Film Review: Vox Lux
It has been three weeks since I watched Vox Lux. Whenever I think about how to approach writing about it, in my head I hear the voice of Bill Hader’s Saturday Night Live character, Stefon...
April 26, 2019
Chelsea Weathers
National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum
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...
November 28, 2018
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.
November 28, 2018
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...
October 30, 2018
Have a Drink with George Casey of Lost Padre Records
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...
October 01, 2018
Archive Futures
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...
October 01, 2018
Brandon Maldonado
It’s not hard to understand why Brandon Maldonado’s paintings are in high demand...
August 28, 2018
Imprint
On the streets of Santa Fe this fall, you might stumble upon a newspaper box...
August 28, 2018
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.
July 30, 2018
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.
July 30, 2018
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?
June 29, 2018
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...
June 28, 2018
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...
June 01, 2018
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...
June 01, 2018
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...
May 01, 2018
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...
May 01, 2018
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...
April 01, 2018
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...
February 01, 2018
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...
December 01, 2017
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...
December 01, 2017
Getting Lost in Portals Bermuda
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?...
December 01, 2017
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...
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
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
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
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
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...
September 01, 2017
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 [...]
July 01, 2017
