In this day of broad familiarity with Philip Guston’s figurative paintings, it’s hard to comprehend the shock of his 1970 show at Marlborough. Remember, though, that by then Guston, first a muralist and then a part of the New York School, had been painting his gestural liquid masses to much acclaim for over twenty years.
Shane Tolbert
Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist
Organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is a comprehensive survey of the obscure American modernist painter, who actively worked for decades to invent abstraction in the West.
David Deutsch: Works 1968-2017
Don’t sleep on Deutsch. For the past fifty years, he has actively questioned the narrative of painting, photography, and image-making in general through highly innovative approaches. This monograph, put out by the can-do-no-wrong Radius Books here in Santa Fe, is full of surprises for any artist who claims to know all things Deutsch.
James Drake: Que Linda la Brisa
Thirty miles north of Ciudad Juárez, at an immigrant detention center in Chaparral, New Mexico, Johana Medina Leon, transgendered and from El Salvador, complains of chest pains. Days later, and a day after James Drake’s opening, Que Linda La Brisa, Leon dies on a hospital bed at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, Texas.
West by Southwest: Considering Landscape in Contemporary Art
Landscape painting: the passé genre that dominates so much of the world’s understanding of Southwest art. For me, first it conjures images of Albert Bierstadt (wrought with a minefield of American colonialism), the sappy, wistful romance of a Caspar David Friedrich abyss, and the airy, observational paintings of Provence by Paul Cézanne…
[Sponsored] Contemporary Voices: Ken Price Preview
Starting this summer, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum presents the innovative sculptures and works on paper of acclaimed artist Ken Price in conversation with the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe as a part of the museum’s ongoing Contemporary Voices series…
Southwest Creative Residencies
A tour of destination residency programs in the Southwest for artists and writers.
Action/Abstraction Redefined
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe July 27, 2017 – July 7, 2019 There’s a valuable history lesson in pedagogy and modernism upstairs at the IAIA Museum of […]
In the Ruins of the Anthropocene
I enter the gallery and see the word “Anthropocene” in vinyl on the wall, and my first thought is: it’s a tired conversation in an art context, but let’s shake the tree and see if anything good comes out.
Tara Donovan: Fieldwork
While many viewers stand mouths agape at the idea of clipping and adhering hundreds of thousands of straws, I’m indifferent to labor and duration. The work takes time: so what? Instead, I lose my mind over the honeycombed waves with optical clusters of tan and ochre that emerge from what I understand to be uniformly opaque white straws.
Matthew Mullins: The Sun in Our Bones
What does it mean to make landscape paintings in 2018? Just this morning I was reading the recently issued UN Climate Change Report about coming food shortages, growing wildfires…
Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking
I’ve always maintained an irrational but polite envy of the orderly and meticulous artist whose studio is swept daily, whose works are steadily recorded, and whose supplies are inventoried as you might find…
