These Are a Few of Our Favorite Things to Read in 2022
Southwest Contemporary's staff, Natalie Hegert, Steve Jansen, Angie Rizzo, and Lauren Tresp, pick their favorite reads—and one podcast—of 2022.
Dec 28
Books + Literary
Jul 05
Raquel Gutiérrez Explores Queer Latinx Identity in Brown Neon
Tucson author Raquel Gutiérrez explores queer identity, creative communities, and life in the Southwest borderlands in her debut essay collection Brown Neon.
Jun 21
The Hiroshima Library: A Memorial Next to Refrigerators
The Hiroshima Library is a library (kind of), art installation (we think), reading room, and place for contemplation created by Brandon Shimoda at Counterpath in Denver.
May 25
“Being Born is Just Plagiarizing Your Parents”: An Interview with Good Actors Author Sommer Browning
Denver poet, librarian, gallerist, and comedian Sommer Browning talks about her new book Good Actors and how it relates to other art forms and interests.
May 19
Miraflores: San Antonio’s Mexican Garden of Memory by Anne Elise Urrutia
Drawing on public and private archives and fifty years of personal documentation, Anne Elise Urrutia’s book Miraflores brings to life her great-grandfather’s San Antonio garden in unmatched detail.
May 11
Aerial Concave Without Cloud by Poet and Artist Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Aerial Concave Without Cloud is an extended meditation on how thinking through and with light can help to illuminate profound personal grief.
Apr 20
Impractical Spaces: 5 Alternative Art Venues in Houston
A book series diving into historical and current alternative art establishments in major stateside cities visits Texas in Impractical Spaces: Houston. Here are five current H-Town favorites from the book.
Mar 29
Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes by Poet Nicky Beer
Denver-based poet Nicky Beer’s Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes is a clever, probing look into the collective desires and fears underlying our love of illusion.
Mar 28
Breadth of Bodies: Dancers with Disabilities Speak Out
A new book, Breadth of Bodies: Discussing Disability in Dance, spotlights the voices, experiences, and art of dancers with disabilities.
Nov 16
Book Review: A Treatise on Stars by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's A Treatise on Stars, the latest book by the New Mexico-based poet, makes a case for communication with star beings.
Jul 06
Book Review: American Geography by Santa Fe’s Radius Books
American Geography: Photographs of Land Use from 1840 to the Present (Radius Books) connects the exploitation of landscape and people to the formation of so-called American identity.
Jan 27
Making History: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
The new book Making History: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts shows how IAIA is redefining boundaries in Native art scholarship.
Nov 02
Getting to Center: A Worthy Offering
Writer and dancer Marlee Grace explores the practice of returning (again and again) to center in her new book.
Mar 26
Early Churches of Mexico: An Architect’s View
Santa Fe preservation architect Beverley Spears’s Early Churches of Mexico: An Architect’s View details her decade-plus study of sixteenth-century churches and conventos in Mexico.
Jan 28
In A Modern Rendering – The Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann
Born in Germany in 1881, Baumann’s parents moved to Chicago when he was ten, and the budding artist began attending the School of the Art Institute in his teens, at one of its most fecund and influential periods. Baumann wasn’t the first of his Chicago peers to discover New Mexico, but he planted deeper roots than most. Fellow master printmaker and Baumann’s soul-heir Tom Leech contributes a heartfelt reflection on decades spent working with the artist’s materials, upholding his legacy at Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors...
Dec 01
David Deutsch: Works 1968-2017
Don’t sleep on Deutsch. For the past fifty years, he has actively questioned the narrative of painting, photography, and image-making in general through highly innovative approaches. This monograph, put out by the can-do-no-wrong Radius Books here in Santa Fe, is full of surprises for any artist who claims to know all things Deutsch.
Apr 26
Book Review: Nature’s Nation
Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, which catalogues an exhibition that opened last fall at Princeton University Art Museum, proposes a reorientation for American art history around ecology and environmental history.
Mar 27
Book Review: Matthew Genitempo: Jasper
Jasper is the first book from photographer Matthew Genitempo. While the images were made in the Ozarks, they recall an atmosphere of rural America more than they reflect a specific place. The name Jasper, too, has a particular generality...
Jan 30
Interview with Poet Joy Harjo
I still feel like a New Mexico writer in part, an important part, and my plans are to secure a little place there to live at least part of the time...New Mexico inspires me as no other place. I consider it the birthplace of my poetry, though of course, my poetry was set in place for generations, through all the speakers, singers, and artists in my ancestral lines.
Nov 28
Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future
A Swedish girl joins her first séance at seventeen. Her mind swirls with a heady mix of books on Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Buddhism, and spiritualism. This doesn’t set her apart; the occult is mainstream in 1879. By the time she is thirty-five, she has started a séance circle with four female friends called The Five (De Fem), which will commission her most significant works...
Oct 30
David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale by Elena Filipovic
February 1983: a man in coat and scarf stands on a sidewalk among various street vendors at Cooper Square in downtown New York City. At his feet, a collection of perfectly spherical white forms...
Oct 01
Drowned River: An Interview with Rebecca Solnit and Mark Klett
Rebecca Solnit’s writing on the intersection of environmental damage and the human body has long captured my attention as a reader and as an inhabitant of this planet...
Jul 30
Curatorial Activism
On April 1, 2014, the editors at ArtSlant reported that MoMA would “give the museum over exclusively to women artists for the entire year of 2015.”...
May 01
Albuquerque Museum Photo Archives Collection: Images in Silver
Images in Silver begins with a quote from famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. “Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing,” it goes, “and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.” Photography, then...
Apr 11
April Reading
When Jenny George read from her collection The Dream of Reason at Collected Works in early April, her voice was soft, slow, and steady. Like her poems, her reading rendered heartbreaking compressions of language and feeling into something delicate to behold. Her images ...
Apr 01
Everything I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code
For fans of Laurie Anderson, and I certainly count myself as one, the book Everything I Lost in the Flood archives her forty-plus-year art career, beginning with a 1974 performance piece called Duets on Ice. This work, even in its simplicity, constellates a certain inscrutable...
Mar 15
March 2018 Reading
Winter in the northern Midwest is not a place I return to in person, at least not willingly. It is a place I dread for its deadly overcast sadness, a dread that, I learned from Michigan poet Emily Van Kley's collection, constitutes its own heady nostalgia. The Cold and the Rust…
Feb 22
February 2018 Reading
Calling herself a "visual artist who writes," author Verónica Gerber Bicecci approaches fiction from the conceptual and the personal simultaneously: What does it mean, logically, for a person to be missing? And how does it feel? Bicecci incorporates line drawings throughout Empty...
Feb 01
3 Questions: Aleksandar Hemon
In the last year, Aleksandar Hemon’s writings in response to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the perils of Trumpism have served as my touchstones, pieces I bookmark and return to and share when I’m feeling especially low, especially unable to proceed. Hemon is a Chicago-based...
Nov 01
¡Órale! Lowrider: Custom Made in New Mexico
Lowrider Summer brought an onslaught of exhibitions, parades, and events to Santa Fe in 2016, but don’t let lowrider burn-out set in just yet...
Dec 14
December Reading: Three Titles from 2017
As a difficult year winds to a close, I’ve been thinking about what books made a difference for me in 2017. What changed my mind, or opened it, or gave me language to understand and express the present moment? Here are three 2017 titles that made me see things in a new way...
Nov 07
November Book Reviews
Jenn Shapland reviews three recent book releases: The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco (nonfiction), Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (fiction), and For Want of Water: And Other Poems by Sasha Pimentel (poetry) ...
Nov 01
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In Forty Questions
Sometimes a writer’s subject finds her. Valeria Luiselli, a novelist and essayist from Mexico City, was waiting for her green card when she and her niece started working as interpreters at the New York immigration court. Luiselli had heard from her own immigration lawyer that after...
Oct 01
New Releases: One Sentence Book Reviews
New fall book released in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are reviewed with one sentence and one quotation of each from Jenn Shapland. Titles include The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt, Katalin Street by Magda Szabo, The Mountain by Paul Yoon, Letters to his Neighbor by Marcel Proust ...
Sep 01
Louise Lawler: Receptions
Louise Lawler has spent her career effacing any presence of her own identity in her artworks. Her works themselves are often either mechanically produced or feature the work of other artists. [...]
Aug 01
Layli Long Soldier: WHEREAS
At the heart of Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS lie two apologies. One comes from the poet’s father for his drinking and his absence during her childhood. This apology, [...]
Jul 01
Openings: A Memoir from the Women’s Art Movement, New York City 1970-1992
While she was planning Views by Women Artists, a massive collaborative exhibition in 1982 during the annual College Art Association conference, Sabra Moore’s own show, Pieced [...]
Jul 01
Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art
The exhibition Southern Accent: Seeking the South in Contemporary Art debuted last year at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and is currently on view at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville [...]
Jun 01
David Taylor: Monuments
The series of obelisks punctuating the US-Mexico border west of the Rio Grande is ostensibly the subject of David Taylor’s 276 photographs in Monuments. These boundary markers resulted from multiple treaties [...]
Feb 01
Marion Belanger: Rift / Fault
In art history classes, the slide pair is a powerful tool. Project two images side by side, and they are like two flint rocks, one setting a spark off the other. Compare and contrast: it’s always easier to understand something when you can say what it is not [...]
