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
Kate Ingold is a visual artist and poet working in a variety of media. In her work, she examines issues of disturbance, reparation, and collapse, and the nostalgia and regret that can accompany loss....
February 01, 2018
Elio Perlman, the main character of André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name, is a beautiful, precocious, and wealthy seventeen-year-old. One summer in the early 1980s, in an unspecified town on the Italian coast, he finds himself both angered and enamored by his father’s...
February 01, 2018
Sanitary Tortilla Factory: Pre-existing Conditions features collaborative sculpture and readymade found art by Cecilia McKinnon and Lance Ryan McGoldrick. All materials were salvaged from illegal dump sites, the work effectively exploring cycles of production and waste.
February 01, 2018
Jewelry in New Mexico is a vast and unwieldy category that spans histories, styles, trends, techniques, and materials. As such, there are multiple avenues by which to approach the topic, and no article could do justice to them all. For our first foray into jewelry and fashion...
February 01, 2018
Welcome to the new The Magazine! With this issue, we are launching into a new phase, and I am thrilled to present a new logo, a completely redesigned magazine, and new branding that will help propel our mission forward.
February 01, 2018
“It’s those Santa Ana winds: they’re so strong, and they never stop blowing,” says Susan Stella. The observation might seem wistful, particularly for a Californian ex-pat living in the sleepy village of Tesuque, but there’s real distress in her voice. It’s mid-December, and Stella’s...
February 01, 2018
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
