While many viewers stand mouths agape at the idea of clipping and adhering hundreds of thousands of straws, I’m indifferent to labor and duration. The work takes time: so what? Instead, I lose my mind over the honeycombed waves with optical clusters of tan and ochre that emerge from what I understand to be uniformly opaque white straws.
November 28, 2018
My third-grade field trip to a State Capitol was a muggy school-bus ride to Montgomery, Alabama. We visited the requisite sites, including the state senate chambers and a life-size statue of Jefferson Davis. We were taught that the Capitol building was the first headquarters for the Confederacy during the Civil War, which was fought to preserve “states’ rights.” Rights to do what? is a question nobody asked...
November 28, 2018
A Swedish girl joins her first séance at seventeen. Her mind swirls with a heady mix of books on Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Buddhism, and spiritualism. This doesn’t set her apart; the occult is mainstream in 1879. By the time she is thirty-five, she has started a séance circle with four female friends called The Five (De Fem), which will commission her most significant works...
November 28, 2018
A collection of eight quilts by Darby Photos, some longer than seven feet, spreads across the white walls of the gallery. In them, violence is implied but not explicit. Each depicts a school where a mass shooting took place. The title of the collected work, 207, refers to the number of people injured across all eight sites.
November 28, 2018
Have a drink with Winston Greene of Tonic, Santa Fe. He's having a penicillin (blended scotch, local raw oak honey, lemon juice, ginger, smokey scotch).
November 28, 2018
“Dear Toad of My Heart,” begins one of the two thousand pages of letters between Dorothy Stewart and Maria Chabot in the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center. “Dearest Thing,” begins another. These letters are a remarkable record of two women in love in the 1920s and ’30s and their various heartbreaks, jealousies, friendships, and new loves along the way...
November 28, 2018
Quite literally, Mason constructs her photographs; each still captures a tableau that she builds outdoors. Found objects such as rocks, plastic tarps, or other photographs of hers layer her compositions. In Backyard Still Life (2017), a wrinkled sheet of silvery mylar is taped to a wall. The wall’s texture and curvature read as adobe, but its inky blackness belies easy recognition.
November 28, 2018
Warehouse 21, Santa Fe
December 2, 6 pm (monthly performance)
I would like you to imagine you are standing alone on a stage. A simple brown folding chair stands in front of you. The audience of about forty people looks up at you, waiting, expectant. You are dressed in your street clothes. Suddenly, a man in a t-shirt and shorts wanders onto the stage and says...
November 28, 2018
Jesse Rieser’s photographic project Christmas in America: Happy Birthday Jesus is at first glance humorous and lighthearted. The garish colors and cartoonish settings allude to theme parks and the classic feature film A Christmas Story and perhaps to one’s own holiday memories...
November 28, 2018
It’s the late nineteenth century in France, and the haircuts are terrible. Frizzy, voluminous bangs, handlebar mustaches with three-inch goatees. Clearly the world was waiting for Colette...
November 28, 2018
The Audacity of Art: Art for the Midterm Elections plays on a phrase that President Barack Obama used in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention...
November 28, 2018
When I started in June, Lauren and I made all sorts of plans, and it’s a joy to watch them develop into realities: more coverage of performance art, dance...
November 28, 2018
The Magazine contributor and former director of Central Features Contemporary Art Nancy Zastudil joined the Tamarind Institute as Gallery Director.
November 12, 2018
In Santa Fe, Bruce Nauman feels to me like an invisible figure. I know he lives near, I know he frequents the same diner I frequent, I question every tall, bald man in my vicinity, but...
October 30, 2018
Aaron Honyumptewa imbues his katsina carvings with the traditional ethos of the Hopi people combined with an undercurrent of...
October 30, 2018
A snake rides in the grass. A rat materializes in front of it. There’s not much doubt how this encounter is going to end...
October 30, 2018
What does it mean to make landscape paintings in 2018? Just this morning I was reading the recently issued UN Climate Change Report about coming food shortages, growing wildfires...
October 30, 2018
February 1983: a man in coat and scarf stands on a sidewalk among various street vendors at Cooper Square in downtown New York City. At his feet, a collection of perfectly spherical white forms...
October 30, 2018
At the mural’s center, a brown-skinned woman reaches her arms outward, one hand holding a microscope, the other a volumetric flask. She is the corn goddess—nose broad, lips full, and hair parted in the middle. Her gaze is fixed...
October 30, 2018
tasting notes with: Christian Waguespack. occupation: Curator of 20th Century Art at the New Mexico Museum of Art. venue: Hervé Wine Bar, Santa Fe.
October 30, 2018
The Printed Page Series: Thomas Christopher Haag, Look What I Can Do
October 30, 2018
On a survey taken outside a 1993 exhibit of Pablita Velarde’s work at the Wheelwright Museum, one visitor wrote, in awe: “that a woman of her time would be able to find her creative life...
October 30, 2018
In the summer of 2015, I called my mother to tell her she had to move out of her house in Portland, Oregon. My sister, on...
October 30, 2018
The leaves in the trees, one night—more leaves than there are stars in the sky, more leaves than there are eyes to look up at the night sky to see them with—
October 30, 2018
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I find myself embarrassed by my own lack of creativity. I’m making my way through...
October 30, 2018
Phil Binaco’s recent body of work was inspired by a poem by W. H. Auden...
October 30, 2018
A month ago, I wrote about the importance of critical writing and critical thinking, one of the core tenets of the work of The Magazine. Now I’m happy to write about a second core tenet: Community.
October 30, 2018
Mark Morris dances are difficult to describe because they are so innovative. The man’s wit is a source of endless creativity, and his work gives the simultaneous impressions of serendipity and contemplation. His dances can...
October 30, 2018
Public art finds itself at the center of a number of our era’s flashpoints: the controversy over Confederate monuments; a questionably placed statue of...
October 29, 2018
LOOKING FOR THE LIGHT BETWEEN: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALIVIA MAGANA Ellsworth Gallery / Santa Fe Fri, Oct 19, 5–7 pm learn more BORDERLAND: PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALIA ALI East of West / […]
October 18, 2018
