Articles

Review

"Several unfinished works in the show are naturally among the most heartbreaking. Unfinished . . . is a rare capsule of work created at the intersection of talent and years of great development. There is an adolescent fearlessness in these paintings, and Stewart allows viewers to see the remarkable efforts of a young artist making use of her rapidly expanding world. Unlike most eighteen-year-olds, the perspective Stewart applied to her work made magical use of a young life evidencing wisdom beyond her years."

Kate Wood • July 29, 2019

Review

Mira Burack’s artwork on view at 516 Arts in Albuquerque evokes themes of rest, comfort, and home—with a dark underside.

Robin Babb • July 29, 2019

National Spotlight

With Still Life No. 3, sound artist Raven Chacon (Diné) subverts the notion of the still life, immersing visitors in a layered, multimedia experience of the story of the Navajo people's emergence into this world at the surface of the earth.

Briana Olson • July 29, 2019

Food + Drink

"I like bright. Refreshing is usually my thing. I also love anything with coconut in it, which is why I ordered this one. My favorite drink is a piña colada, always and forever. Which is funny, because it’s like a guilty pleasure, but so many bartenders love it."

Robin Babb • July 26, 2019

MusicPreview

“To me, the root of music is like the root of a plant. You can’t have a garden without a strong musical foundation. I want to start in the world of roots, but I don’t want to stay there forever”

Patrick McGuire • July 29, 2019

Preview

The work that Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Apache artist Ian Kuali’i makes today is largely born out of a longstanding connection to the landscapes he has lived and worked in, as well as a sense that these different places each hold unique lessons for their inhabitants. As the Ronald and Susan Dubin Native Artist Fellow at the School for Advanced Research, Kuali’i is putting his talent to work to create intricate works of hand-cut paper, as well as an expansive earthwork on a slice of the center’s undeveloped acreage.

Maggie Grimason • July 27, 2019

From the EditorNews

The month of July introduces a season of sequels and new beginnings to The Magazine! On the cusp of The Magazine’s 28th year, I am excited to introduce you to […]

Lauren Tresp • July 01, 2019

Feature

“What exactly is a record label’s future in a music industry climate seemingly hellbent on conditioning audiences to pay next to nothing for music?” Eliza Lutz, founder of the pioneering Santa Fe–based Matron Records label, thinks the only path forward is to embrace the inevitable and adapt accordingly...

Patrick McGuire • June 26, 2019

FeatureMeet Your Makers

Where was the dagger? It was the final act of The Letter, a Santa Fe Opera world premiere that opened in 2009, and forty-mile-per-hour winds were howling across the venue’s open-air stage. The murderous Leslie, played by Patricia Racette, was singing her way towards suicide-by-stabbing. Suddenly, the wind whipped a tablecloth and sent Leslie’s fateful knife skittering down the dining table. This was despite the fact that the properties department had reinforced the linen with a stitch called a swing tack and secured it with a wind skirt.

Jordan Eddy • June 26, 2019

Review

Thirty miles north of Ciudad Juárez, at an immigrant detention center in Chaparral, New Mexico, Johana Medina Leon, transgendered and from El Salvador, complains of chest pains. Days later, and a day after James Drake’s opening, Que Linda La Brisa, Leon dies on a hospital bed at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, Texas.

Shane Tolbert • June 26, 2019

FeatureStudio Visit

Visiting Stuart Arends’s studio was no quick jaunt. We drove one and a half hours from Santa Fe to Willard, New Mexico, past the town, further down the highway, and just before a specified mile marker where we were to rendez-vous with the artist at an unmarked wire gate...

Clayton Porter • June 26, 2019

Feature

Summer in northern New Mexico can be overwhelming. Any day of the week there is some activity calling for our attention: artist talks, studio tours, performances, openings, fairs, festivals, markets, music, and, of course, beautiful weather beckoning us outdoors. To help us make sense of it all, I asked two of our regular contributors, Maggie Grimason and Rachel Preston Prinz, to give us a selection of their “must-sees” for the summer season...

Maggie Grimason and Rachel Preston • June 26, 2019

Preview

This summer, Patina Gallery presents works by more than ten European jewelry artists in a group exhibition opening on July 12, marking their debut in the American Southwest. Below, we highlight three of these artists whose works share modern sensibilities, minimalist shapes, and purity of materials...

Southwest Contemporary • June 26, 2019

Review

I immediately want to speak of devotion, but I will start with the work. The pencil drawings and lithographs by Gendron Jensen at 5. Gallery are gently wondrous. Titled Bidden, the solo exhibition features nine of Jensen’s works made between 1989 and 2015...

Sarah Bradley • June 26, 2019

Review

The Dream Life of Objects is a big show. A selection of work that spans decades and media fills the entirety of the CCA Tank Garage Gallery. This solo show is described by the artist, Judy Tuwaletstiwa, as a “visual poem,” where pieces are asked and allowed to interact with and inform one another. Tuwaletstiwa invites us to experience her work as an “introspective” instead of a retrospective...

Kate Wood • June 26, 2019

Magazine

The question is not merely why Shakespeare, but why make any art at all? Who is art for, and at what cost? In Guards at the Taj, answers to the first question accumulate as if without effort: we make art to create objects of resplendent beauty and experiences of wonder; to revel in the joy of creation; to invent worlds beyond this one; to compete with God; to fail. It’s the second question that’s difficult—brutally so...

Briana Olson • June 26, 2019

New Mexico Women

When I asked Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana) how she came to call herself a cultural arts worker, her reply began with a short history of her tribe’s trading practices. “I come from a long line of Indian traders, not merchants who house goods but traders who pass resources from one place to another.”

Jenn Shapland • June 26, 2019

Review

Often taken as a bellwether of U.S. artistic culture, the Whitney Biennial is renowned for its tendency to provoke political/aesthetic furor...

Janet Abrams • June 26, 2019

Review

Looking at a torn vagina in Judy Chicago’s Creation of the World: Needlepoint 1 (1985), I remember watching my ex-partner give birth to both of our boys at home. She had a tear that had to be sewn. I watched, and that is the extent of my experience with childbirth. I know, however, that men—which I’ll define as cis-gendered, penis-possessing humans—have a lot of opinions about what goes in and out of vaginas...

Matthew Irwin • June 26, 2019

Food + Drink

"If there is a goal to sustain yourself as an artist, then innovation is a big part of that. Traditions have to change with the times, because artists are the chroniclers of our times."

Lauren Tresp • June 26, 2019

Writings

After planting and harvesting crops for over forty years, you would think a being might finally comprehend the ephemeral nature of all things. Not, alas, this one. At least not within my deep inner recesses, in the private folds of knowing...

Stanley Crawford • June 26, 2019

From the Editor

I am thrilled to usher The Magazine into its 28th year with this issue: Volume 28, Issue 1. I have some very exciting announcements that will be made in just a couple of weeks about the future of The Magazine and new offerings to look forward to, so please make sure you are signed up on our email list if you are not already!

Lauren Tresp • June 26, 2019

Feature

Landscape painting: the passé genre that dominates so much of the world’s understanding of Southwest art. For me, first it conjures images of Albert Bierstadt (wrought with a minefield of American colonialism), the sappy, wistful romance of a Caspar David Friedrich abyss, and the airy, observational paintings of Provence by Paul Cézanne...

Shane Tolbert • May 24, 2019

Feature

I grew up on a ranch in the Texas Hill Country and spent as much time outside as possible. There were old roads, stone fence lines, ruins of buildings, and archaeological sites that stretched from creek beds to groves of trees.

Julie McGilvray • May 24, 2019

From the Editor

For a monthly magazine, it can be difficult to capture a theme throughout an entire issue. So much of our content is deliberately eclectic, covers a span of disciplines, and is a mix between in-depth and topical coverage. I’m delighted, therefore, that our “Landscapes” issue came together rather organically...

Lauren Tresp • May 24, 2019

Meet Your Makers

“If you’re celebrating landscape as a pure aesthetic category,” Subhankar Banerjee explains from his office in the Art & Ecology Department on the University of New Mexico’s campus, “it is a crime”...

Maggie Grimason • May 24, 2019

Studio Visit

Paula Wilson and Mike Lagg live in Carrizozo, New Mexico, a town of about nine hundred residents, located north of White Sands. Paula, who arrived there ten years ago by way of Chicago and New York, and Mike, who settled in the area over thirty years ago, are mainstays of the art community in the region...

Angie Rizzo • May 24, 2019

New Mexico Women

Lucy Lippard changed what art writing could look like, and she continues to shift it with each book she writes. Hugely influential in the artworld of New York, beginning in the 1960s with the Art Workers Coalition and later Heresies Collective, her impact on New Mexico is equally prodigious...

Jenn Shapland • May 24, 2019

Review

One of the most influential members of the Bauhaus movement of the early twentieth century, herbert bayer (who preferred his name spelled in all lowercase and favored a unitary, stylized, and all-lowercase alphabet) believed in the seamless integration of fine art, decorative art, architecture, and graphic design...

Deborah Ross • May 24, 2019

Photography

Melanie Walker is an artist based in Boulder, Colorado. She works nearly equally in the worlds of photography and public art, with each realm informing the other...

Angie Rizzo • May 24, 2019