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...
Oct 30
Review
Oct 30
Phil Binaco: The Affirming Flame
Phil Binaco’s recent body of work was inspired by a poem by W. H. Auden...
Oct 01
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...
Oct 01
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...
Oct 01
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...
Oct 01
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...
Oct 01
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...
Aug 28
Aug 28
American Jewelry
It is thought that prehistoric humans adorned their bodies with simple jewelry pieces...
Aug 28
SITElines 2018: Casa tomada
Everyone has a biennial these days—a sprawling exhibition that brings in outside curators...
Aug 28
Aug 28
Nascent Atmospheres
At a preview event for Amie LeGette and Courtney Leonard’s exhibition, guests were lost in a literal twilight zone...
Jul 30
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...
Jul 30
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...
Jul 30
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...
Jul 30
XYZT: Abstract Landscapes
Can we materialize time? Does light have roots? Can we see something when there is nothing?...
Jul 30
Beautiful Test Sites/Now I Am Become Death
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” quoth J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad Gita...
Jul 30
Everywhen: Indigenous Photoscapes
Time, as many a physicist, mystic, and indigenous American can tell you, is not linear, despite our human perception of it as such...
Jun 29
Recall, Recapture, Remember
Tansey Contemporary: The title of this fiber-art exhibition smacks of redundancy—if you couldn’t guess, it’s about memory—but it’s surprisingly economical in other respects. Recall, Recapture, Remember features twenty-two artists from across the Southwest, selected...
Jun 28
Eric Tillinghast: Þyngdarljóð–Gravity’s Poetry
Richard Levy Gallery: Confession: water freaks me out. Floods, hurricanes, waves of any size, hail, steam, swamps, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, snow—it doesn’t matter. And don’t get me started on modern plumbing or droughts, for that matter. Regardless of form...
Jun 29
Two-Fold: A Pairing of Frederick Hammersley + Matthew Shlian
Paper has a memory. Each crease is recorded in the impression left where it was once folded. It can expand like origami, and it can collapse into flatness again, but its history remains pressed into the stuff it’s made of. It is this material and all the marks worn...
Jun 29
Larry Bell: Hocus, Focus and 12
Larry Bell: Hocus, Focus and 12, currently on view at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, is a large-scale exhibition focusing on the artist’s minimalist, architectonic works that reference the clean modernism of Southern California as well as the sleek geometric forms of...
Jun 28
Inner Orbit
form & concept: For most people who aren’t astronomers or astrophysicists, outer space is a nebulous concept (no pun intended). How we relate to ideas like space-time, the Big Bang, and black holes often has more to do with our immediate material surroundings than with...
Jun 01
Stuart Arends: Tin Man, Slabs, and My Father’s House
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”...
Jun 01
Because It’s Time: Unraveling Race and Place in NM
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...
Jun 01
Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru
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...
Jun 01
Patrick Nagatani: A Survey of Early Photographs
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...
Jun 01
Nikesha Breeze: Within This Skin
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...
May 10
Michael Hedges: In Bloom
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 01
Young Curators Present: Guises
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
Jane Lackey: Shifting Pulse
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
Shaelin Jornigan: Home Whispers and Jazmyn Crosby: Eggs in the Rain, Eggs on the Floor
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
Work by Women
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
David Naranjo
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...
Apr 06
Shelley Horton-Trippe: High Brow Low Ride
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...
Apr 01
Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design
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.
Apr 01
Meridel Rubenstein: Eden Turned on Its Side
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...
Apr 01
Lucy Maki: Double Take
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...
Apr 01
Ashley Hunt: Degrees of Visibility
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...
Apr 01
Quest for the New: Modernism in the Southwest
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...
Mar 02
Ciel Bergman: The Linens
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...
Feb 12
East of West, Santa Fe
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.
Jan 30
Dress Matters: Clothing as Metaphor
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...
