Chelsea Weathers

My third-grade field trip to a State Capitol was a muggy school-bus ride to Montgomery, Alabama. We visited the requisite sites, including the state senate chambers and a life-size statue of Jefferson Davis. We were taught that the Capitol building was the first headquarters for the Confederacy during the Civil War, which was fought to preserve “states’ rights.” Rights to do what? is a question nobody asked... By Chelsea Weathers

Nov 28

Emily Margarit Mason: Shadows through a Petal

Quite literally, Mason constructs her photographs; each still captures a tableau that she builds outdoors. Found objects such as rocks, plastic tarps, or other photographs of hers layer her compositions. In Backyard Still Life (2017), a wrinkled sheet of silvery mylar is taped to a wall. The wall’s texture and curvature read as adobe, but its inky blackness belies easy recognition. By Chelsea Weathers

Oct 30

David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale by Elena Filipovic

February 1983: a man in coat and scarf stands on a sidewalk among various street vendors at Cooper Square in downtown New York City. At his feet, a collection of perfectly spherical white forms... By Chelsea Weathers

Oct 01

Have a Drink with George Casey of Lost Padre Records

Food + Drink

Lost Padre Records is a place you can easily get lost in for hours. The shop itself is small—just half an adobe house at 304 Catron Street near downtown Santa Fe—but within its walls is a high density of records you’ll want to discover and rediscover... By Chelsea Weathers

Oct 01

Archive Futures

Feature

One of the most difficult things for an artist to do is to reckon with her own legacy. This is not just a theoretical concern for where one fits into a particular historical narrative—it’s also of material importance... By Chelsea Weathers

Aug 28

Brandon Maldonado

It’s not hard to understand why Brandon Maldonado’s paintings are in high demand... By Chelsea Weathers

Aug 28

Imprint

On the streets of Santa Fe this fall, you might stumble upon a newspaper box... By Chelsea Weathers

Jul 30

Third Space: Shifting Conversations about Contemporary Art

For the past several years, the Birmingham Museum of Art has been quietly amassing a powerhouse collection of some of the most significant politically inflected art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By Chelsea Weathers

Jul 30

Docu Roundup: Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist and RBG

Two women who came of age in the wake of women’s liberation, whose determination landed them at the top of their respective fields: fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg... By Chelsea Weathers

Jun 29

Raychael Stine

As Raychael Stine guided us to her studio on the fringes of the University of New Mexico campus, where she has been an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing for the past five years, I realized that all my questions were actually the same question: Why dogs? By Chelsea Weathers

Jun 28

Inner Orbit

form & concept: For most people who aren’t astronomers or astrophysicists, outer space is a nebulous concept (no pun intended). How we relate to ideas like space-time, the Big Bang, and black holes often has more to do with our immediate material surroundings than with... By Chelsea Weathers

Jun 01

Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru

Museum of International Folk Art: On the wall of Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru reads a statement describing the Peruvian capital’s thriving artistic communities: “Popular arts in Lima are all about remixing.” Moving through the show, it becomes clear that... By Chelsea Weathers

Jun 01

Shane Tolbert

“This rock formation is forty million years old.” Shane Tolbert is guiding me through a narrow passage whose walls contain countless miniscule pebbles and stones—remnants of a mudslide caused by a rush of prehistoric water that cut through the area around the Colorado... By Chelsea Weathers and Clayton Porter

May 01

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

In a recent interview in Artforum, the artist Howardena Pindell recalls her first efforts toward protesting the oppressive and exclusionary practices of art institutions in the 1970s: “Because I was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I needed to remain anonymous, so... By Chelsea Weathers

May 01

Young Curators Present: Guises

Since 2000, SITE Santa Fe’s Young Curators program has given high school students the opportunity to plan every step of a museum exhibition. Students from across New Mexico meet weekly to plan an exhibition theme, create calls for artwork, jury submissions, and install... By Chelsea Weathers

Apr 01

Meridel Rubenstein: Eden Turned on Its Side

UNM Art Museum: Meridel Rubenstein’s photographs brought me to the Bible, which I hadn’t read in earnest since I took a great books class in college. I probably don’t need to tell most people that the Book of Genesis is, at least from a literary perspective, a bit confusing and disorganized... By Chelsea Weathers

Feb 01

Call Me By Your Name

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... By Chelsea Weathers

Dec 01

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985

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... By Chelsea Weathers

Dec 01

2017 Santa Fe Independent Film Festival

I remember the moment, when, as a teenager, i realized that the u.s. interstate system was built by humans. This doesn’t sound like any great epiphany, but to me it was jarring, because it meant that some of the largest structures I had ever seen—highway overpasses, ribbons of asphalt... By Chelsea Weathers

Dec 01

Getting Lost in Portals Bermuda

Feature

Vince Kadlubek is running late. When I arrive at the repurposed bowling alley, I inform the desk clerk I have an interview appointment, and he promptly tells a colleague. She approaches me, a walkie-talkie hanging from her belt, looking authoritative and efficient. “And you are?... By Chelsea Weathers

Nov 01

Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art

Few artists have explored flatness as deeply as Kota Ezawa. Using digital tools, for the past several years Ezawa has transformed appropriated imagery into deceptively simple compositions. A Rembrandt loses its impasto and atmospheric perspective to become a series of... By Chelsea Weathers

Oct 19

Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, Preview #2

Preview

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... By Chelsea Weathers

Oct 12

Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, Preview #1

Preview

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... By Chelsea Weathers

Oct 01

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 ... By Chelsea Weathers and Clayton Porter

Oct 01

Warhol Out West

Feature

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. ... By Chelsea Weathers

Dec 01

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 [...] By Chelsea Weathers

Sep 01

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. [...] By Chelsea Weathers

Sep 01

Susan York

Susan York’s career has evolved over several decades and, in many ways, constitutes an ongoing investigation into materials, process, and site specificity. For the past several years, York has worked with graphite in two and three dimensions... By Chelsea Weathers and Clayton Porter

Jul 01

Desert ArtLAB: Ecologies of Resistance

IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts: Claire Vaye Watkins set her 2015 novel Gold Fame Citrus in a not-so-distant future, in the aftermath of a disastrous event: the entire western United States has been engulfed by a massive sand dune [...] By Chelsea Weathers

Jul 01

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry

Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Kerry James Marshall has said of his childhood, “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. [...] By Chelsea Weathers

Jul 01

Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art

The exhibition Southern Accent: Seeking the South in Contemporary Art debuted last year at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and is currently on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville [...] By Chelsea Weathers

Jun 01

David Taylor: Monuments

The series of obelisks punctuating the US-Mexico border west of the Rio Grande is ostensibly the subject of David Taylor’s 276 photographs in Monuments. These boundary markers resulted from multiple treaties [...] By Chelsea Weathers

Apr 01

Park Place Gallery: Founders and Friends, Then and Now

David Richard Gallery: The Park Place Gallery is probably not as prominent as it should be in the art-historical canon. Founded in 1962 by nine artists working in New York City, many of whom were recent West Coast transplants, the gallery’s program was decidedly anti-dogmatic [...] By Chelsea Weathers

Feb 01

Marion Belanger: Rift / Fault