"Before, I was taught to paint in a traditional, old-school style in Oklahoma. But Santa Fe wasn’t into that. There was lots of activism back then. It was the four hundred year mark of Columbus in the Americas, and there was a certain kind of American Indian Movement (AIM) echo in response. That was my first eye-opener..."
November 27, 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
On April 8, 1956, E. Boyd decided that a santo in the collection of Taylor Museum was a fraud...
August 28, 2018
Nearly everyone who walks into the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has some version of the artist they’re looking for: their Georgia...
July 30, 2018
"I am the son of J.E.T., or Jetson," Chip Thomas said, referring to his own initials and those of his father. Thomas’s full name is Dr. James Edward Thomas, Jr., and his father, James Edward Thomas, Sr., was the original J.E.T. It’s how Chip Thomas came to his own moniker, Jetsonorama.
July 30, 2018
This year the International Folk Art Market celebrates its fifteenth birthday. IFAM first began in 2004 with sixty-one artists from thirty-six countries. Now, that number has more than doubled to 162 artists from fifty-three countries. Officially, the vending is two days...
June 28, 2018
If an object you hold dear could speak, what would it say? Would it talk about the circumstances of its making, who it came into contact with, or where it’s traveled? You see, objects are born into the world, moving about from place to place. Sometimes they are passed...
June 29, 2018
National Hispanic Cultural Center: Identity. It’s one of those words, concepts, ways of making sense of the world and ourselves that could fill volumes. Indeed, volumes of stories: self-made, inherited, or, in many instances, projected. Identity is that way...
June 01, 2018
Poeh Cultural Center: It only takes a few seconds of looking before the optical illusion begins to work on my eyes. The white on the canvas jumps forward and begins to pulsate softly against the black ground. I simply stare without moving until my consciousness snaps...
May 01, 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
Faye Gleisser, the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center’s current postdoctoral fellow, finds inspiration in the work of scholars and artists who disrupt linear historical periods. Fred Wilson is particularly influential. Gaining renown in the early nineties, Wilson juxtaposed...
November 01, 2017
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
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
Peters Projects: Is it possible for an artist to exhaust the format of the self-portrait? Or are we better off asking the opposite question: are artists’ reflections on their own likeness ever enough to fully describe depth of character, change over time, or one’s psyche?...
September 01, 2017
It was like déjà vu, or rather a bad dream that repeated exactly twice. First, it was the closure of the College of Santa Fe in 2009 and now this, the scheduled closure of Santa Fe University of Art and Design in May 2018. While CSF had made it past middle age, if you started counting from the moment of its accreditation in 1965, SFUAD, run by Laureate International Universities in the last eight years, hadn’t even made it into adolescence [...]
September 01, 2017
The night before the indigenous art collective Postcommodity planned on suspending twenty-six balloons along the US-Mexico Border, winds kicked up, threatening the next day’s work and the culmination of...
December 01, 2016
After we finished talking, Nina mentioned that she had to work on a pair of moccasins: she’d started them, then halfway through changed her mind about the [...]
August 01, 2017
IAIA MoCNA: It's like seeing an afterimage. Though you blink, a vision continues to persist even after the original ceases. Over time, these images and afterimages layer upon one another, like sediment refusing to settle[...]
August 01, 2017
What’s a story hustler, you ask? It’s a phrase that came up at the spring SFAI140. Mi’Jan, who spoke of love that night, also spoke of being a story hustler. The word hustler, however you want to cast it, typically conjures questionable intent, shady means for shady ends. It can refer to making money on and off the books, working in formal and informal economies. On the streets a hustler sells [...]
August 01, 2017
Whitney Museum of American Art: At first I noticed the smell, earthy almost. Then there was shade and a flush of coolness. I had entered Rafa Esparza’s Figure/Ground: Beyond the White Field [...]
July 01, 2017
Studio Visit: Michael Namingha has the admirable ability to reveal the irony of language and words on the one hand and, on the other, to cut landscapes apart, fracturing them into sometimes-repetitive images that cascade beyond any typical frame [...]
June 01, 2017
There is no order in this hellish landscape: two policemen raise billy clubs against a figure slouched at the foot of a parked police car [...]
April 01, 2017
I first met Janet Catherine Berlo when she invited me to her home for dinner. It was 2009, and I had just arrived in Rochester, New York, where she is Professor of Native American Art History [...]
April 01, 2017
