In Print

FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now

Currently residing in Albuquerque where they are pursuing an MFA in photography, MK began the recent series The Pain Is Just an Annoyance Now as members of their family began to pass away and they witnessed the grief of their mother. These losses spurred an exploration of the complications of family relationships, as well as obscured histories through the physical remnants of the past that shore up the present—family photo albums.

Maggie Grimason • January 28, 2020

FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now

Looking at Cedra Wood’s paintings feels a little like finding a secret door to enchanted lands. Wood understands a connection between the outer wild terrains and the inward ones. Her art celebrates both realms as essential and beautiful, linked by mythos. The worlds she depicts evoke something of the hero’s journey.

Tamara Johnson • January 28, 2020

FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now

Eric-Paul Riege’s (Diné) elaborate and beautiful fiber works not only connect him with his ancestral and artistic centers, but also envelop viewers in an everyday Navajo worldview, one that the artist believes should be communal.

Steve Jansen • January 28, 2020

FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now

The shapes of Andrea Pichaida’s sculptural works in clay are at once spare and suggestive, their lines and colors inspired by nature, their content speaking to experience both personal and universal.

Maggie Grimason • January 28, 2020

FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now

Danielle Shelley, who earned critical acclaim as a painter, has found similar success as a textile wizard. "My artistic concerns didn’t change when I morphed from a painter into a fiber artist,” writes Shelley in her artist statement. “I am still a passionate colorist, in love with shapes and lines. But I also find satisfaction in being part of the movement that has reclaimed stitch work, a long-dismissed women’s medium.”

Steve Jansen • January 28, 2020

FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now

Justin Richel infuses his paintings and sculptures with incisive, humorous, and exacting layers of commentary. He studied the technique of icon painting at the Franciscan monastery in Kennebunk, Maine, in 2004. This thoughtful Franciscan attention to color and the creation of signifiers informs his work, but his use of these methods is unique.

Tamara Johnson • January 28, 2020

FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now

“My photos illustrate the blood pumping through Albuquerque,” Frank Blazquez told the Guardian in 2018. The portraits—largely captured along the east-west belt of Central Avenue—capture human faces, yes, but each carries a story in and of itself.

Maggie Grimason • January 28, 2020

FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now

William T. Carson’s work brings a unique perspective to the adage “The medium is the message.” He works with coal to explore a multitude of significations. Beyond the economic, political, or environmental meaning of the substance, Carson reminds us that coal is prehistoric, born of ancient metamorphosis.

Tamara Johnson • January 28, 2020

FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now

David Gaussoin, a Santa Fe jewelry artist of Picuris Pueblo, Navajo, and French descent, comes from a long line of creatives, ranging from silversmiths and painters to rug weavers, sculptors, and woodworkers.

Steve Jansen • January 28, 2020

FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now

All year long we share the stories of artists from across our state, but this special issue is our way of focusing on a sample of some of the premier talent continuously emerging from New Mexico. These are artists whose works are shaping the landscape of contemporary art in the Southwest.

Lauren Tresp • January 28, 2020

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Southwest Contemporary is pleased to announce an open call for art to be featured in the second annual "12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now" publication and group exhibition. Artists living and working in New Mexico are welcome to submit artwork in any medium.

Southwest Contemporary • November 01, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Charming plushy animals walk the razor’s edge between life and lifelessness in Vanessa Gonzalez’s paintings. Each creature—a sloth, a jackalope, a flock of birds—has its limbs wrenched from its tiny body, with threads and fiberfill stuffing poking out of wounds.

Lauren Tresp • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

In Yeshe Parks’s gouache-on-paper paintings, figures perform impossible acrobatics. Knees and elbows bend in perfect U-shapes as cartoon-like, faceless characters contort and intertwine themselves into arbitrary postures.

Lauren Tresp • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Nicole Cuzilo's photos contemplate the role of fashion and appearance as mechanisms that historically and continually both celebrate and constrain women.

Lauren Tresp • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Adaptation, experimentation, and evolution are all crucial concepts within Heidi Brandow’s practice, which usually takes the form of layers of paint, drawing, and paper on canvas, but also includes a social practice in her photography projects.

Jenn Shapland • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Francoise Barnes’s titles give the viewer a quick point of entry to her abstract, mixed-media paintings on canvas, panel, or paper.

Lauren Tresp • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Jennifer Vasher’s installations and sculptures evoke the desire for purity and the environmentally toxic consumer culture of cleanliness. Lotion bottles, aspirin, and other pharmaceuticals appear as decorative art objects within the domestic landscapes of her installations.

Jenn Shapland • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Martín Wannam’s photos are an explosion of glitter and color, with an underlying hint of darkness. His work is unabashedly queer but operates in response to a repressive heteronormative society encrypted by religious imagery.

Jenn Shapland • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Mira Burack’s artwork is a space of rest, contemplation, and the contemplation of rest. Her wall-sized collages of photos of rumpled bedclothes enlarge the space where sleep takes place and, in doing so, enlarge a viewer’s attention to sleep and its landscape.

Jenn Shapland • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Dorothy Melander-Dayton is an interdisciplinary artist working at the nexus of performance, theater, and installation, as well as works on paper and sculpture. The artist’s process is grounded in research into various subjects which span artistic influences, texts, material research, and experimentation.

Lauren Tresp • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

In Rosemary Meza-DesPlas’s work, she renders female figures by hand-stitching her own hair into various surfaces. Some of these figures are anguished, some contorted, some vulnerable—each is rendered in delicate, tremulous lines that speak to the traditionally feminine realm of textiles.

Lauren Tresp • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Vincent Campos injects a sense of whimsy and strangeness into a form that is often serious and pious. Campos’s retablos stick to this script, representing saints and other Catholic imagery, but his figures have odd or humorous details: a caricatured face, a bag of Wonder Bread.

Jenn Shapland • January 30, 2019

New Mexico Artists to Know Now

Heather Gallegos-Rex’s tapestries are strikingly minimal in their design, often incorporating only two or three colors. She leans toward spare geometric shapes but does not shy away from landscapes and increasingly layered compositions.

Jenn Shapland • January 30, 2019