Aug 12
The recent destruction of Santa Fe’s Multicultural mural caused fierce controversy, but its little-told history reveals tough questions about authorship and cross-cultural collaboration.
Jun 26
Where was the dagger? It was the final act of The Letter, a Santa Fe Opera world premiere that opened in 2009, and forty-mile-per-hour winds were howling across the venue’s open-air stage. The murderous Leslie, played by Patricia Racette, was singing her way towards suicide-by-stabbing. Suddenly, the wind whipped a tablecloth and sent Leslie’s fateful knife skittering down the dining table. This was despite the fact that the properties department had reinforced the linen with a stitch called a swing tack and secured it with a wind skirt.
Mar 27
Taos artist Nikesha Breeze met her father for the first time when she was ten years old. He was homeless on the streets of Portland, while she was growing up beyond the city’s southern outskirts in the small town of Sherwood...
Oct 01
Much like the movies in its lineup, the inaugural Santa Fe Independent Film Festival had a dogged crew and a bare-bones budget. Jacques Paisner and two like-minded friends...
Aug 28
At a preview event for Amie LeGette and Courtney Leonard’s exhibition, guests were lost in a literal twilight zone...
Aug 28
Christian Mayeur was on a photo scavenger hunt when he took his first trip to Las Vegas, New Mexico...
Aug 28
If you’ve read Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe—or felt the difference between mud and stucco...
Jul 30
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” quoth J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad Gita...
Jul 30
Early in her artistic career, Daisy Quezada came across a real-life scene with all the power of an omen. She and her mother had ventured to their old house in Jalisco, Mexico, which was long abandoned.
Jun 29
Tansey Contemporary: The title of this fiber-art exhibition smacks of redundancy—if you couldn’t guess, it’s about memory—but it’s surprisingly economical in other respects. Recall, Recapture, Remember features twenty-two artists from across the Southwest, selected...
Jun 28
“They’ll say, ‘Why won’t it just float there?’” Scott Schreck says with a little smirk. “Then I go, ‘I’ll tell you what, let me work on that antigravity device for you.’” He’s talking through the joys and difficulties of translating artistic visions to brick and mortar...
Jun 01
Harwood Museum of Art: Late in the process of making artwork for her solo exhibition, Within This Skin, Nikesha Breeze started a series of ceramic and oxide wall sculptures titled Written in Water. She calls the works “death masks,” and each coppery visage was...
May 01
May 01
Harwood Museum of Art: On the walls of major museums, only five percent of artwork is by women. The Harwood Museum flips this number in its current exhibition: there’s a small display featuring some men upstairs, but most of the institution’s galleries are devoted to Work...
Apr 30
A year after Tricia English graduated high school in Kansas City, Kansas, her friends offered her someone else’s plane ticket to Chicago. “Two friends of mine were going there to look at Columbia College, and their friend had bought a nonrefundable ticket but couldn’t make it,” English says. She took the free flight and successfully...
Apr 01
Exhibit/208: Remember that magical automobile from Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, the one that whisks a stuttering Owen Wilson back to the 1920s to party with Gertrude Stein and company? I like to imagine that was just one cab in a fleet of cosmic taxis, each with its own art...
Apr 01
“We are a family of very fast walkers,” says Bridgit Koller. “If you want to keep up, you have to kind of run.” She has a vivid mental image of her mother, Ciel Bergman, blazing through the streets of Pleasanton, California, on a visit to see Koller in early 2016. Shortly after that, Bergman jetted off to Cuba for an action-packed vacation...
Feb 01
New Mexico Museum of Art: Less than six years past the State of New Mexico’s centennial, the New Mexico Museum of Art marked its first 100 years in December. It’s an anniversary made all the more notable by the institution’s enduring commitment to the contemporary. The Canyon...
Feb 01
“It’s those Santa Ana winds: they’re so strong, and they never stop blowing,” says Susan Stella. The observation might seem wistful, particularly for a Californian ex-pat living in the sleepy village of Tesuque, but there’s real distress in her voice. It’s mid-December, and Stella’s...
Dec 01
In nightmarish political times, it’s important to keep in mind that books are more than just objects, and that the pen is always, always mightier than the sword. Pay attention to who’s reading books and who is not, to who is making them and who is burning them...
Nov 01
One day, when she was in her twenties, Roxanne Swentzell paced a barren corner of her grandmother’s land at Santa Clara Pueblo. She was a homeless, single mother of two...
Dec 01
By all accounts, Elaine de Kooning had a roaring good time in Albuquerque. The abstract expressionist painter was a guest professor at the University of New Mexico for two years in the late 1950s, and longtime faculty members still tell tales of her exuberant ways. She drove her...
Nov 01
SITE Santa Fe: The future is now, at least in the context of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. When the book debuted in 1970, the year 2017 was a figment of the journalist-turned-futurist’s locomotive imagination. He daydreamed personal spaceships and underwater cities for us, but also ...
Aug 01
It’s March and Thais Mather sits in her Eldorado living room with a great firmament of inky constellations hanging above her head. She recently completed the artwork for a solo exhibition titled The Anonymous Author, and its centerpiece is a series of densely detailed pointillist...
Sep 01
Jami Porter Lara came upon the map with no border line in 2011, during a trip to the Paquime archaeological site in Chihuahua, Mexico. She was a BFA student at the University of New Mexico [...]
Sep 01
Tansey Contemporary: In her solo exhibition of geometric wall sculptures, Melinda Rosenberg’s lines are not always her own. The Columbus, Ohio, artist’s work is a collaboration with designers [...]
Feb 01
Something I Need You To Know debuted on Wednesday, November 9, 2016, the day after the United States presidential election. During the opening reception, visitors staggered through the hallways of Santa Fe [...]
Aug 01
Peters Projects: Upon entering Kent Monkman’s solo exhibition, resist the temptation to revel in the raucous party raging across monumental canvases in the [...]
Aug 01
Artist Jimmie Durham is not Cherokee, and that’s a fact. Indigenous tribes in the United States act as sovereign nations that determine their own citizenship, and Durham’s [...]
Feb 01
"We do this bookstore every December," says David Chickey. He stands in the lofty, second floor office of Radius Books on Palace Avenue, a rare example of midcentury modern architecture in Santa Fe. [...]
Jul 01
When SITE Santa Fe’s multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion project concludes this October, the contemporary museum space will debut an exhibition called Future Shock [...]
Jun 01
“It’s one thing to draw a picture of a lady in a blue dress,” says Missy West, Costume Director of the Santa Fe Opera. “But what’s the blue dress made of?" [...]
Jun 01
Art.i.fact Gallery: Fukuda Chiyo-ni’s famous haiku bloomed from the mists of Edo Period Japan to inspire Ilona Pachler’s solo exhibition [...]
Apr 01
Center for Contemporary Arts: How do you sum up a solo exhibition? You could measure it in studio hours, or leagues of thought. Jill O’Bryan counted Mapping Resonance in breaths [...]
