Opening Reception: Fight and Dance: Social Realism of Eli Levin

Fight and Dance: Social Realism of Eli Levin
opening reception: Friday, may 10, 5-8 pm
on view: May 10–June 7, 2024

Susan Eddings Pérez Gallery proudly presents Fight and Dance: Social Realism of Eli Levin. This show will be classic Eli bar scenes and social realism from the working world.

About Eli Levin:
Artist Eli Levin was born in 1938 and grew up in the city of Manhattan. From there the public high school of Music and Art accepted him, and he immediately connected to the world of art. Almost all of Levin’s teachers were Social Realists who had started during the Depression. As the domination of the abstract expressionists soon took over Levin found the style depressing, as he was determined to paint the life around him. At the age of twenty-six he decided to leave the east coast and start over; Santa Fe was his answer.

Levin was directed to Canyon Road within minutes of entering Santa Fe, NM on his tiny motorbike in 1964. Within hours he was set up with a place to rent and a job tending bar at Claude’s. Over the ensuing forty-six years he had a presence on the famous road.

Levin is honored to be one of the storytellers for a portion of this roads long history. His presence from 1964 to the 1980s saw some of the biggest changes in Santa Fe art, yet he was early enough to befriend some of the generation of the 1930–40s Santa Fe Art Colony, like Arthur Haddock and Louie Ewing, and to come into contact with Shuster, Baumann, Raymond Johnson, Howard Cook, Willard Clark and the list goes on.

Levin built a round, two story studio on Don and presided over a weekly drawing group for almost fifty years and the Santa Fe Etching Club for over thirty-five years.