Have a Drink with Tom Leech of the Palace Press
Have coffee with Tom Leech, Curator at The Press at the Palace of the Governors.
October 01, 2019
Articles
Letter: October-November 2019
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!).
October 04, 2019
Studio Visit: Erin Mickelson / Broken Cloud Press
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?
October 01, 2019
Impressions From the Past: The Rich History and Modern Processes of Printmaking
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.
October 01, 2019
Master Printer Valpuri Remling Doesn’t Stand on Ceremony in Life or Lithography
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 […]
October 01, 2019
Still in Print: ABQ Zine Fest 9 and Local Lit Destinations
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.
October 01, 2019
Experimental exPRESSion: Printmaking at IAIA, 1963–1980
IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts showcases its student printmakers from the ‘60s and ‘70s in their explorations of form and psyche.
October 01, 2019
Santa Fe Indian Market Haute Couture Fashion Show
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.
October 01, 2019
Sapira Cheuk: New Vessels, Unmade Structures
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...
October 01, 2019
To Survive on This Shore
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.”
October 01, 2019
Will Wilson
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.
October 01, 2019
New Mexico Women: Yoshiko Shimano
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.
October 01, 2019
[sponsored] Timothy Edaakie at the School for Advanced Research
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.
October 01, 2019
[sponsored] Claire Kahn Creates Signs of Life through Color and Pattern
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.
October 01, 2019
New Mexico Women: Virginia Dwan
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.
August 30, 2019
All Work and All Play: At Home with Artists Cannupa Hanska Luger and Ginger Dunnill
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...
August 28, 2019
Studio Visit: Ted Larsen
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.
August 28, 2019
Letter: September 2019
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.
August 28, 2019
Have a Drink with Matie Fricker of Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center
Have a beer with Matie Fricker, owner of the only queer-woman-owned sex shop in Albuquerque: Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center.
August 28, 2019
Father
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.
August 28, 2019
southwestNET: Shizu Saldamando
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.”
August 28, 2019
Rapheal Begay: Lest We Forget
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.
August 28, 2019
New Mexico Dance Project: note g
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.
August 28, 2019
Hung Liu: Catchers
Catchers helps us see into the past and, through the past, to recognize those we ignore in the present.
August 28, 2019
Field Report: Silver City, New Mexico
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.
August 28, 2019
Lightning Cult’s EP2: Ether Waves
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.
August 28, 2019
Weekday Detour: Street Art in Albuquerque
Briana Olson meditates on belonging as she tours the murals and street art of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
August 28, 2019
Meet the Team: Geneva Boliek-Poling
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.
August 28, 2019
What Pain Can Do
About the pain. I’ll first describe it clinically, as if I were a camera. I began to sweat everywhere after a flash of heat lit my skin (the whole organ). I lost the ability or will to control the movement of my eyes, which rolled around the room. My eyes also streamed tears, though my face lacked the grimaces and spasms which normally accompany them. Finally, I moaned.
August 01, 2019
Building the Legacy of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson
Quietly, a new foundation has come into being in Santa Fe that promises to have a significant impact on art history and art-making, not just in the Southwest, but internationally. The Holt/Smithson Foundation (HSF) was literally willed into existence by artist Nancy Holt—creator of the massive concrete art installation, Sun Tunnels, in the Utah desert— who lived in Santa Fe the last two decades of her life, until her death in 2014.
July 30, 2019
