Off-Center at Vladem Contemporary is a three-decade survey of New Mexico art with myriad bright spots—but how are they connected?
Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970-2000
June 8, 2024–March 4, 2025
New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary, Santa Fe
By mapping the constellations, did humanity impose meaning on the sky or vice versa? This philosophical question concerns cosmic and cultural forces, optics and archetypes. Wandering around Off-Center at Vladem Contemporary, the new, freestanding wing of the New Mexico Museum of Art, is like trying to trace constellations when the stars are at their brightest.
The curators of this survey exhibition, which covers artistic practice in New Mexico from 1970 through 2000, are candid about the challenges of carving narratives from this sweep. In introductory wall text, the museum’s in-house curatorial team of Christian Waguespack, Alexandra Terry, and Kate Ware state that there’s no way to “comprehensively embrace” the span in a single show, but that the project is a “love letter” to at least some of the voices in the densely multicultural creative milieux of the period.
Off-Center’s structure is nonetheless maximalist: the show will feature more than 125 artists between this inaugural display and three partial reconfigurations in the coming year. The central themes of these overlapping iterations—“Place,” “Spectacle,” and “Identity”—are dizzyingly broad. Off-center indeed.
The best way to explore this exhibition is to tune out its staccato rhythm—its sightlines can be jarring, its conceptual leaps rough—and zero in on individual artworks. Like a game show, each wall feels like a row of mystery doors to fling open with curiosity and glee. On the first floor, which is labeled “Place,” hunt down Fritz Scholder’s (La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians) aching Indigenous critique of crucifixion motifs from 1980, Bruce Nauman’s luxurious 1981 concept sketch for a perception-bending “architectural puzzle,” and Raymond Belcher’s 1983 photography series revealing the backs of set pieces from the Hollywood Western Silverado, filmed on location in New Mexico.
The show’s second floor, arbitrarily dubbed “Place and Spectacle,” includes impressive, large-scale artworks by Harmony Hammond, Luis Tapia, and Jerry R. West, along with smaller but equally exquisite oddities, such as a Disney-commissioned, Southwest-themed ceramic vessel by Bunny Tobias. Off-Center’s greatest spectacle is a multimedia installation on the ground floor by Meridel Rubinstein, Ellen Zweig, and Steina and Bohuslav “Woody” Vasulka, chronicling the environmental and sociocultural fallout of the Manhattan Project via photo collage, voice recordings, and a floor projection that churns like lava.
Off-Center underscores the significant challenges Vladem Contemporary’s curatorial team faces. By its name, the wing is under pressure to spark contemporary discourse, but it was always intended to showcase the museum’s substantial, and hardly all-new, “contemporary” collection. Mounting a vast survey show as Vladem’s second-ever outing is a direct but ultimately disorienting solution. Off-Center’s next rendition should mark a clearer course through this crowded star chart of still-coalescing Southwestern art history.
