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
Jenn Shapland
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
New Mexico Women: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
When I asked Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana) how she came to call herself a cultural arts worker, her reply began with a short history of her tribe’s trading practices. “I come from a long line of Indian traders, not merchants who house goods but traders who pass resources from one place to another.”
June 26, 2019
New Mexico Women: Lucy Lippard
Lucy Lippard changed what art writing could look like, and she continues to shift it with each book she writes. Hugely influential in the artworld of New York, beginning in the 1960s with the Art Workers Coalition and later Heresies Collective, her impact on New Mexico is equally prodigious...
May 24, 2019
Field Report: El Paso + Juárez
Downtown Juárez still feels gutted since the demolition of its nightclubs and the shuttering of so many businesses and markets, but among the ruins you can experience—if, I will stress, you have a Juarense to guide you—a lively community trying to find itself and its sense of vitality and ownership over the space again...
April 26, 2019
New Mexico Women: Maria Varela
In her essay, “Time to Get Ready,” Maria Varela recalls, “I once volunteered in the fourth grade that I was Mexican, and the angry response of the teacher frightened and shamed me. ‘No, you are not! We’re all Americans here,’ snapped Sister Rosita.” For a woman who has spent her life fighting white supremacy across the U.S., this scene presents a formative moment.
April 26, 2019
[Sponsored] Preview: Meghann O’Brien
Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw Chilkat weaver Meghann O’Brien is the 2019 Eric and Barbara Dobkin Native Artist Fellow. An accomplished textile and basket weaver...
April 26, 2019
Studio Visit: Harmony Hammond
Harmony Hammond is lying on the floor beneath one of her paintings, craning her neck within inches of the canvas. “I’m doing edges,” she tells me. I first heard of Hammond when I came across the catalogue for Out West, a 1999 show...
March 27, 2019
New Mexico Women: Deborah Madison
Chef and food writer Deborah Madison is shifting gears and writing a new memoir about her life.
March 27, 2019
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Heidi Brandow: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now 2019
Adaptation, experimentation, and evolution are all crucial concepts within Heidi Brandow’s practice, which usually takes the form of layers of paint, drawing, and paper on canvas, but also includes a social practice in her photography projects.
January 30, 2019
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Mira Burack: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now 2019
Mira Burack’s artwork is a space of rest, contemplation, and the contemplation of rest. Her wall-sized collages of photos of rumpled bedclothes enlarge the space where sleep takes place and, in doing so, enlarge a viewer’s attention to sleep and its landscape.
January 30, 2019
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Vincent Campos: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now 2019
Vincent Campos injects a sense of whimsy and strangeness into a form that is often serious and pious. Campos’s retablos stick to this script, representing saints and other Catholic imagery, but his figures have odd or humorous details: a caricatured face, a bag of Wonder Bread.
January 30, 2019
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Martín Wannam: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now 2019
Martín Wannam’s photos are an explosion of glitter and color, with an underlying hint of darkness. His work is unabashedly queer but operates in response to a repressive heteronormative society encrypted by religious imagery.
January 30, 2019
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Heather Gallegos-Rex: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now 2019
Heather Gallegos-Rex’s tapestries are strikingly minimal in their design, often incorporating only two or three colors. She leans toward spare geometric shapes but does not shy away from landscapes and increasingly layered compositions.
January 30, 2019
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
Jennifer Vasher: 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now 2019
Jennifer Vasher’s installations and sculptures evoke the desire for purity and the environmentally toxic consumer culture of cleanliness. Lotion bottles, aspirin, and other pharmaceuticals appear as decorative art objects within the domestic landscapes of her installations.
January 30, 2019
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now
When we first dreamed up the Artists Issue, we thought of it as a way to share—with New Mexico and beyond—a sample of the most vibrant and engaged artists working in New Mexico right now. Artists whose work deserves sustained attention, whether or not you’ve ever heard of them before.
January 30, 2019
New Mexico Women: Deb Haaland
This week, an image from the February 2019 issue of Vanity Fair has been circling my social-media feeds. It features six newly elected Democrat representatives, and at the center of the photo sits Representative Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo). Rep Haaland’s demeanor in the photo is fierce yet kind, the exact, impossible combination of feelings a woman politician has to strike to be elected in this country.
January 30, 2019
National Spotlight: Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico
Photos of Mexico from the 1970s to 2005 by Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide bring a documentary impulse in touch with a poetic eye. Her photos are personal, yet immersive in cultures not her own; unafraid of the humorous, the strange, and the symbolic.
January 30, 2019
Interview with Poet Joy Harjo
I still feel like a New Mexico writer in part, an important part, and my plans are to secure a little place there to live at least part of the time...New Mexico inspires me as no other place. I consider it the birthplace of my poetry, though of course, my poetry was set in place for generations, through all the speakers, singers, and artists in my ancestral lines.
January 30, 2019
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
A Swedish girl joins her first séance at seventeen. Her mind swirls with a heady mix of books on Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Buddhism, and spiritualism. This doesn’t set her apart; the occult is mainstream in 1879. By the time she is thirty-five, she has started a séance circle with four female friends called The Five (De Fem), which will commission her most significant works...
November 28, 2018
Dorothy Stewart
“Dear Toad of My Heart,” begins one of the two thousand pages of letters between Dorothy Stewart and Maria Chabot in the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center. “Dearest Thing,” begins another. These letters are a remarkable record of two women in love in the 1920s and ’30s and their various heartbreaks, jealousies, friendships, and new loves along the way...
November 28, 2018
Colette
It’s the late nineteenth century in France, and the haircuts are terrible. Frizzy, voluminous bangs, handlebar mustaches with three-inch goatees. Clearly the world was waiting for Colette...
November 28, 2018
Letters: December 2018-January 2019
When I started in June, Lauren and I made all sorts of plans, and it’s a joy to watch them develop into realities: more coverage of performance art, dance...
November 28, 2018
Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts
In Santa Fe, Bruce Nauman feels to me like an invisible figure. I know he lives near, I know he frequents the same diner I frequent, I question every tall, bald man in my vicinity, but...
October 30, 2018
Pablita Velarde
On a survey taken outside a 1993 exhibit of Pablita Velarde’s work at the Wheelwright Museum, one visitor wrote, in awe: “that a woman of her time would be able to find her creative life...
October 30, 2018
Drowned River: An Interview with Rebecca Solnit and Mark Klett
Rebecca Solnit’s writing on the intersection of environmental damage and the human body has long captured my attention as a reader and as an inhabitant of this planet...
October 01, 2018
Paula Angel
Did you know that in New Mexico, women were not allowed to serve on a jury prior to March 14, 1951? For all the accomplishments of New Mexico’s women throughout history...
October 01, 2018
Mary Hunter Austin
The phrase "Santa Fe women" calls to mind a range of women throughout history...
August 28, 2018
SITElines 2018: Casa tomada
Everyone has a biennial these days—a sprawling exhibition that brings in outside curators...
August 28, 2018
Maria Gertrudis Barceló
One of Santa Fe’s (and New Mexico’s) striking features is the proliferation of women-owned businesses, today and throughout its history...
July 30, 2018
