How to Carve a Turkey
This Thanksgiving, learn how to carve a turkey, illustrated by designer and illustrator Chris Philpot...
November 01, 2017
Articles
Dispatch: Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA
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...
November 21, 2017
Thais Mather’s Reckless Abandon
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...
November 28, 2017
November Book Reviews
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) ...
November 07, 2017
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...
November 01, 2017
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 ...
November 01, 2017
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 ...
November 01, 2017
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In Forty Questions
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...
November 01, 2017
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...
November 01, 2017
2007 Riofavara Nero D’Avola “Sciavè”
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...
November 01, 2017
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...
November 01, 2017
Kinesthesia: Latin American Art, 1954-1969
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...
November 01, 2017
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...
November 01, 2017
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 ...
November 01, 2017
Laurie Tümer: Clouds
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...
November 01, 2017
Field Report: Marfa
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...
November 01, 2017
Jill O’Bryan
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...
November 01, 2017
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...
October 19, 2017
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...
October 12, 2017
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 ...
October 01, 2017
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...
August 01, 2016
New Releases: One Sentence Book Reviews
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 ...
October 01, 2017
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 ...
October 01, 2017
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 ...
October 01, 2017
Monsters of the Santa Fe Art Scene
Monsters of the Santa Fe Art Scene: illustrations by Chris Philpot
October 01, 2017
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...
October 01, 2017
2007 Domaine Les Pallières Gigondas “Les Racines”
In prehistoric times, the line that connected people to each other was regarded as one of [...]
October 01, 2017
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...
October 01, 2017
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...
October 01, 2017
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...
October 01, 2017
