Opening: Tumbleweed Love Affair by Andrea Cermanski

Opening reception: Friday, September 22, 5-8 pm
On view: September 22 through October 20, 2023

Andrea Cermanski announces a solo exhibition entitled Tumbleweed LoveAffair, opening Friday, September 22 with a reception from 5-8 pm. Cermanski will display her latest abstract works that she created by making paint from burnt tumbleweeds and natural pigments at the artist’s gallery and studio space, Santa Fe Painting Workshops.

Tumbleweed Love Affair explores Cermanski’s complex relationship with tumbleweeds. An invasive plant with a storied, symbolic history which romanticizes the American West, tumbleweeds overtake everything – the land, the yard, the imagination – during the windy Spring months in New Mexico. In response to the giant piles that accumulate around her home, she devised a contraption to burn and eradicate the rolling invaders.

“Tumbleweed Black” is the novel paint Cermanski creates following a neighborhood tumbleweed-burning party; it integrates the charred remnants with acrylic medium and water, and a dose of irony and beauty. With this dramatic jet-black paint, she is redefining the tumbleweed’s narrative from romantic to realistic: tumbleweeds outcompete native plants, are a wildfire risk, put farmer’s crops at risk, and will become more prolific as a result of climate change.