Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
“The intention of this work is to honor vulnerability, impermanence, and cycles of life on our planet,” c marquez says of their work, which includes two-dimensional pieces, sculpture, installation, and the results of a daily sketchbook practice.
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
Intensely thoughtful, Raphael Begay sees significance in objects and quotidian scenes and is able to begin a conversation with the viewer through his lens. With installations and discussions about his work, he adds a further dimension of storytelling that engages community...
Jan 28
FeatureNew Mexico Artists to Know Now
Garcia, an Art Institute of Chicago–educated artist who moved to Santa Fe from his native Houston in 1987, developed a unique transfer procedure: he creates an image or pattern on paper that’s soaked in gum arabic and water, which is then hand pressed onto a painting surface.
Jan 28
This spring, UNM Art Museum hosts new-media artist León De la Rosa-Carrillo’s The Remix Room, which will offer visitors “six different stations in which remix can be explored as a viable strategy to conduct research and produce remixed content.”
Jan 28
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.
Jan 28
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.
Jan 28
We, The Masses: Here, the men—drawn in mind-blowing detail on palimpsest-free surfaces—engage in unhinged activity, ranging from gnawing on tree bark to fighting with one another. Some men hug en masse: they seem to know that O’Neil is about to hit the go button on the apocalypse...
Jan 28
Zahra Marwan’s exhibition at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory in Albuquerque pairs exquisite poetry with her illustrations, paintings on paper.
Jan 28
Born in Germany in 1881, Baumann’s parents moved to Chicago when he was ten, and the budding artist began attending the School of the Art Institute in his teens, at one of its most fecund and influential periods. Baumann wasn’t the first of his Chicago peers to discover New Mexico, but he planted deeper roots than most. Fellow master printmaker and Baumann’s soul-heir Tom Leech contributes a heartfelt reflection on decades spent working with the artist’s materials, upholding his legacy at Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors...
Jan 28
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.
Jan 28
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.
Jan 28
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.”
Jan 28
The thirty-five featured artists have opted to use the disarming power of humor, parody, and satire to counter, transcend, and transform the oppression they have suffered.
Jan 28
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.
Jan 28
Martínez-Díaz is a visual artist who uses photography, video, design, and installation to create conceptual work focused on the hyper normalization of violence in Northern Mexican society.
Jan 28
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.
Jan 28
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's most recent installation Border Turner in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez brings voice and person to the forefront.
Jan 28
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.
Jan 28
Di Wae Powa: They Came Back, an exhibition which opened in the fall of 2019 at the Poeh Cultural Center, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), is a step towards reconciling a muddy and violent history of colonialism in the Southwest.
Jan 28
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.
Jan 28
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.
Jan 28
Artist Sharbani Das Gupta's In/Sight, on view at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, examines current environmental and cultural conundrums and asks the viewer to do the same.
Dec 01
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.
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
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.
Dec 01
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.
Dec 01
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.
Dec 01
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.
Dec 01
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.
Dec 01
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.
Dec 01
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.
Oct 01
Gina Adams considers herself an Indigenous-hybrid artist involved in a variety of craft-based work rooted in her heritage. Yet her commitment to art-making is equally matched by the extensive research she conducts in libraries, museums, and databases. Its Honor Is Hereby Pledged: Gina Adams is the product of Adams’s deep-dive into American history. It is a stunning collection of works intent on truth-telling, making it all the more relevant and poignant.
Oct 01
Have coffee with Tom Leech, Curator at The Press at the Palace of the Governors.
Oct 01
Erin Mickelson’s book-based artwork plays with translation, in every sense of the word. In LIMINAL betwixt/between, her series of work displayed in form & concept’s Superscript show in 2018, text is translated to sound, sound to image, and image fed into an algorithm, chopped up, and assembled into new images. Her collaborating artists are Twitter bots and long-dead authors, and her process a visible part of the product. In everything she makes, there’s a degree of absurdity and flux: how many times can you translate something and still call it the same thing?
Oct 01
The evolution of the art of printmaking is practically a human inheritance of knowledge from which we all benefit. We experience printmaking in our daily lives, from the clothes we wear and the books we read to poster advertisements for performances we attend and the money we spend. Printmaking is a three-thousand-year-old art form that reveals within itself an intimacy probably only found in the throes of a fight: gouging, biting, scraping, pressure, scarred surfaces, trenches dug. Years of battling the grain to carve images into wood leave the artists’ hands bent and curved like tree roots, maybe even burned from caustic processes that can scar the hand in the effort of creating visual landscapes.
Oct 01
Unlike most other traditional printmaking technologies, the invention of lithography can be traced to a specific person and time. Like most artists before and since, German actor and playwright Johann […]
Oct 01
As ABQ Zine Fest 9 approaches, we take a look at how print media has endured and the spaces that are building culture through the celebration of zines, books, and comics.
Oct 01
IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts showcases its student printmakers from the ‘60s and ‘70s in their explorations of form and psyche.
Oct 01
Globular figures seem to wiggle, tumble, float, or crawl across pieces of thick, white paper. Two particularly large sheets of paper cascade down from the ceiling at the center of the gallery. Sometimes they’re partially covered by a layer of clear film. About thirty smaller iterations occupy the walls. Here and there: a curled hand wearing what could be an elbow-length glove; firm, flexed ballet feet; sturdy legs in the air; and extra-long legs with powerful thighs...
Oct 01
To Survive on This Shore is the product of five years of research and travel across the U.S. The show pairs Dugan’s photographic portraits with Fabbre’s interviews with transgender and gender-nonconforming adults, all aged fifty or older. I’m drawn immediately to Duchess Milan, 69, Los Angeles, CA (2017). “I just know I’m me,” begins the text beside the photo. “I identify as Duchess.”
Oct 01
Shimano is worried that the culture of making is diminishing as technology becomes more omnipresent. She has noticed the decline in drawing skills as well as even everyday life skills among incoming students in the classes she teaches. We spoke of this phenomenon and the potential consequences which range from physical abilities in art-making to the power of having personal experiences that are unmediated by any device.
Oct 01
Zuni potter Timothy Edaakie considers himself something of a revivalist in the world of natural pottery. While conventional ceramicists opt for the speed and convenience of modern throwing and firing methods, everything about Edaakie’s meticulous approach is slow, spiritual, and aimed at celebrating the seminal work his ancestors pioneered. As 2019’s Rollin and Mary Ella King Native artist fellow, Edaakie traveled from his home on the Zuni Reservation to Santa Fe this fall to live, work, and speak at the School for Advanced Research. Specifically, he plans on re-creating two Zuni pieces from SAR’s collection using clay and other materials collected from Zuni land during his fellowship: an A:shiwi olla jar and a traditional stew bowl.
