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.”...
July 30, 2018
Jenn Shapland
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...
June 29, 2018
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...
June 01, 2018
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, 2018
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, 2018
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...
May 01, 2018
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 ...
April 11, 2018
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...
April 01, 2018
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...
April 01, 2018
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...
April 01, 2018
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...
April 01, 2018
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…
March 15, 2018
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...
February 22, 2018
3 Questions: Aleksandar Hemon
In the last year, Aleksandar Hemon’s writings in response to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the perils of Trumpism have served as my touchstones, pieces I bookmark and return to and share when I’m feeling especially low, especially unable to proceed. Hemon is a Chicago-based...
February 01, 2018
Debra Baxter
Debra Baxter has just chucked something across her studio. A five-pointed throwing star sticks firmly into the opposite wall. She’s about to throw another, but first she shows it to me. It’s elegant lace made of metal. The tips have been sharpened. Baxter’s work occupies several unlikely but generative intersections: between the fierce...
February 01, 2018
Esther Martinez
“I was born in 1912, the year the Titanic sank and the year New Mexico became a state,” P’oe Tsáwä, or Blue Water, begins her memoir. Known by Anglos as Esther Martinez, P’oe Tsáwä lived through periods of unimaginable change. As a child, she recalls riding in a covered wagon with...
February 01, 2018
January 2018 Reading
Zadie Smith is the reason I left Facebook. As I was reading—actually, as my partner, who snatched it up the moment it arrived, was reading—her new collection of essays Feel Free, I revisited a piece of hers I remember from several years ago to see if it held up. "Generation Why?"...
January 18, 2018
IAIA Winter Readers Gathering
Each January, as Santa Fe et environs settle back into their quiet winter ways following the bustle of holidays, markets, and festivals, the Low Residency MFA program in Creative Writing gathers at IAIA for a week of workshops and unforgettable public readings. This is the only...
January 02, 2018
December Reading: Three Titles from 2017
As a difficult year winds to a close, I’ve been thinking about what books made a difference for me in 2017. What changed my mind, or opened it, or gave me language to understand and express the present moment? Here are three 2017 titles that made me see things in a new way...
December 14, 2017
All That is Solid Melts into Air
Etiquette, Santa Fe: My first visit to Etiquette, for the opening of 8 Photographers at Etiquette in early September, I was shocked. In a warehouse-esque space behind Siler Road I saw, at a single glance, more people under thirty than I have seen in the year and...
December 01, 2017
November Book Reviews
Jenn Shapland reviews three recent book releases: The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco (nonfiction), Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (fiction), and For Want of Water: And Other Poems by Sasha Pimentel (poetry) ...
November 07, 2017
The Alchemical Trace
Sanitary Tortilla Factory: In Lesbian Art in America, Harmony Hammond asks a number of questions about what, precisely, is “lesbian” about lesbian art. “Is the quality ‘lesbian’ embodied in the art object, the sexuality of the artist or viewer, or the viewing context?... Is lesbian art ...
November 01, 2017
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In Forty Questions
Sometimes a writer’s subject finds her. Valeria Luiselli, a novelist and essayist from Mexico City, was waiting for her green card when she and her niece started working as interpreters at the New York immigration court. Luiselli had heard from her own immigration lawyer that after...
November 01, 2017
Field Report: Marfa
To borrow a word used by Peruvian artist William Cordova to describe a wall-sized projection of open ocean in a screening room within his show, I think of Marfa as a portal...
November 01, 2017
New Releases: One Sentence Book Reviews
New fall book released in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are reviewed with one sentence and one quotation of each from Jenn Shapland. Titles include The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt, Katalin Street by Magda Szabo, The Mountain by Paul Yoon, Letters to his Neighbor by Marcel Proust ...
October 01, 2017
Way OUT West Film Fest
Celebrating its fifteenth year, the Way OUT West Film Fest (formerly the Southwest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival) in Albuquerque will include thirty-four screenings over ten days, from October 13 through October 22. Chavela (2017), a music documentary directed by Catherine Gund and ...
October 01, 2017
Portraits from Standing Rock
Tom Harjo’s Portraits from Standing Rock provide insight into an event that was difficult to see. Using still photography, he portrays the people, the emotions, the interactions, and the violence that law enforcement in South Dakota tried to shield from public view in 2016. Harjo’s...
October 01, 2017
Cross Pollination
The bees have proven themselves remarkably commodifiable, not only through the products they manufacture that humans enjoy, like honey and beeswax, but also as a pattern, a motif, a caricature. The market loves a stripe found in nature. If panda bears are the symbol of neoliberal...
October 01, 2017
Doris Cross: Selected Works
En route from one Southwest Arts Oasis to another, determined to see the works of Doris Cross (1907-1994) in Marfa and carrying a friend's artwork in our trunk, we passed through the heart of darkness [...]
September 01, 2017
Maudie
A painter, Lewis grew up in Nova Scotia and had no formal training apart from painting postcards with her mother when she was young. Her hands, shoulders, and neck were crumpled by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis [...]
September 01, 2017
