
Ted Larsen: to live, leave it all behind
Nüart Gallery, Santa Fe October 7-30, 2016 evolution of a sculptor (or of almost any artist, for that matter) is a series of comprehensible and logical steps leading to a fully […]
November 01, 2016
Nüart Gallery, Santa Fe October 7-30, 2016 evolution of a sculptor (or of almost any artist, for that matter) is a series of comprehensible and logical steps leading to a fully […]
Ann Landi • November 01, 2016
When I think of Mabel Dodge Luhan and her company, celestial analogies spring to mind: a constellation of disparate personalities, a system of spinning bodies suspended and connected, held in balance by the gravitational force of a central figure whose brilliance is both perilous and life-giving...
Elaine Ritchel • November 01, 2016
Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe: It’s impossible to convey the monumental quality present in Tom Joyce’s exhibition. The scale of some of his forged iron and steel pieces is something to consider along with the works’ refined Platonic sense of form. In addition, there...
Diane Armitage • December 01, 2017
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art: In an influential column in the New York Times in 1970, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called Paolo Soleri “the prophet in the desert,” positing that his ideas on the necessary comingling of architecture and ecology, or...
Deborah Ross • December 01, 2017
Central Features Contemporary Art, Albuquerque: Central Features is blank in all the right ways. treading across the unassuming polished concrete floors to the center of the gallery—which is partitioned into one large immaculately white room and several smaller ones...
Maggie Grimason • December 01, 2017
Etiquette, Santa Fe: My first visit to Etiquette, for the opening of 8 Photographers at Etiquette in early September, I was shocked. In a warehouse-esque space behind Siler Road I saw, at a single glance, more people under thirty than I have seen in the year and...
Jenn Shapland • December 01, 2017
Taos Art Museum at Fechin House, Taos: The Taos Art Museum at Fechin House has recently completed the reinstallation of portions of their permanent collection on the museum’s first floor. The collection highlights the work of the Russian émigré Nicolai Fechin...
Anna Novakov • December 01, 2017
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...
Chelsea Weathers • 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...
Kathryn M Davis • 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 ...
Jordan Eddy • 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 ...
Jenn Shapland • 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...
Chelsea Weathers • 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...
Diane Armitage • 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 ...
Kathryn M Davis • 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...
Jenn Shapland • 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...
Maggie Grimason • 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...
Diane Armitage • 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...
Alicia Inez Guzmán • 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...
Jenn Shapland • 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 [...]
Chelsea Weathers • 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 [...]
Jenn Shapland • 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 [...]
Diane Armitage • 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 [...]
Jenn Shapland • 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 [...]
Marina La Palma • 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 [...]
Jordan Eddy • 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 [...]
Kathryn M Davis • 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...
Jenn Shapland • 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?...
Alicia Inez Guzmán • 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 [...]
Jordan Eddy • 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 [...]
Kathryn M Davis • February 01, 2017
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