Have a Drink with Matie Fricker of Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center
Have a beer with Matie Fricker, owner of the only queer-woman-owned sex shop in Albuquerque: Self Serve Sexuality Resource Center.
August 28, 2019
Father
Julia Brennan is a writer and performer from central New York. Her work has been published in Hotel America, Big Big Wednesday, and Tarpaulin Sky Press, among other publications. Her debut novel, Hunting Season, won the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award and will be published in 2020.
August 28, 2019
southwestNET: Shizu Saldamando
Sashiko greets me as I enter the gallery for Shizu Saldamando’s show, held at SMOCA as part of southwestNET’s series showcasing mid-career Mexican and U.S. artists from the Southwest. Hushed and intimate, each work seems to demand all of one’s attention, a bid made more poignant by Saldamando’s insistence on portraying friends and family and, according to the wall text, “refus[ing] any notions of subjugation” in the artist-subject relationship. A multifaceted artist of Mexican American and Japanese American heritage, Saldamando focuses on “often-overlooked communities of color: punks, queers, activists, and artists.”
August 28, 2019
Rapheal Begay: Lest We Forget
Rapheal Begay is a Diné photographer and curator from Window Rock, Arizona, (the capital of the Navajo Nation) currently showing his work at Trapdoor Projects, near downtown Albuquerque. The medium is photography, but the methods are strikingly conceptual, requiring viewers to finish the work in their minds. His work evokes memories of family, as well as harshly beautiful landscapes and the animals who populate them—especially sheep—in the Navajo Nation.
August 28, 2019
New Mexico Dance Project: note g
New Mexico Dance Project is a newcomer powerhouse on the Santa Fe dance scene. Husband and wife team Erik Sampson and Scarlett Wynne founded the company in New Mexico six months ago. Since then, they have been teaching workshops for students, creating new works nonstop, and performing with the intention to become an integrated part of the community.
August 28, 2019
Hung Liu: Catchers
Catchers helps us see into the past and, through the past, to recognize those we ignore in the present.
August 28, 2019
Field Report: Silver City, New Mexico
It should be on everyone’s bucket list. Silver City. It sounds like a romantic vestige of another time. I didn’t realize how much so until I turned off the highway and onto a deliciously winding drive through the Black Range and into the Gila National Forest and Pinos Altos Mountains.
August 28, 2019
Lightning Cult’s EP2: Ether Waves
Some amount of personal suffering is expected to be felt by those who create music, but it’s rare for musicians to fuel their work with it as adeptly as Lightning Cult’s Mike Marchant. Now living in Santa Fe, the former Denver musician was hailed as one of the city’s most promising songwriters until a devastating cancer diagnosis stopped him in his tracks in 2012. Marchant survived but experienced significant memory loss related to chemotherapy and radiation treatments. A crippling self-destructive period followed. The Lightning Cult project represents Marchant’s return to music-making and reveals an artist transformed through tragedy and tenacity.
August 28, 2019
Weekday Detour: Street Art in Albuquerque
Briana Olson meditates on belonging as she tours the murals and street art of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
August 28, 2019
What Pain Can Do
About the pain. I’ll first describe it clinically, as if I were a camera. I began to sweat everywhere after a flash of heat lit my skin (the whole organ). I lost the ability or will to control the movement of my eyes, which rolled around the room. My eyes also streamed tears, though my face lacked the grimaces and spasms which normally accompany them. Finally, I moaned.
August 01, 2019
Building the Legacy of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson
Quietly, a new foundation has come into being in Santa Fe that promises to have a significant impact on art history and art-making, not just in the Southwest, but internationally. The Holt/Smithson Foundation (HSF) was literally willed into existence by artist Nancy Holt—creator of the massive concrete art installation, Sun Tunnels, in the Utah desert— who lived in Santa Fe the last two decades of her life, until her death in 2014.
July 30, 2019
The Seed Stewards of New Mexico
Genetic diversity is important in plants for the same reason it’s important in humans and animals: a shallower gene pool means more vulnerability to disease and mutation and less adaptability to environmental change. Throughout human history, farmers have benefitted from plants’ ability to evolve over time by carefully selecting seeds from their harvest to plant for next year based on drought tolerance, disease resistance, productivity, or other desirable traits. This long partnership between growers and seeds has created countless unique plant phenotypes, many of which are now extinct or going that way.
July 29, 2019
Letter: August 2019
Welcome to the next chapter of The Magazine! In July, the beginning of The Magazine’s 28th year, I launched a new business: Southwest Contemporary. (If you missed this launch, sign up for our newsletter at the bottom of this page!) Southwest Contemporary is a new art media company that will serve as an umbrella over The Magazine while also carving out room for this company to evolve and grow.
July 29, 2019
Portfolio: Sama Alshaibi: Carry Over
Sama Alshaibi, a Tucson, Arizona–based photographer, is a Palestinian-Iraqi who originally came to the United States as a refugee from Iraq. Her mother’s family are also refugees from Jaffa, a historic port city that was fought over and ultimately became part of Israel in 1948. The families that lived there were forced to leave quickly, and many left behind family keepsakes such as family photo albums. Alshaibi’s family have few photographs from their time in Palestine.
July 29, 2019
Seven Alternative Immersive Art Experiences
Want to break out of the mold? Seven alternative immersive art experiences in Santa Fe are worth exploring this summer.
July 29, 2019
Studio Visit: Dorielle Caimi
Dorielle Caimi’s paintings have been described as absurd, humorous, truthful, and empowered. Those adjectives adequately describe Dorielle the painter, too, though I would add that she is extremely funny, smart as a whip, and masterful in her execution and rendering of the female figure. Both articulate and open in speaking about her work, Dorielle effectively integrates her emotional and physical experiences into her studio practice. Balancing expressive and brutally honest portrayals of the female form with jarring pop-surrealist color, animal characters, and cartoonish elements, she offers viewers something vibrant and complex.
July 26, 2019
New Mexico Women: Natalie Goldberg
Natalie Goldberg, author of "Writing Down the Bones," made New Mexico her home and the center of her writing practice fifty years ago.
July 26, 2019
Nina Elder: What Endures
"What Endures is, and is not, a question. It’s not incidental that I’m focused on the elemental details of my surroundings, that I want to take apart the anthropogenic landscape, break it down into its simplest ingredients. This act is central to Nina Elder’s process—and to the subjects of the featured work, which spans from 2011 to the present."
July 29, 2019
Jonathan Saiz in Denver
Denver artist Jonathan Saiz believes in the value of shock and surprise, as evidenced in two overlapping solo exhibitions. One is #WhatisUtopia, in which ten thousand miniature squares come together in a mosaic-like column given its own space at the Denver Art Museum. The second exhibition, at K Contemporary, is darker in tone, shocking you to attention with foreboding images.
July 29, 2019
Alicia Stewart: Unfinished . . .
"Several unfinished works in the show are naturally among the most heartbreaking. Unfinished . . . is a rare capsule of work created at the intersection of talent and years of great development. There is an adolescent fearlessness in these paintings, and Stewart allows viewers to see the remarkable efforts of a young artist making use of her rapidly expanding world. Unlike most eighteen-year-olds, the perspective Stewart applied to her work made magical use of a young life evidencing wisdom beyond her years."
July 29, 2019
Mira Burack: Sleeping between the Sun and the Moon
Mira Burack’s artwork on view at 516 Arts in Albuquerque evokes themes of rest, comfort, and home—with a dark underside.
July 29, 2019
Raven Chacon: Still Life No. 3
With Still Life No. 3, sound artist Raven Chacon (Diné) subverts the notion of the still life, immersing visitors in a layered, multimedia experience of the story of the Navajo people's emergence into this world at the surface of the earth.
July 29, 2019
Have a Drink with Jessica O’Brien of Sister Bar
"I like bright. Refreshing is usually my thing. I also love anything with coconut in it, which is why I ordered this one. My favorite drink is a piña colada, always and forever. Which is funny, because it’s like a guilty pleasure, but so many bartenders love it."
July 26, 2019
Valerie June: My Songs are Portals
“To me, the root of music is like the root of a plant. You can’t have a garden without a strong musical foundation. I want to start in the world of roots, but I don’t want to stay there forever”
July 29, 2019
[sponsored] Preview: Ian Kuali’i
The work that Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Apache artist Ian Kuali’i makes today is largely born out of a longstanding connection to the landscapes he has lived and worked in, as well as a sense that these different places each hold unique lessons for their inhabitants. As the Ronald and Susan Dubin Native Artist Fellow at the School for Advanced Research, Kuali’i is putting his talent to work to create intricate works of hand-cut paper, as well as an expansive earthwork on a slice of the center’s undeveloped acreage.
July 27, 2019
Introducing Southwest Contemporary
The month of July introduces a season of sequels and new beginnings to The Magazine! On the cusp of The Magazine’s 28th year, I am excited to introduce you to […]
July 01, 2019
Matron’s Matron: Eliza Lutz
“What exactly is a record label’s future in a music industry climate seemingly hellbent on conditioning audiences to pay next to nothing for music?” Eliza Lutz, founder of the pioneering Santa Fe–based Matron Records label, thinks the only path forward is to embrace the inevitable and adapt accordingly...
June 26, 2019
Stage Worthy: The Santa Fe Opera Properties Department
Where was the dagger? It was the final act of The Letter, a Santa Fe Opera world premiere that opened in 2009, and forty-mile-per-hour winds were howling across the venue’s open-air stage. The murderous Leslie, played by Patricia Racette, was singing her way towards suicide-by-stabbing. Suddenly, the wind whipped a tablecloth and sent Leslie’s fateful knife skittering down the dining table. This was despite the fact that the properties department had reinforced the linen with a stitch called a swing tack and secured it with a wind skirt.
June 26, 2019
James Drake: Que Linda la Brisa
Thirty miles north of Ciudad Juárez, at an immigrant detention center in Chaparral, New Mexico, Johana Medina Leon, transgendered and from El Salvador, complains of chest pains. Days later, and a day after James Drake’s opening, Que Linda La Brisa, Leon dies on a hospital bed at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, Texas.
June 26, 2019
Studio Visit: Stuart Arends
Visiting Stuart Arends’s studio was no quick jaunt. We drove one and a half hours from Santa Fe to Willard, New Mexico, past the town, further down the highway, and just before a specified mile marker where we were to rendez-vous with the artist at an unmarked wire gate...
June 26, 2019
