Charlene Teters: Way of Sorrows
The new Charlene Teters exhibition at Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe challenges border policies in a time of mass migration.
Mar 26
Review
Mar 26
Esphyr Slobodkina: Six Decades of Groundbreaking Painting, Collage, and Sculpture
Esphyr Slobodkina: Six Decades of Groundbreaking Painting, Collage, and Sculpture at the LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe is a window into twentieth-century abstract art by one of the movement’s early pioneers, Esphyr Slobodkina, a versatile and prolific New York artist. A cofounder of the American Abstract Artists group, she translated the concepts of European Modernism into American idiom.
Mar 26
Indelible Ink: Native Women, Printmaking, Collaboration
Indelible Ink displays pieces by nine multigenerational Native American printmaking women whose artwork stuns with originality, beauty, and color, while also illustrating the historical trauma that impacts Native people today.
Mar 26
Yōkai: Ghosts & Demons of Japan
Yōkai: Ghosts & Demons of Japan at the Museum of International Folk Art spotlights the Japanese folk art tradition of yōkai, which depicts paranormal beings such as ghosts, demons, and monsters in a variety of settings, ranging from traditional kabuki theater to Pokémon anime.
Mar 26
Francesca Woodman: Portrait of a Reputation
The provocative work of Francesca Woodman, an art photographer who took her life at only twenty-two, takes on new dimensions in Portrait of a Reputation, an exhibition at MCA Denver that combines Woodman’s experimental work from the late 1970s with candid photos of the artist by her friend, George Lange.
Mar 26
Donald Judd & Barnett Newman
Chinati's special exhibition is like a conversation between Donald Judd and Barnett Newman, with work from both artists on view.
Jan 28
Robyn O’Neil: We, The Masses
We, The Masses: Here, the men—drawn in mind-blowing detail on palimpsest-free surfaces—engage in unhinged activity, ranging from gnawing on tree bark to fighting with one another. Some men hug en masse: they seem to know that O’Neil is about to hit the go button on the apocalypse...
Jan 28
Fish in Persian Gardens
Zahra Marwan’s exhibition at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory in Albuquerque pairs exquisite poetry with her illustrations, paintings on paper.
Jan 28
Laughter and Resilience: Humor in Native American Art
The thirty-five featured artists have opted to use the disarming power of humor, parody, and satire to counter, transcend, and transform the oppression they have suffered.
Jan 28
The Distance is Very Frightening
Martínez-Díaz is a visual artist who uses photography, video, design, and installation to create conceptual work focused on the hyper normalization of violence in Northern Mexican society.
Jan 28
Border Tuner
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's most recent installation Border Turner in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez brings voice and person to the forefront.
Mar 26
Labor: Motherhood and Art in 2020
Labor: Motherhood and Art in 2020 in NMSU’s new art building fills its elegant spaces with imposing artwork, mostly photographs and installation work.These exhibitions put a spotlight on the idea of motherhood as a powerful but almost invisible force in life.
Jan 28
Di Wae Powa: They Came Back
Di Wae Powa: They Came Back, an exhibition which opened in the fall of 2019 at the Poeh Cultural Center, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), is a step towards reconciling a muddy and violent history of colonialism in the Southwest.
Jan 28
Sharbani Das Gupta: In/Sight
Artist Sharbani Das Gupta's In/Sight, on view at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, examines current environmental and cultural conundrums and asks the viewer to do the same.
Dec 01
Water by the Spoonful
Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful examines the results of trauma in people’s lives in this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama at Santa Fe's Teatro Paraguas.
Dec 01
Still: Elemental
From the vast archives of Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum comes Elemental, an eye-catching exhibition that organizes Still’s work around images conjured by the elements: earth, air, water, fire, and æther.
Dec 01
Scott Johnson: Fissure
Scott Johnson’s solo show, Fissure, at the Center for Contemporary Arts is a rich smorgasbord of textures, light, and reflections, culminating in a crescendo of visual experience.
Dec 01
Nari Ward: We the People
In Nari Ward: We the People at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Harlem-based mixed-media artist subtly yet powerfully confronts America’s sordid legacy of racism and discrimination as well as overall American identity in his show of sculptural pieces constructed from discarded materials.
Dec 01
Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist
Organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is a comprehensive survey of the obscure American modernist painter, who actively worked for decades to invent abstraction in the West.
Dec 01
Species In Peril Along the Rio Grande
In Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande, twenty-three New Mexico artists challenge themselves and visitors to 516 Arts to confront the fragmentation of the ecosystem on which the river, the bosque, and innumerable lifeforms—humans included—depend.
Dec 01
H. Joe Waldrum (1934-2003): Retrospective
The exhibition, H. Joe Waldrum: Retrospective, at Rio Bravo Fine Art is a first-of-its-kind overview of works from the H. Joe Waldrum Trust, which inherited a majority of his pieces after his estate closed in 2014. The exhibition, curated by Eduardo Alicea-Moreno—director and president of Rio Bravo Fine Art, the Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, gallery Waldrum founded shortly before his unexpected death in 2003—showcases the depth and breadth of Waldrum’s high-volume career.
Oct 01
Experimental exPRESSion: Printmaking at IAIA, 1963–1980
IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts showcases its student printmakers from the ‘60s and ‘70s in their explorations of form and psyche.
Oct 01
Santa Fe Indian Market Haute Couture Fashion Show
From the moment Shandien LaRance (Hopi) dances out onto the runway, threading her legs into and out of and through her five hoops, the sixth annual Indian Market Haute Couture Fashion Show feels as much a ceremony as a runway show.
Oct 01
Sapira Cheuk: New Vessels, Unmade Structures
Globular figures seem to wiggle, tumble, float, or crawl across pieces of thick, white paper. Two particularly large sheets of paper cascade down from the ceiling at the center of the gallery. Sometimes they’re partially covered by a layer of clear film. About thirty smaller iterations occupy the walls. Here and there: a curled hand wearing what could be an elbow-length glove; firm, flexed ballet feet; sturdy legs in the air; and extra-long legs with powerful thighs...
Oct 01
To Survive on This Shore
To Survive on This Shore is the product of five years of research and travel across the U.S. The show pairs Dugan’s photographic portraits with Fabbre’s interviews with transgender and gender-nonconforming adults, all aged fifty or older. I’m drawn immediately to Duchess Milan, 69, Los Angeles, CA (2017). “I just know I’m me,” begins the text beside the photo. “I identify as Duchess.”
Aug 28
southwestNET: Shizu Saldamando
Sashiko greets me as I enter the gallery for Shizu Saldamando’s show, held at SMOCA as part of southwestNET’s series showcasing mid-career Mexican and U.S. artists from the Southwest. Hushed and intimate, each work seems to demand all of one’s attention, a bid made more poignant by Saldamando’s insistence on portraying friends and family and, according to the wall text, “refus[ing] any notions of subjugation” in the artist-subject relationship. A multifaceted artist of Mexican American and Japanese American heritage, Saldamando focuses on “often-overlooked communities of color: punks, queers, activists, and artists.”
Aug 28
Rapheal Begay: Lest We Forget
Rapheal Begay is a Diné photographer and curator from Window Rock, Arizona, (the capital of the Navajo Nation) currently showing his work at Trapdoor Projects, near downtown Albuquerque. The medium is photography, but the methods are strikingly conceptual, requiring viewers to finish the work in their minds. His work evokes memories of family, as well as harshly beautiful landscapes and the animals who populate them—especially sheep—in the Navajo Nation.
Aug 28
New Mexico Dance Project: note g
New Mexico Dance Project is a newcomer powerhouse on the Santa Fe dance scene. Husband and wife team Erik Sampson and Scarlett Wynne founded the company in New Mexico six months ago. Since then, they have been teaching workshops for students, creating new works nonstop, and performing with the intention to become an integrated part of the community.
Aug 28
Hung Liu: Catchers
Catchers helps us see into the past and, through the past, to recognize those we ignore in the present.
Jul 29
Nina Elder: What Endures
"What Endures is, and is not, a question. It’s not incidental that I’m focused on the elemental details of my surroundings, that I want to take apart the anthropogenic landscape, break it down into its simplest ingredients. This act is central to Nina Elder’s process—and to the subjects of the featured work, which spans from 2011 to the present."
Jul 29
Jonathan Saiz in Denver
Denver artist Jonathan Saiz believes in the value of shock and surprise, as evidenced in two overlapping solo exhibitions. One is #WhatisUtopia, in which ten thousand miniature squares come together in a mosaic-like column given its own space at the Denver Art Museum. The second exhibition, at K Contemporary, is darker in tone, shocking you to attention with foreboding images.
Jul 29
Alicia Stewart: Unfinished . . .
"Several unfinished works in the show are naturally among the most heartbreaking. Unfinished . . . is a rare capsule of work created at the intersection of talent and years of great development. There is an adolescent fearlessness in these paintings, and Stewart allows viewers to see the remarkable efforts of a young artist making use of her rapidly expanding world. Unlike most eighteen-year-olds, the perspective Stewart applied to her work made magical use of a young life evidencing wisdom beyond her years."
Jul 29
Mira Burack: Sleeping between the Sun and the Moon
Mira Burack’s artwork on view at 516 Arts in Albuquerque evokes themes of rest, comfort, and home—with a dark underside.
Jun 26
James Drake: Que Linda la Brisa
Thirty miles north of Ciudad Juárez, at an immigrant detention center in Chaparral, New Mexico, Johana Medina Leon, transgendered and from El Salvador, complains of chest pains. Days later, and a day after James Drake’s opening, Que Linda La Brisa, Leon dies on a hospital bed at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, Texas.
Jun 26
Gendron Jensen: Bidden
I immediately want to speak of devotion, but I will start with the work. The pencil drawings and lithographs by Gendron Jensen at 5. Gallery are gently wondrous. Titled Bidden, the solo exhibition features nine of Jensen’s works made between 1989 and 2015...
Jun 26
Judy Tuwaletstiwa: The Dream Life of Objects
The Dream Life of Objects is a big show. A selection of work that spans decades and media fills the entirety of the CCA Tank Garage Gallery. This solo show is described by the artist, Judy Tuwaletstiwa, as a “visual poem,” where pieces are asked and allowed to interact with and inform one another. Tuwaletstiwa invites us to experience her work as an “introspective” instead of a retrospective...
Jun 26
Whitney Biennial 2019
Often taken as a bellwether of U.S. artistic culture, the Whitney Biennial is renowned for its tendency to provoke political/aesthetic furor...
Jun 26
Judy Chicago: The Birth Project from New Mexico Collections
Looking at a torn vagina in Judy Chicago’s Creation of the World: Needlepoint 1 (1985), I remember watching my ex-partner give birth to both of our boys at home. She had a tear that had to be sewn. I watched, and that is the extent of my experience with childbirth. I know, however, that men—which I’ll define as cis-gendered, penis-possessing humans—have a lot of opinions about what goes in and out of vaginas...
May 24
Bauhaus Centennial: 1919-2019
One of the most influential members of the Bauhaus movement of the early twentieth century, herbert bayer (who preferred his name spelled in all lowercase and favored a unitary, stylized, and all-lowercase alphabet) believed in the seamless integration of fine art, decorative art, architecture, and graphic design...
May 24
Seeds Regeneration by Dancing Earth
Rulan Tangen’s company, Dancing Earth, performed the culmination of a six-year project called ...SEEDS: RE GENERATION... in Santa Fe this April...
May 24
Robert Stokowy: [structures] Albuquerque
To see Robert Stokowy’s conceptual artwork, structures [ albuquerque ], I went on eight hikes in eight days. I got a deep t-shirt tan, I got really lost once, and on one day I cried a little...
May 24
Interlopers
Interlopers is a show of works on paper at Evoke Contemporary that brings together eighteen artists and uses the term “works on paper” broadly, representing a wide range of media...
Apr 26
Film Review: Vox Lux
It has been three weeks since I watched Vox Lux. Whenever I think about how to approach writing about it, in my head I hear the voice of Bill Hader’s Saturday Night Live character, Stefon...
