Jan 30
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...
Feb 01
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...
Feb 01
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...
Feb 01
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...
Feb 01
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...
Feb 01
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.
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
In nightmarish political times, it’s important to keep in mind that books are more than just objects, and that the pen is always, always mightier than the sword. Pay attention to who’s reading books and who is not, to who is making them and who is burning them...
Oct 15
What a felicitous curatorial idea, the juxtaposition of this trio of artists. Pokrasso, Stanford, and Glovaski continue to explore new media...
Nov 01
Fictitious Fiber. Exactly. The closest thing to a thread or a filament in this exhibition is likely the nylon fishing line used to weave elements in two of the works.
Nov 11
Let us sing the praises of art galleries who dare set up shop in risky neighborhoods...
Nov 01
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 […]
Nov 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Nov 01
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 ...
Nov 01
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 ...
Nov 01
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...
Nov 01
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...
Nov 01
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 ...
Oct 01
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...
Oct 01
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...
Oct 01
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...
Oct 01
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...
Oct 01
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...
Dec 01
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 [...]
Sep 01
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 [...]
Sep 01
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 [...]
Sep 01
Sep 01
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 [...]
Sep 01
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 [...]
Sep 01
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 [...]
Feb 01
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...
Sep 01
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?...
