After you've Googled the Sun Tunnels and copied the coordinates from The Center for Land Use Interpretation website into your phone, and driven two hours around the Salt Lake from the Spiral Jetty, accidentally by way of Snowville, Idaho, where no one wants to make you a milkshake, you will find yourself dangerously close to Nevada...
April 01, 2018
“This place. The river is life,” Luke Carr tells me as we walk through a stand of cottonwood trees near the flowing water. He lives on a small farm in a remote part of northern New Mexico, next to the confluence of two rivers. For a musician, this place provides silence for writing...
April 01, 2018
For fans of Laurie Anderson, and I certainly count myself as one, the book Everything I Lost in the Flood archives her forty-plus-year art career, beginning with a 1974 performance piece called Duets on Ice. This work, even in its simplicity, constellates a certain inscrutable...
April 01, 2018
Albuquerque Museum: Making Africa approaches the design of a huge, diverse place through many media with the intention of providing a fuller understanding of the contemporary work being developed in the creative sector across the continent's 54 countries.
April 01, 2018
Fishing nets once connected the communities along Colombia’s Magdalena (Yuma) river with the water and its populations, but now the waters are so polluted the nets cannot be used for fishing. Carolina Caycedo, whose parents are Colombian, repurposes the nets as hand-dyed sculptures...
April 01, 2018
UNM Art Museum: Meridel Rubenstein’s photographs brought me to the Bible, which I hadn’t read in earnest since I took a great books class in college. I probably don’t need to tell most people that the Book of Genesis is, at least from a literary perspective, a bit confusing and disorganized...
April 01, 2018
Nancy Holt is known for artworks that engage the celestial: stars and sunlight, orbiting bodies, and the earth’s rotation. But getting to know her work more thoroughly through Sightlines, a retrospective edited by Alena Williams in 2011 and still the only and most complete...
April 01, 2018
Exhibit/208: Remember that magical automobile from Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, the one that whisks a stuttering Owen Wilson back to the 1920s to party with Gertrude Stein and company? I like to imagine that was just one cab in a fleet of cosmic taxis, each with its own art...
April 01, 2018
She told me her stories. She talked about her childhood, about the lies the adults told to the children and the pain the little girl experienced after she learned the truth. We drove back and forth across the country. Most of the time it was west to east and east to west but there...
April 01, 2018
Foto Forum: “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still,” Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. Although she isn’t directly referencing prisons, they are continually a reality which is systematically...
April 01, 2018
LewAllen Galleries: Tucked into a quiet nook in the northwest corner of LewAllen Galleries’ rather showy structure is a gem of an exhibition. Quest for the New: Modernism in the Southwest features artworks by a who’s-who litany of Santa Fe’s early twentieth-century art colony...
April 01, 2018
In terms of New Mexico’s history, one hundred years is but a drop in the bucket of time. Still, it was noteworthy when, this past November, the New Mexico Museum of Art celebrated its centennial anniversary. This is an especially significant moment when considering the meaning...
April 01, 2018
I keep waiting for New Mexico to embrace the taco. I love a burrito as much as the next guy, and the enchiladas at La Choza are life-changing, but with so much green chile and red chile flowing here in Santa Fe, the taco and its valiant hero, salsa, have been eclipsed. I visited...
April 01, 2018
“We are a family of very fast walkers,” says Bridgit Koller. “If you want to keep up, you have to kind of run.” She has a vivid mental image of her mother, Ciel Bergman, blazing through the streets of Pleasanton, California, on a visit to see Koller in early 2016. Shortly after that, Bergman jetted off to Cuba for an action-packed vacation...
April 01, 2018
Last summer I met up with artist Sabra Moore at Angelina’s Restaurant, with the big chili pepper sign, on Fairview Street just by the Rio Grande in Española. We were about to tour the district elementary schools where she has been working to create large, permanent tile wall mosaics...
March 22, 2018
Winter in the northern Midwest is not a place I return to in person, at least not willingly. It is a place I dread for its deadly overcast sadness, a dread that, I learned from Michigan poet Emily Van Kley's collection, constitutes its own heady nostalgia. The Cold and the Rust…
March 15, 2018
Light, shadow, and doors opened and closed are a few of the subjects of Santa Fe–based photographer Natalie Christensen. Informed by Carl Jung and a twenty-five-year career as a psychotherapist, Christensen looks for symbols in the Southwestern urban landscape that “reveal psychological...
February 01, 2018
Center for Contemporary Arts: Begun in 1970 and ending in 1977, the late Ciel Bergman’s series, The Linens, is in truth the work of an “emerging artist.” Bergman (1938-2017) was thirty-two when she began these large-scale paintings on unstretched linen, an age in keeping with the...
March 02, 2018
Calling herself a "visual artist who writes," author Verónica Gerber Bicecci approaches fiction from the conceptual and the personal simultaneously: What does it mean, logically, for a person to be missing? And how does it feel? Bicecci incorporates line drawings throughout Empty...
February 22, 2018
East of West: Alicia Inez Guzmán reviews the opening of the recently founded East of West Gallery on Santa Fe’s south side, looking at how a diverse body of works from the Middle East and northern Africa pry open new dialogues about self-representation.
February 12, 2018
Tucson Museum of Art: Arguably, the finest exhibitions are ones that expand our worldview, or at least prod us into greater understanding of artists’ subject matter, style, and societal influences. But it surprised me when first walking through Dress Matters: Clothing as Metaphor...
January 30, 2018
There’s a ring around the moon with four stars inside the ring. That means it will rain during the next four days. A dog sleeps on his back. That means he trusts you. The prows of the fishing boats face the ocean. That means the tide’s coming in. A woman touches your hand while she...
February 01, 2018
Roberta Breitmore was never “real,” even though she was made of flesh and blood; her persona was, in fact, just a figment of Hershman Leeson’s feminist imagination, only more developed than most artificially created alter egos that are set loose in the art world...
February 01, 2018
Canal Convergence: A tranquil canal that slices through a chic section of downtown Scottsdale, Arizona, is the attractive setting for an annual exhibition of large-scale, temporary, and site-specific art installations. Called Canal Convergence: Water + Art + Light, the...
February 01, 2018
New Mexico Museum of Art: Less than six years past the State of New Mexico’s centennial, the New Mexico Museum of Art marked its first 100 years in December. It’s an anniversary made all the more notable by the institution’s enduring commitment to the contemporary. The Canyon...
February 01, 2018
Sanitary Tortilla Factory: The word “installation” can often be unsatisfying, so much so that some artists have invented their own words to describe what they do with media composed in space. German artist Monika Grzymala created the word Raumzeichnung to describe her large...
February 01, 2018
In the last year, Aleksandar Hemon’s writings in response to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the perils of Trumpism have served as my touchstones, pieces I bookmark and return to and share when I’m feeling especially low, especially unable to proceed. Hemon is a Chicago-based...
February 01, 2018
form & concept: Feminist artist Thais Mather’s new exhibition, Reckless Abandon, comes at a time of cultural, political, and environmental soul searching. The artist offers urgent questions that suggest a new path forward, away from oppression and toward a more enlightened...
February 01, 2018
Debra Baxter has just chucked something across her studio. A five-pointed throwing star sticks firmly into the opposite wall. She’s about to throw another, but first she shows it to me. It’s elegant lace made of metal. The tips have been sharpened. Baxter’s work occupies several unlikely but generative intersections: between the fierce...
February 01, 2018
“I was born in 1912, the year the Titanic sank and the year New Mexico became a state,” P’oe Tsáwä, or Blue Water, begins her memoir. Known by Anglos as Esther Martinez, P’oe Tsáwä lived through periods of unimaginable change. As a child, she recalls riding in a covered wagon with...
February 01, 2018
