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
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...
November 28, 2018
"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..."
November 27, 2018
Aaron Honyumptewa imbues his katsina carvings with the traditional ethos of the Hopi people combined with an undercurrent of...
October 30, 2018
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...
October 30, 2018
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...
October 30, 2018
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...
October 29, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
Peter Sellars’s new staging of Doctor Atomic refuses to allow the audience to look past the Pueblos...
August 28, 2018
If you’ve read Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe—or felt the difference between mud and stucco...
August 28, 2018
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...
July 30, 2018
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...
July 30, 2018
"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.
July 30, 2018
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...
June 28, 2018
“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...
June 01, 2018
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...
June 01, 2018
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...
May 01, 2018
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...
June 02, 2018
“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...
April 30, 2018
“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...
April 01, 2018
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...
April 01, 2018
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...
April 01, 2018
“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
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...
February 01, 2018
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...
February 01, 2018
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.
December 01, 2016
It was John Seabrook’s profile of singer Tanya Tagaq in The New Yorker that introduced me to her work as a contemporary performer. Seabrook went on to write, “Tagaq is an Inuit throat singer, and she was in the city for a performance... a jaw-dropping forty-five minutes of guttural heaves, juddering howls, and murderous shrieks—Inuit folk meets Karen Finley."...
November 01, 2016
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
Each year, we ask The Magazine’s contributors to pick their favorite recent (or recently relevant) books to recommend for your holiday-season reading. Read on for their suggestions...
December 01, 2017
