Articles

National Spotlight

Gina Adams considers herself an Indigenous-hybrid artist involved in a variety of craft-based work rooted in her heritage. Yet her commitment to art-making is equally matched by the extensive research she conducts in libraries, museums, and databases. Its Honor Is Hereby Pledged: Gina Adams is the product of Adams’s deep-dive into American history. It is a stunning collection of works intent on truth-telling, making it all the more relevant and poignant.

Deborah Ross • October 01, 2019

Music

“Having your crew is essential,” says Paul who relocated to Portland for college and stayed after graduating. “When you walk outside and don’t see people who look like you, it makes you feel helpless. It’s a lonely feeling.” She goes on to say that the people of color who supported her during the creation and release of Mother of My Children were invaluable for their love and understanding. The “party” Paul’s new album refers to is a bittersweet one, the unavoidable and contrasting beauty and despair of life, born of a worldview that’s inextricably linked with her Native upbringing, friends, and family.

Patrick McGuire • October 01, 2019

Food + Drink

Have coffee with Tom Leech, Curator at The Press at the Palace of the Governors.

Lauren Tresp • October 01, 2019

From the Editor

I love print. I love words on a physical page held in my hands. I love the texture of paper and the smell of old books. I love interesting editorial design that creates an experience greater than the sum of its parts. If you’ve ever been to Southwest Contemporary’s offices, you may have seen my collection of independent magazines from around the world, which is always growing (here’s an open invitation to come say hi and take a look!).

Lauren Tresp • October 04, 2019

FeatureStudio Visit

Erin Mickelson’s book-based artwork plays with translation, in every sense of the word. In LIMINAL betwixt/between, her series of work displayed in form & concept’s Superscript show in 2018, text is translated to sound, sound to image, and image fed into an algorithm, chopped up, and assembled into new images. Her collaborating artists are Twitter bots and long-dead authors, and her process a visible part of the product. In everything she makes, there’s a degree of absurdity and flux: how many times can you translate something and still call it the same thing?

Robin Babb • October 01, 2019

Feature

The evolution of the art of printmaking is practically a human inheritance of knowledge from which we all benefit. We experience printmaking in our daily lives, from the clothes we wear and the books we read to poster advertisements for performances we attend and the money we spend. Printmaking is a three-thousand-year-old art form that reveals within itself an intimacy probably only found in the throes of a fight: gouging, biting, scraping, pressure, scarred surfaces, trenches dug. Years of battling the grain to carve images into wood leave the artists’ hands bent and curved like tree roots, maybe even burned from caustic processes that can scar the hand in the effort of creating visual landscapes.

Marya Errin Jones • October 01, 2019

Feature

Unlike most other traditional printmaking technologies, the invention of lithography can be traced to a specific person and time. Like most artists before and since, German actor and playwright Johann […]

Titus O'Brien • October 01, 2019

Feature

As ABQ Zine Fest 9 approaches, we take a look at how print media has endured and the spaces that are building culture through the celebration of zines, books, and comics.

Maggie Grimason • October 01, 2019

Review

IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts showcases its student printmakers from the ‘60s and ‘70s in their explorations of form and psyche.

Asuri Ramanujan Krittika • October 01, 2019

Review

From the moment Shandien LaRance (Hopi) dances out onto the runway, threading her legs into and out of and through her five hoops, the sixth annual Indian Market Haute Couture Fashion Show feels as much a ceremony as a runway show.

Briana Olson • October 01, 2019

Review

Globular figures seem to wiggle, tumble, float, or crawl across pieces of thick, white paper. Two particularly large sheets of paper cascade down from the ceiling at the center of the gallery. Sometimes they’re partially covered by a layer of clear film. About thirty smaller iterations occupy the walls. Here and there: a curled hand wearing what could be an elbow-length glove; firm, flexed ballet feet; sturdy legs in the air; and extra-long legs with powerful thighs...

Marcus Civin • October 01, 2019

Review

To Survive on This Shore is the product of five years of research and travel across the U.S. The show pairs Dugan’s photographic portraits with Fabbre’s interviews with transgender and gender-nonconforming adults, all aged fifty or older. I’m drawn immediately to Duchess Milan, 69, Los Angeles, CA (2017). “I just know I’m me,” begins the text beside the photo. “I identify as Duchess.”

Briana Olson • October 01, 2019

Photography

Wilson began CIPX in 2012 with the support of the New Mexico Museum of Art and has photographed internationally, adding to the prolific body of work. Over time, the project and Wilson’s intentions have evolved. Today, he speaks about the ritual of portraiture and questions how it fits into contemporary culture. Some traditions that were once a rite of passage for families and individuals have become part of the past.

Angie Rizzo • October 01, 2019

New Mexico Women

Shimano is worried that the culture of making is diminishing as technology becomes more omnipresent. She has noticed the decline in drawing skills as well as even everyday life skills among incoming students in the classes she teaches. We spoke of this phenomenon and the potential consequences which range from physical abilities in art-making to the power of having personal experiences that are unmediated by any device.

Angie Rizzo • October 01, 2019

PreviewSponsored

Zuni potter Timothy Edaakie considers himself something of a revivalist in the world of natural pottery. While conventional ceramicists opt for the speed and convenience of modern throwing and firing methods, everything about Edaakie’s meticulous approach is slow, spiritual, and aimed at celebrating the seminal work his ancestors pioneered. As 2019’s Rollin and Mary Ella King Native artist fellow, Edaakie traveled from his home on the Zuni Reservation to Santa Fe this fall to live, work, and speak at the School for Advanced Research. Specifically, he plans on re-creating two Zuni pieces from SAR’s collection using clay and other materials collected from Zuni land during his fellowship: an A:shiwi olla jar and a traditional stew bowl.

Patrick McGuire • October 01, 2019

Sponsored

Claire Kahn’s design sensibilities are applied across a staggering range of media. From architecture to water features (she was the project designer and a choreographer on the team that designed the Bellagio fountain, among many notable others) to jewelry, she seeks to discover, distill, and express the essence of her subjects. Her upcoming jewelry exhibition at Patina Gallery, Signs of Life, explores the twelve months of the year through pieces composed of their birthstones and crocheted beads.

Tamara Johnson • October 01, 2019

New Mexico Women

Virginia Dwan, best known in the Southwest for her support of land art and artists, as well as the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico, boasts a career that reaches far beyond the desert. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Dwan got her start in Los Angeles with the Virginia Dwan Gallery, which eventually expanded to New York, where she represented artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Sol LeWitt, Edward Kienholz, and many, many more. Dwan, the heiress of manufacturing conglomerate 3M, was able to take risks on challenging art. She played a major role in supporting some of the most definitive earthworks, such as Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, The Lightning Fields by Walter De Maria, Double Negative by Michael Heizer, and the still-in-progress Star Axis by Charles Ross. She is still a passionate supporter of the arts and speaks fondly of working with artists and being a part of the creative process.

Angie Rizzo • August 30, 2019

Feature

We took a seat at the table in the center of the warehouse-turned-home (turned-“work, brainstorming, and studio space”) where artists Cannupa Hanska Luger and Ginger Dunnill live in Glorieta, New Mexico. Taped to the kitchen cabinet was a wall-size paper schedule of impending deadlines for numerous projects. Every line was filled out, and notes were made in black marker, even in the margins. “Welcome to my life,” Dunnill laughed as, never skipping a beat, she outlined their individual projects—while the couple’s two children ran in one door and out the other...

Maggie Grimason • August 28, 2019

FeatureStudio Visit

The tone of my studio visit with Santa Fe artist Ted Larsen was set early when he declared that he would likely be both circumspect and like a blowtorch when talking about his thoughts on his studio practice, life, and work. Now fifty-five, the trained painter has been showing his art since before he graduated college. By the time he was twenty-two, he had already exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, making big strides early on in a career that has now spanned decades.

Clayton Porter • August 28, 2019

From the Editor

This month we embrace our new name and traverse the southwest from Silver City, New Mexico, to Scottsdale, Arizona. In our features, we visit the studio of Santa Fe artist Ted Larsen, whose work we are honored to present as this issue’s cover art. Briana Olson takes us on a day tour of some of Albuquerque’s incredible murals. Rachel Preston Prinz gives us the lowdown on the art, architecture, and natural glories in and around Silver City, New Mexico. Maggie Grimason goes deep with artists Ginger Dunnill and Cannupa Hanska Luger at their Glorieta, New Mexico home, to talk about their individual and collaborative practices spanning art, life, community, and family.

Lauren Tresp • August 28, 2019

Food + Drink

Have a beer with Matie Fricker, owner of the only queer-woman-owned sex shop in Albuquerque: Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center.

Robin Babb • August 28, 2019

Writings

Julia Brennan is a writer and performer from central New York. Her work has been published in Hotel America, Big Big Wednesday, and Tarpaulin Sky Press, among other publications. Her debut novel, Hunting Season, won the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award and will be published in 2020.

Julia Brennan • August 28, 2019

Review

Sashiko greets me as I enter the gallery for Shizu Saldamando’s show, held at SMOCA as part of southwestNET’s series showcasing mid-career Mexican and U.S. artists from the Southwest. Hushed and intimate, each work seems to demand all of one’s attention, a bid made more poignant by Saldamando’s insistence on portraying friends and family and, according to the wall text, “refus[ing] any notions of subjugation” in the artist-subject relationship. A multifaceted artist of Mexican American and Japanese American heritage, Saldamando focuses on “often-overlooked communities of color: punks, queers, activists, and artists.”

Aviva Dove-Viebahn • August 28, 2019

Review

Rapheal Begay is a Diné photographer and curator from Window Rock, Arizona, (the capital of the Navajo Nation) currently showing his work at Trapdoor Projects, near downtown Albuquerque. The medium is photography, but the methods are strikingly conceptual, requiring viewers to finish the work in their minds. His work evokes memories of family, as well as harshly beautiful landscapes and the animals who populate them—especially sheep—in the Navajo Nation.

Asuri Ramanujan Krittika • August 28, 2019

Review

New Mexico Dance Project is a newcomer powerhouse on the Santa Fe dance scene. Husband and wife team Erik Sampson and Scarlett Wynne founded the company in New Mexico six months ago. Since then, they have been teaching workshops for students, creating new works nonstop, and performing with the intention to become an integrated part of the community.

Tamara Johnson • August 28, 2019

Review

Catchers helps us see into the past and, through the past, to recognize those we ignore in the present.

Jonah Winn-Lenetsky • August 28, 2019

FeatureTravel

It should be on everyone’s bucket list. Silver City. It sounds like a romantic vestige of another time. I didn’t realize how much so until I turned off the highway and onto a deliciously winding drive through the Black Range and into the Gila National Forest and Pinos Altos Mountains.

Rachel Preston • August 28, 2019

Music

Some amount of personal suffering is expected to be felt by those who create music, but it’s rare for musicians to fuel their work with it as adeptly as Lightning Cult’s Mike Marchant. Now living in Santa Fe, the former Denver musician was hailed as one of the city’s most promising songwriters until a devastating cancer diagnosis stopped him in his tracks in 2012. Marchant survived but experienced significant memory loss related to chemotherapy and radiation treatments. A crippling self-destructive period followed. The Lightning Cult project represents Marchant’s return to music-making and reveals an artist transformed through tragedy and tenacity.

Patrick McGuire • August 28, 2019

Feature

Briana Olson meditates on belonging as she tours the murals and street art of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Briana Olson • August 28, 2019

News

Geneva Boliek-Poling is a visual artist emerging from the University of New Mexico's Art & Ecology department. Geneva solidified her affection for the southwest through horseback riding and painting along the Rio Grande.

Southwest Contemporary • August 28, 2019