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FeatureStudio Visit

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.

Clayton Porter • August 28, 2019

FeatureTravel

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.

Rachel Preston • August 28, 2019

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Briana Olson meditates on belonging as she tours the murals and street art of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Briana Olson • August 28, 2019

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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.

Janet Abrams • July 30, 2019

FeatureFood + Drink

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.

Robin Babb • July 29, 2019

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Want to break out of the mold? Seven alternative immersive art experiences in Santa Fe are worth exploring this summer.

Jenn Shapland • July 29, 2019

FeatureStudio Visit

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.

Kate Wood • July 26, 2019

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“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...

Patrick McGuire • June 26, 2019

FeatureMeet Your Makers

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.

Jordan Eddy • June 26, 2019

FeatureStudio Visit

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...

Clayton Porter • June 26, 2019

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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...

Maggie Grimason and Rachel Preston • June 26, 2019

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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...

Shane Tolbert • May 24, 2019

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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.

Julie McGilvray • May 24, 2019

FeatureStudio Visit

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...

Maggie Grimason • April 26, 2019

FeatureTravel

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...

Jenn Shapland • April 26, 2019

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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...”

Rachel Preston • April 26, 2019

FeatureStudio Visit

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...

Jenn Shapland • March 27, 2019

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A tour of destination residency programs in the Southwest for artists and writers.

Shane Tolbert • March 27, 2019

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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...

Jordan Eddy • March 27, 2019

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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...

Rachel Preston • November 28, 2018

FeatureStudio Visit

"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..."

Alicia Inez Guzmán • November 27, 2018

FeatureStudio Visit

Aaron Honyumptewa imbues his katsina carvings with the traditional ethos of the Hopi people combined with an undercurrent of...

Clayton Porter • October 30, 2018

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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...

Ellen Berkovitch • October 30, 2018

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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...

Tamara Johnson • October 30, 2018

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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...

Southwest Contemporary • October 29, 2018

FeatureStudio Visit

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...

Nancy Zastudil • October 01, 2018

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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...

Chelsea Weathers • October 01, 2018

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Peter Sellars’s new staging of Doctor Atomic refuses to allow the audience to look past the Pueblos...

Thomas Grant Richardson • August 28, 2018

FeatureTravel

If you’ve read Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe—or felt the difference between mud and stucco...

Jordan Eddy • August 28, 2018

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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...

Diane Armitage • July 30, 2018