrific accident at the age of eighteen. It was the dreadful collision of a bus with... By Diane Armitage

Oct 01

Broken Boxes

The box can be a thing and an idea, sometimes diffuse, other times quite literally bounded. To think outside of one is a ready adage, one of those sayings that’s so overused it’s actually lost most of its ability to make a point. But when I think about the box in this exhibition... By Alicia Inez Guzmán

Oct 01

Three Questions with Dario Robleto

Magazine

Houston-based artist Dario Robleto was recently described by Krista Tippett of onbeing.org as “famous for spinning and shaping unconventional materials—from dinosaur fossils to pulverized vintage records, from swamp root to cramp bark. He joins words and objects in a way that distills ... By Cyndi Conn

Oct 01

Cross Pollination

The bees have proven themselves remarkably commodifiable, not only through the products they manufacture that humans enjoy, like honey and beeswax, but also as a pattern, a motif, a caricature. The market loves a stripe found in nature. If panda bears are the symbol of neoliberal... By Jenn Shapland

Oct 01

Review Santa Fe Photo Festival

Review Santa Fe is the multifaceted flagship program of CENTER and is one of the premier juried [...] By Southwest Contemporary

Oct 01

Christian Michael Filardo

Studio Visit

Christian Michael Filardo takes photographs constantly. A hand holds a switchblade near a blurry-socked leg; a drone floats in a twilit sky above a cholla cactus; soap suds cover the windows of a car. A tattooed arm, melted candles, broken glass, leafy houseplants, tainted concrete, dirt, cats, the back of a shaved head. An omnipresent flash ... By Chelsea Weathers and Clayton Porter

Oct 01

Warhol Out West