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...
June 26, 2019
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, 2019
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.
May 24, 2019
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...
April 26, 2019
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...
April 26, 2019
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...”
April 26, 2019
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...
March 27, 2019
A tour of destination residency programs in the Southwest for artists and writers.
March 27, 2019
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
