Zadie Smith is the reason I left Facebook. As I was reading—actually, as my partner, who snatched it up the moment it arrived, was reading—her new collection of essays Feel Free, I revisited a piece of hers I remember from several years ago to see if it held up. "Generation Why?"...
January 18, 2018
Each year, THE Magazine curates a list of the year's best art books. This year we've asked our contributors for their recent favorite arts reading materials. The results ranged from exhibition catalogues to memoirs, artist books to artists' writings.
December 01, 2016
One art critic from the Bay Area, Jessica Zack, referred to Cate White’s work as “vivid tragicomic painting... with its skin-in-the-game vitality” and that is what first hits you—White’s go-for-broke passion for art, life, social justice, and racial fairness. It seems that there is nothing that White won’t investigate...
December 01, 2016
Al-qobbah, “the vaulted chamber,” a recessed space, within a room or without, like a bower. “Alcove” has many applications, and the New Mexico Museum of Art has one of the best of them. The NMMA Alcoves 16/17 exhibition series comprises seven small group shows, each featuring five New Mexico artists and running for five weeks...
December 01, 2016
It’s a slang thang, a vernacular spectacular from the high priest of lowbrow, Robert Williams, the top exec of Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine, “Big Daddy” Roth’s Art Director, and an outstanding Zap Comix original. Williams’s wild and wooly imagination is matched only by his mad skills as an oil painter. Call it Pop Surrealism...
December 01, 2016
Worldwide, we take a lot of pictures—over one trillion per year, in fact. Many of them, snapped with smartphone cameras, earn only seconds of our attention before being deleted or forgotten, replaced by the next “grammable” moment. Whether you believe...
December 01, 2016
The presence of so many cartoon characters, plus, on one painting, the block-printed phrase “Everything Will Be OK,” might suggest that the title of this exhibition (on view through December 4) reflects a state of mind. Along with toy monkeys and a thumbs up sign, various icons of “optimism” turn out to convey a more ambiguous message...
December 01, 2016
In nightmarish political times, it’s important to keep in mind that books are more than just objects, and that the pen is always, always mightier than the sword. Pay attention to who’s reading books and who is not, to who is making them and who is burning them...
December 01, 2016
A new off-the-beaten-path exhibition space founded by Max Baseman, 5. Gallery has had a number of small exhibitions, primarily featuring local emerging artists. The raw, warehouse-style space is one of the latest to pop up in the budding—perhaps now burgeoning—Rufina arts district. For its next exhibition, small, a selection of small-scale...
December 01, 2016
Matthews Gallery presents a major retrospective of Janet Lippincott, a pioneer of Southwest Modernism. Born in New York in 1918, Lippincott had attended the Art Students League of New York at age fifteen before departing for Paris where she was introduced to the work of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and other early modernists...
December 01, 2016
If you’re Denver-bound this ski season, the MCA Denver has a trifecta of concurrent exhibitions on view through January 29. Kim Dickey: Words Are Leaves is a major survey of work by the Boulder, CO–based artist. Primarily working in ceramics, but also other media including textile and photography...
December 01, 2016
Earl McBride works across a variety of moods, methods, and vibrations—predominantly in the realm of abstract painting. Throughout, his layered markmaking against clean white or softly patinaed panels creates compositions that buzz with tension. In more vigorous pieces, pigment and line are suspended, about to collide in a frenzy...
November 01, 2016
It was John Seabrook’s profile of singer Tanya Tagaq in The New Yorker that introduced me to her work as a contemporary performer. Seabrook went on to write, “Tagaq is an Inuit throat singer, and she was in the city for a performance... a jaw-dropping forty-five minutes of guttural heaves, juddering howls, and murderous shrieks—Inuit folk meets Karen Finley."...
November 01, 2016
One day, when she was in her twenties, Roxanne Swentzell paced a barren corner of her grandmother’s land at Santa Clara Pueblo. She was a homeless, single mother of two...
November 01, 2016
Throughout the sprawling, cavernous gallery spaces of downtown LA’s Geffen MOCA, the haunting doo-wop coos of “I Only Have Eyes for You” follow viewers everywhere...
November 01, 2016
What a felicitous curatorial idea, the juxtaposition of this trio of artists. Pokrasso, Stanford, and Glovaski continue to explore new media...
October 15, 2017
Lowrider Summer brought an onslaught of exhibitions, parades, and events to Santa Fe in 2016, but don’t let lowrider burn-out set in just yet...
November 01, 2016
Fictitious Fiber. Exactly. The closest thing to a thread or a filament in this exhibition is likely the nylon fishing line used to weave elements in two of the works.
November 01, 2016
Let us sing the praises of art galleries who dare set up shop in risky neighborhoods...
November 11, 2016
Nüart Gallery, Santa Fe October 7-30, 2016 evolution of a sculptor (or of almost any artist, for that matter) is a series of comprehensible and logical steps leading to a fully […]
November 01, 2016
When I think of Mabel Dodge Luhan and her company, celestial analogies spring to mind: a constellation of disparate personalities, a system of spinning bodies suspended and connected, held in balance by the gravitational force of a central figure whose brilliance is both perilous and life-giving...
November 01, 2016
Each January, as Santa Fe et environs settle back into their quiet winter ways following the bustle of holidays, markets, and festivals, the Low Residency MFA program in Creative Writing gathers at IAIA for a week of workshops and unforgettable public readings. This is the only...
January 02, 2018
As a difficult year winds to a close, I’ve been thinking about what books made a difference for me in 2017. What changed my mind, or opened it, or gave me language to understand and express the present moment? Here are three 2017 titles that made me see things in a new way...
December 14, 2017
How do we understand different cultural groups through the objects they produce? Anthropological artefacts reveal information of the behaviours, practices and arts of a particular society. The Southern Athabaskans—a tribe situated across New Mexico and Arizona—have a long...
December 14, 2017
The movie Faces Places, considered a masterpiece by many contemporary film critics, won Best Documentary at Cannes in 2017. It was written by the esteemed French filmmaker Agnès Varda and was directed by her and the French artist-activist JR. Faces Places has been enthusiastically received...
December 05, 2017
By all accounts, Elaine de Kooning had a roaring good time in Albuquerque. The abstract expressionist painter was a guest professor at the University of New Mexico for two years in the late 1950s, and longtime faculty members still tell tales of her exuberant ways. She drove her...
December 01, 2017
Each year, we ask The Magazine’s contributors to pick their favorite recent (or recently relevant) books to recommend for your holiday-season reading. Read on for their suggestions...
December 01, 2017
Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe: It’s impossible to convey the monumental quality present in Tom Joyce’s exhibition. The scale of some of his forged iron and steel pieces is something to consider along with the works’ refined Platonic sense of form. In addition, there...
December 01, 2017
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art: In an influential column in the New York Times in 1970, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called Paolo Soleri “the prophet in the desert,” positing that his ideas on the necessary comingling of architecture and ecology, or...
December 01, 2017
Some advice before visiting the Hammer Museum to view Radical Women: make sure you have a few hours, and bring a notebook and pen. The exhibition, a dense and sprawling display of hundreds of works, deserves focused attention, and there will be many artists that most viewers...
December 01, 2017
