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!
June 26, 2019
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...
June 26, 2019
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.
June 26, 2019
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...
June 26, 2019
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...
June 26, 2019
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...
June 26, 2019
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...
June 26, 2019
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...
June 26, 2019
“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...
June 26, 2019
Often taken as a bellwether of U.S. artistic culture, the Whitney Biennial is renowned for its tendency to provoke political/aesthetic furor...
June 26, 2019
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...
June 26, 2019
"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."
June 26, 2019
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.
June 26, 2019
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.”
June 26, 2019
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...
June 26, 2019
