Whitney Biennial 2019
Often taken as a bellwether of U.S. artistic culture, the Whitney Biennial is renowned for its tendency to provoke political/aesthetic furor...
Jun 26
Review
Jun 26
Judy Chicago: The Birth Project from New Mexico Collections
Looking at a torn vagina in Judy Chicago’s Creation of the World: Needlepoint 1 (1985), I remember watching my ex-partner give birth to both of our boys at home. She had a tear that had to be sewn. I watched, and that is the extent of my experience with childbirth. I know, however, that men—which I’ll define as cis-gendered, penis-possessing humans—have a lot of opinions about what goes in and out of vaginas...
May 24
Bauhaus Centennial: 1919-2019
One of the most influential members of the Bauhaus movement of the early twentieth century, herbert bayer (who preferred his name spelled in all lowercase and favored a unitary, stylized, and all-lowercase alphabet) believed in the seamless integration of fine art, decorative art, architecture, and graphic design...
May 24
Seeds Regeneration by Dancing Earth
Rulan Tangen’s company, Dancing Earth, performed the culmination of a six-year project called ...SEEDS: RE GENERATION... in Santa Fe this April...
May 24
Robert Stokowy: [structures] Albuquerque
To see Robert Stokowy’s conceptual artwork, structures [ albuquerque ], I went on eight hikes in eight days. I got a deep t-shirt tan, I got really lost once, and on one day I cried a little...
May 24
Interlopers
Interlopers is a show of works on paper at Evoke Contemporary that brings together eighteen artists and uses the term “works on paper” broadly, representing a wide range of media...
Apr 26
Film Review: Vox Lux
It has been three weeks since I watched Vox Lux. Whenever I think about how to approach writing about it, in my head I hear the voice of Bill Hader’s Saturday Night Live character, Stefon...
Apr 26
Apr 26
Aftereffect
Aftereffect: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Painting is not only a vibrant and eye-catching show but also an exercise in understanding how artists can be influenced by legendary painters without resorting to outright imitation. Aftereffect gathers together twelve...
Apr 26
Apr 26
Timothy Jason Reed: Vortexting the Muses
Vortexting The Muses is the inaugural show of Niomi Fawn’s new brick-and-mortar curation project in Santa Fe, Show Pony Gallery. Drawings and paintings on paper, wood, glass, and brick by artist Timothy Jason Reed...
Mar 27
Hindsight/Insight
After an afternoon insisting that I was impatient, though my date didn’t believe it was true, it was significant to walk into the UNM Museum of Art together. Galleries, of course, with their windowless, static light...
Mar 27
Jeremy Thomas: Unintended Consequences
It is an exciting time to be Jeremy Thomas. With shows opening in Santa Fe, Munich, and Paris in the next six months, New Mexico is lucky to claim Thomas as a local and to have his work on view at the CCA Tank Garage Gallery...
Mar 27
Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze
In a video interview installed in Returning the Gaze, painter Jordan Casteel says her encounters with portraiture in museums and galleries have typically involved “dead white people” in staid poses. Her large-scale oils on canvas subvert that trope in a number of ways...
Mar 27
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 […]
Mar 27
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...
Jan 30
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.
Jan 30
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.
Jan 30
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.
Jan 30
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.
Nov 28
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.
Nov 28
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.
Nov 28
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.
Nov 28
Nov 28
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...
Oct 30
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...
Oct 30
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...
Oct 30
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...
Oct 30
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
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...
