december 19-january 20

Feature

Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand. You can find all of them on Instagram and at local markets.

Robin Babb • December 01, 2019

New Mexico Women

The role of a midwife is a powerful one. She is a guide through one of the most life-changing events a person can have, welcoming a new child into the world. How one enters the world matters. Birth experiences can have effects that ripple throughout a person’s life, impacting their family and community.

Angie Rizzo • December 01, 2019

National Spotlight

In this day of broad familiarity with Philip Guston’s figurative paintings, it’s hard to comprehend the shock of his 1970 show at Marlborough. Remember, though, that by then Guston, first a muralist and then a part of the New York School, had been painting his gestural liquid masses to much acclaim for over twenty years.

Shane Tolbert • December 01, 2019

Books + Literary

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.

Shane Tolbert • December 01, 2019

Sponsored

"There’s no safety net. Great art is full of ups and downs, but when I see someone come in wearing fine jewelry from Patina, my heart fills. That so many people trust us makes me feel we’ve made an impact."

Tamara Johnson • December 01, 2019

Feature

We asked nine curators, critics, and makers in the state to look back, in hindsight, at the vibrant art scene here as experienced in the past year, and to look forward as through a crystal ball at the year to come. They were asked to answer two questions: "What was your favorite exhibition in 2019: the most compelling, beautiful, or thought-provoking show?", and "What shows are you looking forward to in the next year?"

Asuri Ramanujan Krittika • December 01, 2019

Feature

Southern Nevada–based artist Justin Favela’s work embodies the qualities of Las Vegas by affirming the startling originality of smart near-copies. Last spring, I visited Favela in his temporary studio at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Reliably buoyant, Favela can shed light on seemingly any aspect of the folklore of contemporary Las Vegas...

Marcus Civin • December 01, 2019

Review

The exhibition, H. Joe Waldrum: Retrospective, at Rio Bravo Fine Art is a first-of-its-kind overview of works from the H. Joe Waldrum Trust, which inherited a majority of his pieces after his estate closed in 2014. The exhibition, curated by Eduardo Alicea-Moreno—director and president of Rio Bravo Fine Art, the Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, gallery Waldrum founded shortly before his unexpected death in 2003—showcases the depth and breadth of Waldrum’s high-volume career.

Steve Jansen • December 01, 2019

Studio VisitFeature

Lynch makes hand-built, smoke-fired vessels, some as large as five feet tall, others small enough to fit in the hand. Her color palette is minimal and plays the whiteness of the clay against the deep graphite blacks achieved by saggar firing, a process that sometimes also deposits hues of blue and brown. Her work is simple to describe but is not necessarily easy to talk about...

Sarah Bradley • December 01, 2019

Feature

“I want my students to understand that their embodied knowledge and way of consciously moving in space, as dancers, is special. My goal is to give them vocabulary and tools so they can be part of the creative force that invents whatever comes next.”

Tamara Johnson • December 01, 2019

Feature

Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand.

Robin Babb • December 01, 2019

Feature

Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand.

Robin Babb • December 01, 2019

Feature

Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand.

Robin Babb • December 01, 2019

Feature

Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand.

Robin Babb • December 01, 2019

Feature

Craft is alive and well in New Mexico. The home of Pueblo pottery and colorful Diné tapestry, this part of the world has a heritage of craft and design that continues to inspire artisans to practice old trades or create something entirely new. Often some mixture of the two. These are just a few of the craftspeople in New Mexico who are creating one-of-a-kind goods by hand.

Robin Babb • December 01, 2019

From the Editor

This issue taps into contemporary craft. It wasn’t intentionally a choice informed by the season, but it feels right to contemplate our own crafts at the end of the year—a season of endings, reflections, and new opportunities. We approached this topic from many different angles, from traditional craft to craft and tech.

Lauren Tresp • December 01, 2019

Photography

In Outside the Castle (2019), Atmus the deer sits on a lawn outside Disney’s Cinderella Castle. Atmus is a fur-suit. The person inside is Tommy Bruce. The lawn is artificial. And the castle is an image. Bruce is a furry. He goes to conventions, participates in online discussions, and documents the community. His also takes self-portraits in his fur-suit.

Matthew Irwin • December 01, 2019

Review

Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful examines the results of trauma in people’s lives in this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama at Santa Fe's Teatro Paraguas.

Talia Pura • December 01, 2019

Review

From the vast archives of Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum comes Elemental, an eye-catching exhibition that organizes Still’s work around images conjured by the elements: earth, air, water, fire, and æther.

Deborah Ross • December 01, 2019

Review

Scott Johnson’s solo show, Fissure, at the Center for Contemporary Arts is a rich smorgasbord of textures, light, and reflections, culminating in a crescendo of visual experience.

Clayton Porter • December 01, 2019

Review

In Nari Ward: We the People at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Harlem-based mixed-media artist subtly yet powerfully confronts America’s sordid legacy of racism and discrimination as well as overall American identity in his show of sculptural pieces constructed from discarded materials.

Steve Jansen • December 01, 2019

Review

Organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is a comprehensive survey of the obscure American modernist painter, who actively worked for decades to invent abstraction in the West.

Shane Tolbert • December 01, 2019

Review

In Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande, twenty-three New Mexico artists challenge themselves and visitors to 516 Arts to confront the fragmentation of the ecosystem on which the river, the bosque, and innumerable lifeforms—humans included—depend.

Briana Olson • December 01, 2019