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.
Jul 29
Jenn Shapland
Jul 26
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.
Jun 26
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.”
May 24
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...
Apr 26
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...
Apr 26
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.
Apr 26
[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...
Mar 27
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...
Mar 27
New Mexico Women: Deborah Madison
Chef and food writer Deborah Madison is shifting gears and writing a new memoir about her life.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Heidi Brandow
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Mira Burack
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Vincent Campos
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Martín Wannam
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Heather Gallegos-Rex
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Jennifer Vasher
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now
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.
Jan 30
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.
Jan 30
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.
Jan 30
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.
Nov 28
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...
Nov 28
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...
Nov 28
Nov 28
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...
Oct 30
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...
Oct 30
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...
Oct 01
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...
Oct 01
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...
Aug 28
Mary Hunter Austin
The phrase "Santa Fe women" calls to mind a range of women throughout history...
Aug 28
SITElines 2018: Casa tomada
Everyone has a biennial these days—a sprawling exhibition that brings in outside curators...
Jul 30
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...
Jul 30
Curatorial Activism
On April 1, 2014, the editors at ArtSlant reported that MoMA would “give the museum over exclusively to women artists for the entire year of 2015.”...
Jun 29
Isabel de Olvera
Where are the black women in colonial New Mexican history? Typically, the 1500s and 1600s are defined by a series of male Spanish conquistadors and governors whose names litter the city: Coronado, Peralta, De Vargas. Their expeditions brought soldiers and their families...
Jun 01
Laura Gilpin
Laura Gilpin saw the landscape of the Southwest as a constitutive element of the human cultures that formed there. Among the few women artists who took active part in landscape photography in the early and mid-twentieth century, Gilpin’s photos stand out against the pristine...
May 01
Gloria Graham
Spending a morning with Gloria Graham in her drawing studio is like being in the world's most inspiring chemistry class. She speaks with sheer awe about the structures and movements of molecular particles, telling personal anecdotes about carbon and silicon, acting out the effects...
May 01
Interview with Colson Whitehead
In the late '80s and early '90s, Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead and New Yorker Poetry Editor Kevin Young were a couple of kids at Harvard. They became friends long before either had a writing career to speak of, but in Whitehead's words...
May 01
Agueda Salazar Martínez
In a video taken in 1995, Agueda Martínez stands at her loom wearing a long floral dress, an apron, and a faded baseball cap with the logo of a local café. She works the threads quickly with both hands, tapping out a rhythm on the treadles below. She is 97 years old...
Apr 11
April Reading
When Jenny George read from her collection The Dream of Reason at Collected Works in early April, her voice was soft, slow, and steady. Like her poems, her reading rendered heartbreaking compressions of language and feeling into something delicate to behold. Her images ...
Apr 01
Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels (1976), near Lucin, UT
After you've Googled the Sun Tunnels and copied the coordinates from The Center for Land Use Interpretation website into your phone, and driven two hours around the Salt Lake from the Spiral Jetty, accidentally by way of Snowville, Idaho, where no one wants to make you a milkshake, you will find yourself dangerously close to Nevada...
Apr 01
Between the Waters
Fishing nets once connected the communities along Colombia’s Magdalena (Yuma) river with the water and its populations, but now the waters are so polluted the nets cannot be used for fishing. Carolina Caycedo, whose parents are Colombian, repurposes the nets as hand-dyed sculptures...
Apr 01
Nancy Holt
Nancy Holt is known for artworks that engage the celestial: stars and sunlight, orbiting bodies, and the earth’s rotation. But getting to know her work more thoroughly through Sightlines, a retrospective edited by Alena Williams in 2011 and still the only and most complete...
Apr 01
Field Report: Austin
I keep waiting for New Mexico to embrace the taco. I love a burrito as much as the next guy, and the enchiladas at La Choza are life-changing, but with so much green chile and red chile flowing here in Santa Fe, the taco and its valiant hero, salsa, have been eclipsed. I visited...
Mar 15
March 2018 Reading
Winter in the northern Midwest is not a place I return to in person, at least not willingly. It is a place I dread for its deadly overcast sadness, a dread that, I learned from Michigan poet Emily Van Kley's collection, constitutes its own heady nostalgia. The Cold and the Rust…
Feb 22
February 2018 Reading
Calling herself a "visual artist who writes," author Verónica Gerber Bicecci approaches fiction from the conceptual and the personal simultaneously: What does it mean, logically, for a person to be missing? And how does it feel? Bicecci incorporates line drawings throughout Empty...
