Introducing Southwest Contemporary
The month of July introduces a season of sequels and new beginnings to The Magazine! On the cusp of The Magazine’s 28th year, I am excited to introduce you to […]
July 01, 2019
Articles
Matron’s Matron: Eliza Lutz
“What exactly is a record label’s future in a music industry climate seemingly hellbent on conditioning audiences to pay next to nothing for music?” Eliza Lutz, founder of the pioneering Santa Fe–based Matron Records label, thinks the only path forward is to embrace the inevitable and adapt accordingly...
June 26, 2019
Stage Worthy: The Santa Fe Opera Properties Department
Where was the dagger? It was the final act of The Letter, a Santa Fe Opera world premiere that opened in 2009, and forty-mile-per-hour winds were howling across the venue’s open-air stage. The murderous Leslie, played by Patricia Racette, was singing her way towards suicide-by-stabbing. Suddenly, the wind whipped a tablecloth and sent Leslie’s fateful knife skittering down the dining table. This was despite the fact that the properties department had reinforced the linen with a stitch called a swing tack and secured it with a wind skirt.
June 26, 2019
James Drake: Que Linda la Brisa
Thirty miles north of Ciudad Juárez, at an immigrant detention center in Chaparral, New Mexico, Johana Medina Leon, transgendered and from El Salvador, complains of chest pains. Days later, and a day after James Drake’s opening, Que Linda La Brisa, Leon dies on a hospital bed at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, Texas.
June 26, 2019
Studio Visit: Stuart Arends
Visiting Stuart Arends’s studio was no quick jaunt. We drove one and a half hours from Santa Fe to Willard, New Mexico, past the town, further down the highway, and just before a specified mile marker where we were to rendez-vous with the artist at an unmarked wire gate...
June 26, 2019
Summer According to The
Summer in northern New Mexico can be overwhelming. Any day of the week there is some activity calling for our attention: artist talks, studio tours, performances, openings, fairs, festivals, markets, music, and, of course, beautiful weather beckoning us outdoors. To help us make sense of it all, I asked two of our regular contributors, Maggie Grimason and Rachel Preston Prinz, to give us a selection of their “must-sees” for the summer season...
June 26, 2019
[sponsored] Material studies: Unearthing New European Makers for 2019
This summer, Patina Gallery presents works by more than ten European jewelry artists in a group exhibition opening on July 12, marking their debut in the American Southwest. Below, we highlight three of these artists whose works share modern sensibilities, minimalist shapes, and purity of materials...
June 26, 2019
Gendron Jensen: Bidden
I immediately want to speak of devotion, but I will start with the work. The pencil drawings and lithographs by Gendron Jensen at 5. Gallery are gently wondrous. Titled Bidden, the solo exhibition features nine of Jensen’s works made between 1989 and 2015...
June 26, 2019
Judy Tuwaletstiwa: The Dream Life of Objects
The Dream Life of Objects is a big show. A selection of work that spans decades and media fills the entirety of the CCA Tank Garage Gallery. This solo show is described by the artist, Judy Tuwaletstiwa, as a “visual poem,” where pieces are asked and allowed to interact with and inform one another. Tuwaletstiwa invites us to experience her work as an “introspective” instead of a retrospective...
June 26, 2019
A Season of Anachronisms at the Vortex Theatre
The question is not merely why Shakespeare, but why make any art at all? Who is art for, and at what cost? In Guards at the Taj, answers to the first question accumulate as if without effort: we make art to create objects of resplendent beauty and experiences of wonder; to revel in the joy of creation; to invent worlds beyond this one; to compete with God; to fail. It’s the second question that’s difficult—brutally so...
June 26, 2019
New Mexico Women: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
When I asked Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana) how she came to call herself a cultural arts worker, her reply began with a short history of her tribe’s trading practices. “I come from a long line of Indian traders, not merchants who house goods but traders who pass resources from one place to another.”
June 26, 2019
Whitney Biennial 2019
Often taken as a bellwether of U.S. artistic culture, the Whitney Biennial is renowned for its tendency to provoke political/aesthetic furor...
June 26, 2019
Judy Chicago: The Birth Project from New Mexico Collections
Looking at a torn vagina in Judy Chicago’s Creation of the World: Needlepoint 1 (1985), I remember watching my ex-partner give birth to both of our boys at home. She had a tear that had to be sewn. I watched, and that is the extent of my experience with childbirth. I know, however, that men—which I’ll define as cis-gendered, penis-possessing humans—have a lot of opinions about what goes in and out of vaginas...
June 26, 2019
Have a drink with Stuart Ashman of the International Folk Art Market
"If there is a goal to sustain yourself as an artist, then innovation is a big part of that. Traditions have to change with the times, because artists are the chroniclers of our times."
June 26, 2019
Writings: Medallions
After planting and harvesting crops for over forty years, you would think a being might finally comprehend the ephemeral nature of all things. Not, alas, this one. At least not within my deep inner recesses, in the private folds of knowing...
June 26, 2019
Letter: July 2019
I am thrilled to usher The Magazine into its 28th year with this issue: Volume 28, Issue 1. I have some very exciting announcements that will be made in just a couple of weeks about the future of The Magazine and new offerings to look forward to, so please make sure you are signed up on our email list if you are not already!
June 26, 2019
West by Southwest: Considering Landscape in Contemporary Art
Landscape painting: the passé genre that dominates so much of the world’s understanding of Southwest art. For me, first it conjures images of Albert Bierstadt (wrought with a minefield of American colonialism), the sappy, wistful romance of a Caspar David Friedrich abyss, and the airy, observational paintings of Provence by Paul Cézanne...
May 24, 2019
JB Jackson and the Exploration of the American Cultural Landscape
I grew up on a ranch in the Texas Hill Country and spent as much time outside as possible. There were old roads, stone fence lines, ruins of buildings, and archaeological sites that stretched from creek beds to groves of trees.
May 24, 2019
Letters: June 2019
For a monthly magazine, it can be difficult to capture a theme throughout an entire issue. So much of our content is deliberately eclectic, covers a span of disciplines, and is a mix between in-depth and topical coverage. I’m delighted, therefore, that our “Landscapes” issue came together rather organically...
May 24, 2019
Meet Your Makers: Subhankar Banerjee
“If you’re celebrating landscape as a pure aesthetic category,” Subhankar Banerjee explains from his office in the Art & Ecology Department on the University of New Mexico’s campus, “it is a crime”...
May 24, 2019
Studio Visit: Paula Wilson and Mike Lagg
Paula Wilson and Mike Lagg live in Carrizozo, New Mexico, a town of about nine hundred residents, located north of White Sands. Paula, who arrived there ten years ago by way of Chicago and New York, and Mike, who settled in the area over thirty years ago, are mainstays of the art community in the region...
May 24, 2019
New Mexico Women: Lucy Lippard
Lucy Lippard changed what art writing could look like, and she continues to shift it with each book she writes. Hugely influential in the artworld of New York, beginning in the 1960s with the Art Workers Coalition and later Heresies Collective, her impact on New Mexico is equally prodigious...
May 24, 2019
Bauhaus Centennial: 1919-2019
One of the most influential members of the Bauhaus movement of the early twentieth century, herbert bayer (who preferred his name spelled in all lowercase and favored a unitary, stylized, and all-lowercase alphabet) believed in the seamless integration of fine art, decorative art, architecture, and graphic design...
May 24, 2019
Portfolio: Melanie Walker: Song for My Father
Melanie Walker is an artist based in Boulder, Colorado. She works nearly equally in the worlds of photography and public art, with each realm informing the other...
May 24, 2019
Seeds Regeneration by Dancing Earth
Rulan Tangen’s company, Dancing Earth, performed the culmination of a six-year project called ...SEEDS: RE GENERATION... in Santa Fe this April...
May 24, 2019
[Sponsored] Contemporary Voices: Ken Price Preview
Starting this summer, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum presents the innovative sculptures and works on paper of acclaimed artist Ken Price in conversation with the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe as a part of the museum’s ongoing Contemporary Voices series...
May 24, 2019
Have a drink with Kenneth Francis of Surroundings Studio
Tasting notes with: Kenneth Francis. Occupation: Landscape architect. Venue: Geronimo bar, Santa Fe. (Next stop: Paloma patio.) Drinking: Hendrix Martini.
May 24, 2019
Cauleen Smith: Give It or Leave It
Two years ago, I sat transfixed beside a memorial garden assembled within a gallery at the Frye Art Museum on Seattle’s First Hill. That installation, a feat in and of itself, might have scored my memory even were it not for what preceded it...
May 24, 2019
Robert Stokowy: [structures] Albuquerque
To see Robert Stokowy’s conceptual artwork, structures [ albuquerque ], I went on eight hikes in eight days. I got a deep t-shirt tan, I got really lost once, and on one day I cried a little...
May 24, 2019
Interlopers
Interlopers is a show of works on paper at Evoke Contemporary that brings together eighteen artists and uses the term “works on paper” broadly, representing a wide range of media...
May 24, 2019
