Action/Abstraction Redefined
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe July 27, 2017 – July 7, 2019 There’s a valuable history lesson in pedagogy and modernism upstairs at the IAIA Museum of […]
March 27, 2019
Review
Future Perfect
All of the five installation artists in Harwood Art Center’s Future Perfect wrote their artist’s statements, appropriately, in the future perfect tense. This formation encourages thinking that is forward-reaching, idealistic, and reflective at the same time...
March 27, 2019
Currency: What Do You Value?
Currency: What do you value? puts fifteen artists in conversation about the problem of value in a world where the dollar seems to be the one unit of measurement that everyone can agree on—even if few can articulate what a dollar measures, or means.
January 30, 2019
Shots in the Dark
Shots in the Dark is an exploration of the ambiguous space that takes shape in darkness. The thirty-two photographs spanning the gallery were all made at night by four Southwest-based photographers: Chris Colville, scott b. davis, Ken Rosenthal, and Mike Lundgren.
January 30, 2019
In the Ruins of the Anthropocene
I enter the gallery and see the word “Anthropocene” in vinyl on the wall, and my first thought is: it’s a tired conversation in an art context, but let’s shake the tree and see if anything good comes out.
January 30, 2019
Everyday People: The Photography of Clarence E. Redman
The photos in Everyday People: The Photography of Clarence E. Redman at the Albuquerque Museum remind me of essayist Joan Didion’s ability to remove herself from her stories. In her recountings of discussions between Hollywood stars and their directors, she is completely absent from the room. Likewise, C.E. Redman’s photos, though mostly posed, have a way of disappearing the photographer and camera.
January 30, 2019
Tara Donovan: Fieldwork
While many viewers stand mouths agape at the idea of clipping and adhering hundreds of thousands of straws, I’m indifferent to labor and duration. The work takes time: so what? Instead, I lose my mind over the honeycombed waves with optical clusters of tan and ochre that emerge from what I understand to be uniformly opaque white straws.
November 28, 2018
Darby Photos: 207
A collection of eight quilts by Darby Photos, some longer than seven feet, spreads across the white walls of the gallery. In them, violence is implied but not explicit. Each depicts a school where a mass shooting took place. The title of the collected work, 207, refers to the number of people injured across all eight sites.
November 28, 2018
Emily Margarit Mason: Shadows through a Petal
Quite literally, Mason constructs her photographs; each still captures a tableau that she builds outdoors. Found objects such as rocks, plastic tarps, or other photographs of hers layer her compositions. In Backyard Still Life (2017), a wrinkled sheet of silvery mylar is taped to a wall. The wall’s texture and curvature read as adobe, but its inky blackness belies easy recognition.
November 28, 2018
Colette
It’s the late nineteenth century in France, and the haircuts are terrible. Frizzy, voluminous bangs, handlebar mustaches with three-inch goatees. Clearly the world was waiting for Colette...
November 28, 2018
The Audacity of Art: Art for the Midterm Elections
The Audacity of Art: Art for the Midterm Elections plays on a phrase that President Barack Obama used in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention...
November 28, 2018
Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts
In Santa Fe, Bruce Nauman feels to me like an invisible figure. I know he lives near, I know he frequents the same diner I frequent, I question every tall, bald man in my vicinity, but...
October 30, 2018
Matthew Mullins: The Sun in Our Bones
What does it mean to make landscape paintings in 2018? Just this morning I was reading the recently issued UN Climate Change Report about coming food shortages, growing wildfires...
October 30, 2018
2018 Santa Fe Independent Film Festival
In the summer of 2015, I called my mother to tell her she had to move out of her house in Portland, Oregon. My sister, on...
October 30, 2018
Zone: Visionary and Contemplative Art
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I find myself embarrassed by my own lack of creativity. I’m making my way through...
October 30, 2018
Phil Binaco: The Affirming Flame
Phil Binaco’s recent body of work was inspired by a poem by W. H. Auden...
October 30, 2018
Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking
I’ve always maintained an irrational but polite envy of the orderly and meticulous artist whose studio is swept daily, whose works are steadily recorded, and whose supplies are inventoried as you might find...
October 01, 2018
Wilderness Acts: Art in the Land
It’s a pleasure to be taken by surprise in a place I had never heard of before—the Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve in La Cienega. Managed by the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, this thirty-five-acre gem is a kiss away from I-25, yet it’s a haven for flora and fauna...
October 01, 2018
Holly Wilson: On Turtle’s Back
“Anything or anyone you care for creates a responsibility for you,” reads a museum plaque beside Holly Wilson’s Guardian and Guide, one of six of the artist’s works currently on display at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. In the piece, a small bronze-cast woman perches...
October 01, 2018
GenNext: Future So Bright
n GenNext, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art assembles a group of contemporary artists working between traditional genres and contemporary subject matter. Each artist combines the materials and iconography of New Mexico’s traditional Spanish arts...
October 01, 2018
Yumiko and Kenro Izu: In Harmony
I am not a photographer. When I tell a friend I’m writing a review of Yumiko and Kenro Izu’s exhibition In Harmony at Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd., she asks me to forgive her before saying...
October 01, 2018
Imprint
On the streets of Santa Fe this fall, you might stumble upon a newspaper box...
August 28, 2018
American Jewelry
It is thought that prehistoric humans adorned their bodies with simple jewelry pieces...
August 28, 2018
SITElines 2018: Casa tomada
Everyone has a biennial these days—a sprawling exhibition that brings in outside curators...
August 28, 2018
Eye Contact
Why is it no one looks? Why is it no one knows how to look. —Robert Wilson...
August 28, 2018
Nascent Atmospheres
At a preview event for Amie LeGette and Courtney Leonard’s exhibition, guests were lost in a literal twilight zone...
August 28, 2018
The Black Place: Georgia O’Keeffe and Michael Namingha
Nearly everyone who walks into the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum has some version of the artist they’re looking for: their Georgia...
July 30, 2018
Allyson Packer: Liquid State
It wasn’t close yet to 3:50, but I lay down anyway on the thick red rug pulled through with floral patterns in blue and white yarn...
July 30, 2018
Docu Roundup: Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist and RBG
Two women who came of age in the wake of women’s liberation, whose determination landed them at the top of their respective fields: fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
July 30, 2018
XYZT: Abstract Landscapes
Can we materialize time? Does light have roots? Can we see something when there is nothing?...
July 30, 2018
