Weekday Detour: Street Art in Albuquerque
Briana Olson meditates on belonging as she tours the murals and street art of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Briana Olson meditates on belonging as she tours the murals and street art of Albuquerque, New Mexico. By Briana Olson
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. By Janet Abrams
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. By Robin Babb
Want to break out of the mold? Seven alternative immersive art experiences in Santa Fe are worth exploring this summer. By Jenn Shapland
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. By Kate Wood
“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... By Patrick McGuire
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. By Jordan Eddy
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... By Clayton Porter
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... By Maggie Grimason and Rachel Preston
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... By Shane Tolbert
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. By Julie McGilvray
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... By Maggie Grimason
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... By Jenn Shapland
Amy was unyielding. Every time I saw her, she’d ask, “Have you gone to church yet?” “No,” I’d reply, again. “They’re about to start construction on the new sanctuary...” By Rachel Preston
Harmony Hammond is lying on the floor beneath one of her paintings, craning her neck within inches of the canvas. “I’m doing edges,” she tells me. I first heard of Hammond when I came across the catalogue for Out West, a 1999 show... By Jenn Shapland
A tour of destination residency programs in the Southwest for artists and writers. By Shane Tolbert
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... By Jordan Eddy
I tucked myself between the open front door and an elegant, old wood easel next to the Acequia Madre House’s immense living room’s antique grand piano, taking a moment in my hiding place to observe the extraordinary space, rarely open to the public. I took in the deeply stained beams in the grand sala, the large arched opening into the dining room with its traditional kiva fireplace, the collection of antiques from all over the Spanish empire, and the gorgeous, massive European-style fireplace. I looked out through the open door towards the mountains over the rare jewel of a lawn and enjoyed the view from the Spanish Pueblo Revival porch. Something prickled at me... By Rachel Preston
"Before, I was taught to paint in a traditional, old-school style in Oklahoma. But Santa Fe wasn’t into that. There was lots of activism back then. It was the four hundred year mark of Columbus in the Americas, and there was a certain kind of American Indian Movement (AIM) echo in response. That was my first eye-opener..." By Alicia Inez Guzmán
Aaron Honyumptewa imbues his katsina carvings with the traditional ethos of the Hopi people combined with an undercurrent of... By Clayton Porter
A snake rides in the grass. A rat materializes in front of it. There’s not much doubt how this encounter is going to end... By Ellen Berkovitch
Mark Morris dances are difficult to describe because they are so innovative. The man’s wit is a source of endless creativity, and his work gives the simultaneous impressions of serendipity and contemplation. His dances can... By Tamara Johnson
Public art finds itself at the center of a number of our era’s flashpoints: the controversy over Confederate monuments; a questionably placed statue of... By Southwest Contemporary
In Karsten Creightney’s painting studio at Sanitary Tortilla Factory in downtown Albuquerque, there is a massive pile of paper scraps: richly colored vintage advertisements, newspaper clippings, blown-out images torn to bits, an array of textures, colors, and weights. This is the stuff of dreams... By Nancy Zastudil
One of the most difficult things for an artist to do is to reckon with her own legacy. This is not just a theoretical concern for where one fits into a particular historical narrative—it’s also of material importance... By Chelsea Weathers
Peter Sellars’s new staging of Doctor Atomic refuses to allow the audience to look past the Pueblos... By Thomas Grant Richardson
If you’ve read Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe—or felt the difference between mud and stucco... By Jordan Eddy
A tragic awareness haunts every element of the opera Doctor Atomic. The libretto, the music—the tableaux of singers, dancers, scenes, and the one prop that never ceases to cast its shadow on the whole... By Diane Armitage
Sitting with Sage Paisner in his new gallery space, Foto Forum Santa Fe, I am met with the feeling that photography can create a sense of community, togetherness... By Hatty Nestor
"I am the son of J.E.T., or Jetson," Chip Thomas said, referring to his own initials and those of his father. Thomas’s full name is Dr. James Edward Thomas, Jr., and his father, James Edward Thomas, Sr., was the original J.E.T. It’s how Chip Thomas came to his own moniker, Jetsonorama. By Alicia Inez Guzmán
This year the International Folk Art Market celebrates its fifteenth birthday. IFAM first began in 2004 with sixty-one artists from thirty-six countries. Now, that number has more than doubled to 162 artists from fifty-three countries. Officially, the vending is two days... By Alicia Inez Guzmán
“I suppose in some ways I’m always trying to achieve the impossible.” Jonathan Winkle, the newly appointed director of Performance Santa Fe ignores his coffee while enthusiastically explaining how he books the perfect season roster. “I want a balance between artistically... By Maxwell Lucas
Every now and then modern societies erupt in what Noam Chomsky calls “outbreaks of democracy.” These can take many forms, from political revolution to resistance, and various art movements can be viewed as versions of such outbreaks. Eventually, outbreaks are suppressed... By Marina La Palma
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... By Jenn Shapland
For us the journey to Naoshima, the art island of Japan in the Seto Inland Sea, will necessarily be long. You’ll have taken a plane or two or three, a Shinkansen, a train, a bus, a ferry, a shuttle. You’ll have overcome the inevitable travel dramas of buying the right... By Lauren Tresp
“I love coming back home and being surrounded with things that have some connection or meaning to me,” Aimee LaCalle tells me. An avid traveler and founder of her eponymous Santa Fe–based textile design company, LaCalle makes soft home goods, like bedding, table linens, and fabric... By Maria Egolf-Romero
“This place. The river is life,” Luke Carr tells me as we walk through a stand of cottonwood trees near the flowing water. He lives on a small farm in a remote part of northern New Mexico, next to the confluence of two rivers. For a musician, this place provides silence for writing... By Maxwell Lucas
In terms of New Mexico’s history, one hundred years is but a drop in the bucket of time. Still, it was noteworthy when, this past November, the New Mexico Museum of Art celebrated its centennial anniversary. This is an especially significant moment when considering the meaning... By Kathryn M Davis
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... By Jenn Shapland
“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... By Jordan Eddy
Roberta Breitmore was never “real,” even though she was made of flesh and blood; her persona was, in fact, just a figment of Hershman Leeson’s feminist imagination, only more developed than most artificially created alter egos that are set loose in the art world... By Diane Armitage
Jewelry in New Mexico is a vast and unwieldy category that spans histories, styles, trends, techniques, and materials. As such, there are multiple avenues by which to approach the topic, and no article could do justice to them all. For our first foray into jewelry and fashion... By Southwest Contemporary
Each year, THE Magazine curates a list of the year's best art books. This year we've asked our contributors for their recent favorite arts reading materials. The results ranged from exhibition catalogues to memoirs, artist books to artists' writings. By Southwest Contemporary
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