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
Articles
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
Three Questions with Dario Robleto
Houston-based artist Dario Robleto was recently described by Krista Tippett of onbeing.org as “famous for spinning and shaping unconventional materials—from dinosaur fossils to pulverized vintage records, from swamp root to cramp bark. He joins words and objects in a way that distills ...
October 01, 2017
Cross Pollination
The bees have proven themselves remarkably commodifiable, not only through the products they manufacture that humans enjoy, like honey and beeswax, but also as a pattern, a motif, a caricature. The market loves a stripe found in nature. If panda bears are the symbol of neoliberal...
October 01, 2017
Review Santa Fe Photo Festival
Review Santa Fe is the multifaceted flagship program of CENTER and is one of the premier juried [...]
October 01, 2017
Christian Michael Filardo
Christian Michael Filardo takes photographs constantly. A hand holds a switchblade near a blurry-socked leg; a drone floats in a twilit sky above a cholla cactus; soap suds cover the windows of a car. A tattooed arm, melted candles, broken glass, leafy houseplants, tainted concrete, dirt, cats, the back of a shaved head. An omnipresent flash ...
October 01, 2017
Warhol Out West
In 1968, Andy Warhol made a Western movie. He traveled to Tucson that January with about a dozen actors, collaborators, and friends. There was no script. There may have been one at some point, a rough treatment that may or may not have been an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, but by the time the group arrived in Arizona, the script was not there. ...
October 01, 2017
October 2017
If anyone thought the New Mexico arts scene was slowing down, guess again. We still have another month+ of world-class arts programming to get through before we can take a […]
October 01, 2017
Field Report: Aspen
Aspen is something of a wonderland. Tucked away and remote in the Roaring Fork Valley, vestiges of the town’s founding as a mining town turned ski resort are still visible in the now multi-million dollar Victorian homes [...]
September 01, 2017
Santa Fe Independent Film Festival
What does it mean to represent someone else? Must we only endeavor to represent stories and people with whom we also identify? Of course not—but recent debates in art and literary circles reflect a growing sense of [...]
December 01, 2016
Franco Andres
Franco Andreshas a thing for textures, surfaces, and sensory information. Throughout his sculptural assemblages, wax, fur, feathers, soil, or charred wood create finishes both sumptuous and visceral. The artist’s [...]
December 01, 2016
Jami Porter Lara: A Map with No Border
Jami Porter Lara came upon the map with no border line in 2011, during a trip to the Paquime archaeological site in Chihuahua, Mexico. She was a BFA student at the University of New Mexico [...]
September 01, 2017
Doris Cross: Selected Works
En route from one Southwest Arts Oasis to another, determined to see the works of Doris Cross (1907-1994) in Marfa and carrying a friend's artwork in our trunk, we passed through the heart of darkness [...]
September 01, 2017
Something Fierce
Lannan Foundation: Roni Horn’s series of photographs of the river Thames—each one capturing a different texture of the opaque and oily water—creates a portrait of the river as if it were [...]
September 01, 2017
Craig Duncan: Whispers of Youth
This is what happens when a photographer with a graphic design sensibility uses paper to make large-scale installation that ends up being a constructed photography series. [...]
September 01, 2017
Maudie
A painter, Lewis grew up in Nova Scotia and had no formal training apart from painting postcards with her mother when she was young. Her hands, shoulders, and neck were crumpled by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis [...]
September 01, 2017
Louise Lawler: Receptions
Louise Lawler has spent her career effacing any presence of her own identity in her artworks. Her works themselves are often either mechanically produced or feature the work of other artists. [...]
September 01, 2017
