Southwest Art News: June 2024
The arts community goes head-to-head with a sports magnate in Salt Lake City, and other recent Southwest art news headlines.
June 03, 2024
Jordan Eddy
Southwest Artist and Writer Residencies with Summer 2024 Deadlines
Lavish and rugged residency opportunities abound in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.
May 21, 2024
From the EditorInside Southwest ContemporarySouthwest
An Opening Letter from New Southwest Contemporary Editorial Director Jordan Eddy
Our new editorial director, who joined SWC on April 22, looks back on a challenging decade of arts journalism—and ahead with an ambitious editorial vision.
May 17, 2024
FeatureNew MexicoVol. 9 Living Histories
Modernware: The Allure and Tension in Defining Nampeyo, An Iconic Pueblo Potter, as a Modernist
An art world debate over the modernist credentials of iconic Hopi-Tewa potter Nampeyo surfaces tense questions about art, craft, Indigeneity, and the meaning of modernity.
March 01, 2024
Travel2023 New Mexico Field Guide
Unique New Mexico: Dwan Light Sanctuary
Dwan Light Sanctuary is a prismatic art installation in Las Vegas, New Mexico conceived by influential arts patron Virginia Dwan.
May 26, 2023
Meet Zara Kriegstein, the Forgotten Artist Who Spearheaded Santa Fe’s Most Embattled Mural
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.
August 12, 2022
Stage Worthy: The Santa Fe Opera Properties Department
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.
June 26, 2019
Return to Blackdom
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...
March 27, 2019
Santa Fe Independent Film Festival
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...
October 01, 2018
Nascent Atmospheres
At a preview event for Amie LeGette and Courtney Leonard’s exhibition, guests were lost in a literal twilight zone...
August 28, 2018
Mayeur Projects
Christian Mayeur was on a photo scavenger hunt when he took his first trip to Las Vegas, New Mexico...
August 28, 2018
Field Report: Las Vegas, NM
If you’ve read Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe—or felt the difference between mud and stucco...
August 28, 2018
Beautiful Test Sites/Now I Am Become Death
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” quoth J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad Gita...
July 30, 2018
Daisy Quezada
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.
July 30, 2018
Recall, Recapture, Remember
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...
June 29, 2018
Floating Worlds: The Santa Fe Opera Scene Shop
“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...
June 28, 2018
Nikesha Breeze: Within This Skin
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...
June 01, 2018
H2O
“I got tired of auditioning for lame parts,” said Santa Fe actress Jessica Haring at an intimate living room preview for H2O this spring. Last year, she read Jane Martin’s one-act, two-character play from 2015 and knew its female protagonist, Deborah Elling...
May 01, 2018
Work by Women
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...
May 01, 2018
Tricia English, UNUM Magazine
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...
April 30, 2018
Lucy Maki: Double Take
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...
April 01, 2018
After Ciel Bergman
“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...
April 01, 2018
Contact: Local to Global
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...
February 01, 2018
Susan M. Stella
“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...
February 01, 2018
Twice Through the Maze
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...
December 01, 2016
Roxanne Swentzell
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...
November 01, 2016
The Individualists
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...
December 01, 2017
Future Shock
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 ...
November 01, 2017
New Myths of Santa Fe
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...
August 01, 2016
Jami Porter Lara: A Map with No Border
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 [...]
September 01, 2017
