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
Vince Kadlubek is running late. When I arrive at the repurposed bowling alley, I inform the desk clerk I have an interview appointment, and he promptly tells a colleague. She approaches me, a walkie-talkie hanging from her belt, looking authoritative and efficient. “And you are?...
December 01, 2017
It’s March and Thais Mather sits in her Eldorado living room with a great firmament of inky constellations hanging above her head. She recently completed the artwork for a solo exhibition titled The Anonymous Author, and its centerpiece is a series of densely detailed pointillist...
August 01, 2016
There is something pulsing through our thin mountain air. Something electric and exciting and I’m not describing the lightning-filled monsoon season. Instead, I am talking about the growing and energetic theatre and performance scene that is currently emanating from all over ...
October 01, 2017
In 1968, Andy Warhol made a Western movie. He traveled to Tucson that January with about a dozen actors, collaborators, and friends. There was no script. There may have been one at some point, a rough treatment that may or may not have been an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, but by the time the group arrived in Arizona, the script was not there. ...
October 01, 2017
Jami Porter Lara came upon the map with no border line in 2011, during a trip to the Paquime archaeological site in Chihuahua, Mexico. She was a BFA student at the University of New Mexico [...]
September 01, 2017
It was like déjà vu, or rather a bad dream that repeated exactly twice. First, it was the closure of the College of Santa Fe in 2009 and now this, the scheduled closure of Santa Fe University of Art and Design in May 2018. While CSF had made it past middle age, if you started counting from the moment of its accreditation in 1965, SFUAD, run by Laureate International Universities in the last eight years, hadn’t even made it into adolescence [...]
September 01, 2017
The night before the indigenous art collective Postcommodity planned on suspending twenty-six balloons along the US-Mexico Border, winds kicked up, threatening the next day’s work and the culmination of...
December 01, 2016
I don’t know if I will ever hear the world ‘moonlight’ again without thinking of the wondrous movie that came out to great acclaim in 2016. Moonlight is a masterpiece of understated filmic construction, [...]
February 01, 2017
The music plays. Suddenly the words feel right. It makes perfect sense. The Norse god Odin is crossing a rainbow bridge into the castle in heaven. That's one way of reading it at least. The recording switches off. Discussion resumes. A college professor hovers over a giant textbook...
February 01, 2017
After we finished talking, Nina mentioned that she had to work on a pair of moccasins: she’d started them, then halfway through changed her mind about the [...]
August 01, 2017
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971 is a bold and illuminating exhibition in honor of Virginia Dwan and is now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) [...]
July 01, 2017
When SITE Santa Fe’s multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion project concludes this October, the contemporary museum space will debut an exhibition called Future Shock [...]
July 01, 2017
When Lauren Tresp bought THE Magazine in early 2016 from its founding publisher, the former New York fashion photographer Guy Cross, he was happy to retire [...]
July 01, 2017
"It's like the suburbs," she said. "In the '50s," I said. I was on a tour of the Manhattan Project National Historic Park in Los Alamos, NM, with my partner this April, in the shadow of the Starbucks that seems to serve as the town's hub [...]
June 01, 2017
Come Fridays, many people are thinking of a TGIF outing after work rather than a way to start the day. CreativeMornings helps get the energy going by gathering across-the-board creatives over coffee [...]
June 01, 2017
There is no order in this hellish landscape: two policemen raise billy clubs against a figure slouched at the foot of a parked police car [...]
April 01, 2017
