Jan 28
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
Zahra Marwan’s exhibition at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory in Albuquerque pairs exquisite poetry with her illustrations, paintings on paper.
Jan 28
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
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
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's most recent installation Border Turner in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez brings voice and person to the forefront.
Jan 28
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
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
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
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’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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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 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 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
Catchers helps us see into the past and, through the past, to recognize those we ignore in the present.
Jul 29
"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
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
"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’s artwork on view at 516 Arts in Albuquerque evokes themes of rest, comfort, and home—with a dark underside.
Jun 26
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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...
Apr 26
Apr 26
Aftereffect: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Painting is not only a vibrant and eye-catching show but also an exercise in understanding how artists can be influenced by legendary painters without resorting to outright imitation. Aftereffect gathers together twelve...
Apr 26
Apr 26
Vortexting The Muses is the inaugural show of Niomi Fawn’s new brick-and-mortar curation project in Santa Fe, Show Pony Gallery. Drawings and paintings on paper, wood, glass, and brick by artist Timothy Jason Reed...
Mar 27
After an afternoon insisting that I was impatient, though my date didn’t believe it was true, it was significant to walk into the UNM Museum of Art together. Galleries, of course, with their windowless, static light...
Mar 27
It is an exciting time to be Jeremy Thomas. With shows opening in Santa Fe, Munich, and Paris in the next six months, New Mexico is lucky to claim Thomas as a local and to have his work on view at the CCA Tank Garage Gallery...
Mar 27
In a video interview installed in Returning the Gaze, painter Jordan Casteel says her encounters with portraiture in museums and galleries have typically involved “dead white people” in staid poses. Her large-scale oils on canvas subvert that trope in a number of ways...
