New Mexico Women: Anita Rodriguez
Anita Rodriguez is a true renaissance woman. She is a writer and painter, in addition to her accomplishments in the field of sustainable architecture.
March 26, 2020
New Mexico Women
New Mexico Women: Eugenia Parry
Parry is well regarded in the world of photography. She taught one of the first official history of photography classes at Wellesley in the early ’70s, creating the curriculum from scratch. She’s published over one hundred pieces during her lifetime, including essays for exhibition catalogues and periodicals and several books...
January 28, 2020
New Mexico Women: Nicolle Gonzales
The role of a midwife is a powerful one. She is a guide through one of the most life-changing events a person can have, welcoming a new child into the world. How one enters the world matters. Birth experiences can have effects that ripple throughout a person’s life, impacting their family and community.
December 01, 2019
New Mexico Women: Yoshiko Shimano
Shimano is worried that the culture of making is diminishing as technology becomes more omnipresent. She has noticed the decline in drawing skills as well as even everyday life skills among incoming students in the classes she teaches. We spoke of this phenomenon and the potential consequences which range from physical abilities in art-making to the power of having personal experiences that are unmediated by any device.
October 01, 2019
New Mexico Women: Virginia Dwan
Virginia Dwan, best known in the Southwest for her support of land art and artists, as well as the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico, boasts a career that reaches far beyond the desert. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Dwan got her start in Los Angeles with the Virginia Dwan Gallery, which eventually expanded to New York, where she represented artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Sol LeWitt, Edward Kienholz, and many, many more. Dwan, the heiress of manufacturing conglomerate 3M, was able to take risks on challenging art. She played a major role in supporting some of the most definitive earthworks, such as Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, The Lightning Fields by Walter De Maria, Double Negative by Michael Heizer, and the still-in-progress Star Axis by Charles Ross. She is still a passionate supporter of the arts and speaks fondly of working with artists and being a part of the creative process.
August 30, 2019
New Mexico Women: Natalie Goldberg
Natalie Goldberg, author of "Writing Down the Bones," made New Mexico her home and the center of her writing practice fifty years ago.
July 26, 2019
New Mexico Women: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
When I asked Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana) how she came to call herself a cultural arts worker, her reply began with a short history of her tribe’s trading practices. “I come from a long line of Indian traders, not merchants who house goods but traders who pass resources from one place to another.”
June 26, 2019
New Mexico Women: Lucy Lippard
Lucy Lippard changed what art writing could look like, and she continues to shift it with each book she writes. Hugely influential in the artworld of New York, beginning in the 1960s with the Art Workers Coalition and later Heresies Collective, her impact on New Mexico is equally prodigious...
May 24, 2019
New Mexico Women: Maria Varela
In her essay, “Time to Get Ready,” Maria Varela recalls, “I once volunteered in the fourth grade that I was Mexican, and the angry response of the teacher frightened and shamed me. ‘No, you are not! We’re all Americans here,’ snapped Sister Rosita.” For a woman who has spent her life fighting white supremacy across the U.S., this scene presents a formative moment.
April 26, 2019
New Mexico Women: Deborah Madison
Chef and food writer Deborah Madison is shifting gears and writing a new memoir about her life.
March 27, 2019
New Mexico Women: Deb Haaland
This week, an image from the February 2019 issue of Vanity Fair has been circling my social-media feeds. It features six newly elected Democrat representatives, and at the center of the photo sits Representative Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo). Rep Haaland’s demeanor in the photo is fierce yet kind, the exact, impossible combination of feelings a woman politician has to strike to be elected in this country.
January 30, 2019
Dorothy Stewart
“Dear Toad of My Heart,” begins one of the two thousand pages of letters between Dorothy Stewart and Maria Chabot in the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center. “Dearest Thing,” begins another. These letters are a remarkable record of two women in love in the 1920s and ’30s and their various heartbreaks, jealousies, friendships, and new loves along the way...
November 28, 2018
Pablita Velarde
On a survey taken outside a 1993 exhibit of Pablita Velarde’s work at the Wheelwright Museum, one visitor wrote, in awe: “that a woman of her time would be able to find her creative life...
October 30, 2018
Paula Angel
Did you know that in New Mexico, women were not allowed to serve on a jury prior to March 14, 1951? For all the accomplishments of New Mexico’s women throughout history...
October 01, 2018
Mary Hunter Austin
The phrase "Santa Fe women" calls to mind a range of women throughout history...
August 28, 2018
Maria Gertrudis Barceló
One of Santa Fe’s (and New Mexico’s) striking features is the proliferation of women-owned businesses, today and throughout its history...
July 30, 2018
Isabel de Olvera
Where are the black women in colonial New Mexican history? Typically, the 1500s and 1600s are defined by a series of male Spanish conquistadors and governors whose names litter the city: Coronado, Peralta, De Vargas. Their expeditions brought soldiers and their families...
June 29, 2018
Laura Gilpin
Laura Gilpin saw the landscape of the Southwest as a constitutive element of the human cultures that formed there. Among the few women artists who took active part in landscape photography in the early and mid-twentieth century, Gilpin’s photos stand out against the pristine...
June 01, 2018
Agueda Salazar Martínez
In a video taken in 1995, Agueda Martínez stands at her loom wearing a long floral dress, an apron, and a faded baseball cap with the logo of a local café. She works the threads quickly with both hands, tapping out a rhythm on the treadles below. She is 97 years old...
May 01, 2018
Nancy Holt
Nancy Holt is known for artworks that engage the celestial: stars and sunlight, orbiting bodies, and the earth’s rotation. But getting to know her work more thoroughly through Sightlines, a retrospective edited by Alena Williams in 2011 and still the only and most complete...
April 01, 2018
Esther Martinez
“I was born in 1912, the year the Titanic sank and the year New Mexico became a state,” P’oe Tsáwä, or Blue Water, begins her memoir. Known by Anglos as Esther Martinez, P’oe Tsáwä lived through periods of unimaginable change. As a child, she recalls riding in a covered wagon with...
February 01, 2018
