Mayeur Projects: Stuart Arends is fond of saying that he lives in the middle of nowhere. Ever hear of Willard, New Mexico? The landscape around the artist’s house is austere, almost barren, with a view of some mountains off in the distance. He is “off the grid and under the radar”...
June 01, 2018
National Hispanic Cultural Center: Identity. It’s one of those words, concepts, ways of making sense of the world and ourselves that could fill volumes. Indeed, volumes of stories: self-made, inherited, or, in many instances, projected. Identity is that way...
June 01, 2018
Museum of International Folk Art: On the wall of Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru reads a statement describing the Peruvian capital’s thriving artistic communities: “Popular arts in Lima are all about remixing.” Moving through the show, it becomes clear that...
June 01, 2018
UNM Art Museum: The whir of air conditioning swells as viewers descend the stairs of the UNM Museum of Art into the cave-like rooms that contain Patrick Nagatani: A Survey of Early Photographs. Blonde wood chairs sit at the bottom of the staircase in the...
June 01, 2018
Harwood Museum of Art: Late in the process of making artwork for her solo exhibition, Within This Skin, Nikesha Breeze started a series of ceramic and oxide wall sculptures titled Written in Water. She calls the works “death masks,” and each coppery visage was...
June 01, 2018
David Richard Gallery: Michael Hedges is a painter based near Chicago. He is youngish, what we might call “mid-career,” and I would suggest that he’s an artist to watch as he continues making art over the years. In Bloom consists of fifteen oil paintings whose style and...
May 10, 2018
Since 2000, SITE Santa Fe’s Young Curators program has given high school students the opportunity to plan every step of a museum exhibition. Students from across New Mexico meet weekly to plan an exhibition theme, create calls for artwork, jury submissions, and install...
May 01, 2018
Central Features Contemporary Art: The term shibui refers to a particular aesthetic in Japanese art, and it can mean a variety of things that are like spokes on a wheel organized around a central core of perceptions: simplicity, unobtrusive beauty, a spare elegance, and implicity...
May 01, 2018
Orpheum Community Hub: A narrow entrance and hallway separates two exhibition spaces in downtown Albuquerque’s Orpheum Community Hub, a building that features classrooms, art spaces, and more, as well as offices for the Homewise Albuquerque Homeownership Center. Word is that...
May 01, 2018
Harwood Museum of Art: On the walls of major museums, only five percent of artwork is by women. The Harwood Museum flips this number in its current exhibition: there’s a small display featuring some men upstairs, but most of the institution’s galleries are devoted to Work...
May 01, 2018
Poeh Cultural Center: It only takes a few seconds of looking before the optical illusion begins to work on my eyes. The white on the canvas jumps forward and begins to pulsate softly against the black ground. I simply stare without moving until my consciousness snaps...
May 01, 2018
Phil Space: Shelley Horton-Trippe, in her recent exhibition High Brow Low Ride, references the great twentieth-century French writer Colette, and she does this by way of a large painting titled The Pure and the Impure (Colette). Horton-Trippe draws on Colette’s book...
April 06, 2018
Albuquerque Museum: Making Africa approaches the design of a huge, diverse place through many media with the intention of providing a fuller understanding of the contemporary work being developed in the creative sector across the continent's 54 countries.
April 01, 2018
UNM Art Museum: Meridel Rubenstein’s photographs brought me to the Bible, which I hadn’t read in earnest since I took a great books class in college. I probably don’t need to tell most people that the Book of Genesis is, at least from a literary perspective, a bit confusing and disorganized...
April 01, 2018
Exhibit/208: Remember that magical automobile from Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, the one that whisks a stuttering Owen Wilson back to the 1920s to party with Gertrude Stein and company? I like to imagine that was just one cab in a fleet of cosmic taxis, each with its own art...
April 01, 2018
Foto Forum: “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still,” Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography. Although she isn’t directly referencing prisons, they are continually a reality which is systematically...
April 01, 2018
LewAllen Galleries: Tucked into a quiet nook in the northwest corner of LewAllen Galleries’ rather showy structure is a gem of an exhibition. Quest for the New: Modernism in the Southwest features artworks by a who’s-who litany of Santa Fe’s early twentieth-century art colony...
April 01, 2018
Center for Contemporary Arts: Begun in 1970 and ending in 1977, the late Ciel Bergman’s series, The Linens, is in truth the work of an “emerging artist.” Bergman (1938-2017) was thirty-two when she began these large-scale paintings on unstretched linen, an age in keeping with the...
March 02, 2018
East of West: Alicia Inez Guzmán reviews the opening of the recently founded East of West Gallery on Santa Fe’s south side, looking at how a diverse body of works from the Middle East and northern Africa pry open new dialogues about self-representation.
February 12, 2018
Tucson Museum of Art: Arguably, the finest exhibitions are ones that expand our worldview, or at least prod us into greater understanding of artists’ subject matter, style, and societal influences. But it surprised me when first walking through Dress Matters: Clothing as Metaphor...
January 30, 2018
New Mexico Museum of Art: Less than six years past the State of New Mexico’s centennial, the New Mexico Museum of Art marked its first 100 years in December. It’s an anniversary made all the more notable by the institution’s enduring commitment to the contemporary. The Canyon...
February 01, 2018
Sanitary Tortilla Factory: The word “installation” can often be unsatisfying, so much so that some artists have invented their own words to describe what they do with media composed in space. German artist Monika Grzymala created the word Raumzeichnung to describe her large...
February 01, 2018
form & concept: Feminist artist Thais Mather’s new exhibition, Reckless Abandon, comes at a time of cultural, political, and environmental soul searching. The artist offers urgent questions that suggest a new path forward, away from oppression and toward a more enlightened...
February 01, 2018
Elio Perlman, the main character of André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name, is a beautiful, precocious, and wealthy seventeen-year-old. One summer in the early 1980s, in an unspecified town on the Italian coast, he finds himself both angered and enamored by his father’s...
February 01, 2018
Sanitary Tortilla Factory: Pre-existing Conditions features collaborative sculpture and readymade found art by Cecilia McKinnon and Lance Ryan McGoldrick. All materials were salvaged from illegal dump sites, the work effectively exploring cycles of production and waste.
February 01, 2018
One art critic from the Bay Area, Jessica Zack, referred to Cate White’s work as “vivid tragicomic painting... with its skin-in-the-game vitality” and that is what first hits you—White’s go-for-broke passion for art, life, social justice, and racial fairness. It seems that there is nothing that White won’t investigate...
December 01, 2016
Al-qobbah, “the vaulted chamber,” a recessed space, within a room or without, like a bower. “Alcove” has many applications, and the New Mexico Museum of Art has one of the best of them. The NMMA Alcoves 16/17 exhibition series comprises seven small group shows, each featuring five New Mexico artists and running for five weeks...
December 01, 2016
It’s a slang thang, a vernacular spectacular from the high priest of lowbrow, Robert Williams, the top exec of Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine, “Big Daddy” Roth’s Art Director, and an outstanding Zap Comix original. Williams’s wild and wooly imagination is matched only by his mad skills as an oil painter. Call it Pop Surrealism...
December 01, 2016
Worldwide, we take a lot of pictures—over one trillion per year, in fact. Many of them, snapped with smartphone cameras, earn only seconds of our attention before being deleted or forgotten, replaced by the next “grammable” moment. Whether you believe...
December 01, 2016
The presence of so many cartoon characters, plus, on one painting, the block-printed phrase “Everything Will Be OK,” might suggest that the title of this exhibition (on view through December 4) reflects a state of mind. Along with toy monkeys and a thumbs up sign, various icons of “optimism” turn out to convey a more ambiguous message...
December 01, 2016
