I remember the moment, when, as a teenager, i realized that the u.s. interstate system was built by humans. This doesn’t sound like any great epiphany, but to me it was jarring, because it meant that some of the largest structures I had ever seen—highway overpasses, ribbons of asphalt...
December 01, 2017
Blue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe: In his exhibition title, the artist martin spei introduces his viewers to the concept of tramoya, defining the Spanish term as “various leftover stage props and devices that may or may not be seen as detritus by the next play’s crew when they...
December 01, 2017
SITE Santa Fe: The future is now, at least in the context of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. When the book debuted in 1970, the year 2017 was a figment of the journalist-turned-futurist’s locomotive imagination. He daydreamed personal spaceships and underwater cities for us, but also ...
November 01, 2017
Sanitary Tortilla Factory: In Lesbian Art in America, Harmony Hammond asks a number of questions about what, precisely, is “lesbian” about lesbian art. “Is the quality ‘lesbian’ embodied in the art object, the sexuality of the artist or viewer, or the viewing context?... Is lesbian art ...
November 01, 2017
Few artists have explored flatness as deeply as Kota Ezawa. Using digital tools, for the past several years Ezawa has transformed appropriated imagery into deceptively simple compositions. A Rembrandt loses its impasto and atmospheric perspective to become a series of...
November 01, 2017
One of humanity’s most important accomplishments, after the invention of written language, is the application of systematic measurements to things like distances, weights, codified sizes of this or that object. Applying number to the concept of a standard measurement has at its...
November 01, 2017
With its script by Santa Fean Annie Lux, The Portable Dorothy Parker is almost as good as being a fly on the wall while one of the most popular writers and oft-quoted wits of the early twentieth century holds forth. It also serves as an excellent example that good art gets ...
November 01, 2017
Tom Harjo’s Portraits from Standing Rock provide insight into an event that was difficult to see. Using still photography, he portrays the people, the emotions, the interactions, and the violence that law enforcement in South Dakota tried to shield from public view in 2016. Harjo’s...
October 01, 2017
The thick metal door swung shut behind me, and the momentum of its thud closed off the thrum of traffic from Coal Avenue, quieting the world inside the gallery. In the small exhibition space of Sanitary Tortilla Factory, machinery began to whirr, set off by the movement of my body in...
October 01, 2017
In the new documentary that accompanies the exhibition Frida Kahlo:Her Photos, curated by Mexican photographer and historian Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, reference is made at the very beginning to Kahlo’s horrific accident at the age of eighteen. It was the dreadful collision of a bus with...
October 01, 2017
The box can be a thing and an idea, sometimes diffuse, other times quite literally bounded. To think outside of one is a ready adage, one of those sayings that’s so overused it’s actually lost most of its ability to make a point. But when I think about the box in this exhibition...
October 01, 2017
The bees have proven themselves remarkably commodifiable, not only through the products they manufacture that humans enjoy, like honey and beeswax, but also as a pattern, a motif, a caricature. The market loves a stripe found in nature. If panda bears are the symbol of neoliberal...
October 01, 2017
What does it mean to represent someone else? Must we only endeavor to represent stories and people with whom we also identify? Of course not—but recent debates in art and literary circles reflect a growing sense of [...]
December 01, 2016
En route from one Southwest Arts Oasis to another, determined to see the works of Doris Cross (1907-1994) in Marfa and carrying a friend's artwork in our trunk, we passed through the heart of darkness [...]
September 01, 2017
Lannan Foundation: Roni Horn’s series of photographs of the river Thames—each one capturing a different texture of the opaque and oily water—creates a portrait of the river as if it were [...]
September 01, 2017
A painter, Lewis grew up in Nova Scotia and had no formal training apart from painting postcards with her mother when she was young. Her hands, shoulders, and neck were crumpled by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis [...]
September 01, 2017
Complex patterns unfold for the viewer and richly reward time spent looking in Quilts of Southwest China. The curation of this show, which includes textiles dated from 1900 to contemporary times, expands our [...]
September 01, 2017
Tansey Contemporary: In her solo exhibition of geometric wall sculptures, Melinda Rosenberg’s lines are not always her own. The Columbus, Ohio, artist’s work is a collaboration with designers [...]
September 01, 2017
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts: A single visit to the Institute of American Indian Arts' Museum of Contemporary Native Arts is enough to prompt wonder at why those visits are not more frequent [...]
September 01, 2017
Mary Dezember: Still Howling: When I walked in to Mary Dezember’s reading for Still Howling, upstairs from the plaza in a snug gallery space run by Strangers Collective, the poet came up to me and immediately connected me with something I’d written, something about women, she said...
February 01, 2017
Peters Projects: Is it possible for an artist to exhaust the format of the self-portrait? Or are we better off asking the opposite question: are artists’ reflections on their own likeness ever enough to fully describe depth of character, change over time, or one’s psyche?...
September 01, 2017
Something I Need You To Know debuted on Wednesday, November 9, 2016, the day after the United States presidential election. During the opening reception, visitors staggered through the hallways of Santa Fe [...]
February 01, 2017
A recent exhibition at one of Santa Fe's truly contemporary galleries conveyed a tenet of what makes an art space in Santa Fe “contemporary” in the first place. The word is largely misused—by myself and [...]
February 01, 2017
UNM Art Museum: The Arctic has for so long been defined by distance, both geographically and conceptually. Called the Far North because it is far from some perceived [...]
August 01, 2017
Peters Projects: Upon entering Kent Monkman’s solo exhibition, resist the temptation to revel in the raucous party raging across monumental canvases in the [...]
August 01, 2017
IAIA MoCNA: It's like seeing an afterimage. Though you blink, a vision continues to persist even after the original ceases. Over time, these images and afterimages layer upon one another, like sediment refusing to settle[...]
August 01, 2017
The newly acquired work at the Thoma Foundation, by such artists as computer pioneer Vera Molnar, Alan Rath, Steina Vasulka, and Guillermo Galindo, unfolds in so many technological and conceptual directions [...]
August 01, 2017
form & concept: I went to Rebecca Rutstein’s Fault Lines expecting to see in her paintings a comment, a reflection, or a transformation of the [...]
August 01, 2017
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts: Claire Vaye Watkins set her 2015 novel Gold Fame Citrus in a not-so-distant future, in the aftermath of a disastrous event: the entire western United States has been engulfed by a massive sand dune [...]
July 01, 2017
Whitney Museum of American Art: At first I noticed the smell, earthy almost. Then there was shade and a flush of coolness. I had entered Rafa Esparza’s Figure/Ground: Beyond the White Field [...]
July 01, 2017
