Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
“The intention of this work is to honor vulnerability, impermanence, and cycles of life on our planet,” c marquez says of their work, which includes two-dimensional pieces, sculpture, installation, and the results of a daily sketchbook practice.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
Intensely thoughtful, Raphael Begay sees significance in objects and quotidian scenes and is able to begin a conversation with the viewer through his lens. With installations and discussions about his work, he adds a further dimension of storytelling that engages community...
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
Garcia, an Art Institute of Chicago–educated artist who moved to Santa Fe from his native Houston in 1987, developed a unique transfer procedure: he creates an image or pattern on paper that’s soaked in gum arabic and water, which is then hand pressed onto a painting surface.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
Currently residing in Albuquerque where they are pursuing an MFA in photography, MK began the recent series The Pain Is Just an Annoyance Now as members of their family began to pass away and they witnessed the grief of their mother. These losses spurred an exploration of the complications of family relationships, as well as obscured histories through the physical remnants of the past that shore up the present—family photo albums.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
Looking at Cedra Wood’s paintings feels a little like finding a secret door to enchanted lands. Wood understands a connection between the outer wild terrains and the inward ones. Her art celebrates both realms as essential and beautiful, linked by mythos. The worlds she depicts evoke something of the hero’s journey.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
Eric-Paul Riege’s (Diné) elaborate and beautiful fiber works not only connect him with his ancestral and artistic centers, but also envelop viewers in an everyday Navajo worldview, one that the artist believes should be communal.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
The shapes of Andrea Pichaida’s sculptural works in clay are at once spare and suggestive, their lines and colors inspired by nature, their content speaking to experience both personal and universal.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
Danielle Shelley, who earned critical acclaim as a painter, has found similar success as a textile wizard. "My artistic concerns didn’t change when I morphed from a painter into a fiber artist,” writes Shelley in her artist statement. “I am still a passionate colorist, in love with shapes and lines. But I also find satisfaction in being part of the movement that has reclaimed stitch work, a long-dismissed women’s medium.”
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
Justin Richel infuses his paintings and sculptures with incisive, humorous, and exacting layers of commentary. He studied the technique of icon painting at the Franciscan monastery in Kennebunk, Maine, in 2004. This thoughtful Franciscan attention to color and the creation of signifiers informs his work, but his use of these methods is unique.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
“My photos illustrate the blood pumping through Albuquerque,” Frank Blazquez told the Guardian in 2018. The portraits—largely captured along the east-west belt of Central Avenue—capture human faces, yes, but each carries a story in and of itself.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
William T. Carson’s work brings a unique perspective to the adage “The medium is the message.” He works with coal to explore a multitude of significations. Beyond the economic, political, or environmental meaning of the substance, Carson reminds us that coal is prehistoric, born of ancient metamorphosis.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
David Gaussoin, a Santa Fe jewelry artist of Picuris Pueblo, Navajo, and French descent, comes from a long line of creatives, ranging from silversmiths and painters to rug weavers, sculptors, and woodworkers.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
All year long we share the stories of artists from across our state, but this special issue is our way of focusing on a sample of some of the premier talent continuously emerging from New Mexico. These are artists whose works are shaping the landscape of contemporary art in the Southwest.
Dec 01
Lynch makes hand-built, smoke-fired vessels, some as large as five feet tall, others small enough to fit in the hand. Her color palette is minimal and plays the whiteness of the clay against the deep graphite blacks achieved by saggar firing, a process that sometimes also deposits hues of blue and brown. Her work is simple to describe but is not necessarily easy to talk about...
Dec 01
Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand. You can find all of them on Instagram and at local markets.
Dec 01
Southern Nevada–based artist Justin Favela’s work embodies the qualities of Las Vegas by affirming the startling originality of smart near-copies. Last spring, I visited Favela in his temporary studio at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Reliably buoyant, Favela can shed light on seemingly any aspect of the folklore of contemporary Las Vegas...
Dec 01
Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand.
Dec 01
We asked nine curators, critics, and makers in the state to look back, in hindsight, at the vibrant art scene here as experienced in the past year, and to look forward as through a crystal ball at the year to come. They were asked to answer two questions: "What was your favorite exhibition in 2019: the most compelling, beautiful, or thought-provoking show?", and "What shows are you looking forward to in the next year?"
Dec 01
“I want my students to understand that their embodied knowledge and way of consciously moving in space, as dancers, is special. My goal is to give them vocabulary and tools so they can be part of the creative force that invents whatever comes next.”
Dec 01
Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand.
Dec 01
Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand.
Dec 01
Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand.
Dec 01
Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand.
Oct 01
Erin Mickelson’s book-based artwork plays with translation, in every sense of the word. In LIMINAL betwixt/between, her series of work displayed in form & concept’s Superscript show in 2018, text is translated to sound, sound to image, and image fed into an algorithm, chopped up, and assembled into new images. Her collaborating artists are Twitter bots and long-dead authors, and her process a visible part of the product. In everything she makes, there’s a degree of absurdity and flux: how many times can you translate something and still call it the same thing?
Oct 01
The evolution of the art of printmaking is practically a human inheritance of knowledge from which we all benefit. We experience printmaking in our daily lives, from the clothes we wear and the books we read to poster advertisements for performances we attend and the money we spend. Printmaking is a three-thousand-year-old art form that reveals within itself an intimacy probably only found in the throes of a fight: gouging, biting, scraping, pressure, scarred surfaces, trenches dug. Years of battling the grain to carve images into wood leave the artists’ hands bent and curved like tree roots, maybe even burned from caustic processes that can scar the hand in the effort of creating visual landscapes.
Oct 01
Unlike most other traditional printmaking technologies, the invention of lithography can be traced to a specific person and time. Like most artists before and since, German actor and playwright Johann […]
Oct 01
As ABQ Zine Fest 9 approaches, we take a look at how print media has endured and the spaces that are building culture through the celebration of zines, books, and comics.
Aug 28
We took a seat at the table in the center of the warehouse-turned-home (turned-“work, brainstorming, and studio space”) where artists Cannupa Hanska Luger and Ginger Dunnill live in Glorieta, New Mexico. Taped to the kitchen cabinet was a wall-size paper schedule of impending deadlines for numerous projects. Every line was filled out, and notes were made in black marker, even in the margins. “Welcome to my life,” Dunnill laughed as, never skipping a beat, she outlined their individual projects—while the couple’s two children ran in one door and out the other...
Aug 28
The tone of my studio visit with Santa Fe artist Ted Larsen was set early when he declared that he would likely be both circumspect and like a blowtorch when talking about his thoughts on his studio practice, life, and work. Now fifty-five, the trained painter has been showing his art since before he graduated college. By the time he was twenty-two, he had already exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, making big strides early on in a career that has now spanned decades.
Aug 28
It should be on everyone’s bucket list. Silver City. It sounds like a romantic vestige of another time. I didn’t realize how much so until I turned off the highway and onto a deliciously winding drive through the Black Range and into the Gila National Forest and Pinos Altos Mountains.
Aug 28
Briana Olson meditates on belonging as she tours the murals and street art of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Jul 30
Quietly, a new foundation has come into being in Santa Fe that promises to have a significant impact on art history and art-making, not just in the Southwest, but internationally. The Holt/Smithson Foundation (HSF) was literally willed into existence by artist Nancy Holt—creator of the massive concrete art installation, Sun Tunnels, in the Utah desert— who lived in Santa Fe the last two decades of her life, until her death in 2014.
Jul 29
Genetic diversity is important in plants for the same reason it’s important in humans and animals: a shallower gene pool means more vulnerability to disease and mutation and less adaptability to environmental change. Throughout human history, farmers have benefitted from plants’ ability to evolve over time by carefully selecting seeds from their harvest to plant for next year based on drought tolerance, disease resistance, productivity, or other desirable traits. This long partnership between growers and seeds has created countless unique plant phenotypes, many of which are now extinct or going that way.
Jul 29
Want to break out of the mold? Seven alternative immersive art experiences in Santa Fe are worth exploring this summer.
Jul 26
Dorielle Caimi’s paintings have been described as absurd, humorous, truthful, and empowered. Those adjectives adequately describe Dorielle the painter, too, though I would add that she is extremely funny, smart as a whip, and masterful in her execution and rendering of the female figure. Both articulate and open in speaking about her work, Dorielle effectively integrates her emotional and physical experiences into her studio practice. Balancing expressive and brutally honest portrayals of the female form with jarring pop-surrealist color, animal characters, and cartoonish elements, she offers viewers something vibrant and complex.
Jun 26
“What exactly is a record label’s future in a music industry climate seemingly hellbent on conditioning audiences to pay next to nothing for music?” Eliza Lutz, founder of the pioneering Santa Fe–based Matron Records label, thinks the only path forward is to embrace the inevitable and adapt accordingly...
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.
Jun 26
Visiting Stuart Arends’s studio was no quick jaunt. We drove one and a half hours from Santa Fe to Willard, New Mexico, past the town, further down the highway, and just before a specified mile marker where we were to rendez-vous with the artist at an unmarked wire gate...
Jun 26
Summer in northern New Mexico can be overwhelming. Any day of the week there is some activity calling for our attention: artist talks, studio tours, performances, openings, fairs, festivals, markets, music, and, of course, beautiful weather beckoning us outdoors. To help us make sense of it all, I asked two of our regular contributors, Maggie Grimason and Rachel Preston Prinz, to give us a selection of their “must-sees” for the summer season...
May 24
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...
May 24
I grew up on a ranch in the Texas Hill Country and spent as much time outside as possible. There were old roads, stone fence lines, ruins of buildings, and archaeological sites that stretched from creek beds to groves of trees.
Apr 26
Grace Rosario Perkins describes a drawing she had made years ago, taking Black Flag’s Family Man album and replacing Raymond Pettibon’s violent imagery with a repeated series of pencil drawings of women. She then filled out the liner notes with her mother’s name...
Apr 26
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...
