Jul 30
Quietly, a new foundation has come into being in Santa Fe that promises to have a significant impact on art history and art-making, not just in the Southwest, but internationally. The Holt/Smithson Foundation (HSF) was literally willed into existence by artist Nancy Holt—creator of the massive concrete art installation, Sun Tunnels, in the Utah desert— who lived in Santa Fe the last two decades of her life, until her death in 2014.
Jul 26
Dorielle Caimi’s paintings have been described as absurd, humorous, truthful, and empowered. Those adjectives adequately describe Dorielle the painter, too, though I would add that she is extremely funny, smart as a whip, and masterful in her execution and rendering of the female figure. Both articulate and open in speaking about her work, Dorielle effectively integrates her emotional and physical experiences into her studio practice. Balancing expressive and brutally honest portrayals of the female form with jarring pop-surrealist color, animal characters, and cartoonish elements, she offers viewers something vibrant and complex.
Jul 29
"What Endures is, and is not, a question. It’s not incidental that I’m focused on the elemental details of my surroundings, that I want to take apart the anthropogenic landscape, break it down into its simplest ingredients. This act is central to Nina Elder’s process—and to the subjects of the featured work, which spans from 2011 to the present."
Jul 29
Denver artist Jonathan Saiz believes in the value of shock and surprise, as evidenced in two overlapping solo exhibitions. One is #WhatisUtopia, in which ten thousand miniature squares come together in a mosaic-like column given its own space at the Denver Art Museum. The second exhibition, at K Contemporary, is darker in tone, shocking you to attention with foreboding images.
Jul 29
"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."
Jul 29
Mira Burack’s artwork on view at 516 Arts in Albuquerque evokes themes of rest, comfort, and home—with a dark underside.
Jul 29
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.
Jul 27
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.
Jun 26
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.
Jun 26
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...
Jun 26
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...
Jun 26
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...
Jun 26
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.”
Jun 26
Often taken as a bellwether of U.S. artistic culture, the Whitney Biennial is renowned for its tendency to provoke political/aesthetic furor...
Jun 26
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...
May 24
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...
May 24
“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”...
May 24
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...
May 24
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...
May 24
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...
May 24
Starting this summer, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum presents the innovative sculptures and works on paper of acclaimed artist Ken Price in conversation with the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe as a part of the museum’s ongoing Contemporary Voices series...
May 24
Two years ago, I sat transfixed beside a memorial garden assembled within a gallery at the Frye Art Museum on Seattle’s First Hill. That installation, a feat in and of itself, might have scored my memory even were it not for what preceded it...
May 24
To see Robert Stokowy’s conceptual artwork, structures [ albuquerque ], I went on eight hikes in eight days. I got a deep t-shirt tan, I got really lost once, and on one day I cried a little...
May 24
Interlopers is a show of works on paper at Evoke Contemporary that brings together eighteen artists and uses the term “works on paper” broadly, representing a wide range of media...
May 11
For the first panel-discussion Collectors Collect New Mexico I at The Magazine on May 9, 2019, we hosted collectors and gallerists Christian Mayeur and Anne Poux along with artists Anne-Marie […]
Apr 26
Grace Rosario Perkins describes a drawing she had made years ago, taking Black Flag’s Family Man album and replacing Raymond Pettibon’s violent imagery with a repeated series of pencil drawings of women. She then filled out the liner notes with her mother’s name...
Apr 26
Downtown Juárez still feels gutted since the demolition of its nightclubs and the shuttering of so many businesses and markets, but among the ruins you can experience—if, I will stress, you have a Juarense to guide you—a lively community trying to find itself and its sense of vitality and ownership over the space again...
Apr 26
Amy was unyielding. Every time I saw her, she’d ask, “Have you gone to church yet?” “No,” I’d reply, again. “They’re about to start construction on the new sanctuary...”
Apr 26
Apr 26
Walking around Santiago for a week, I saw it as a magical city. In many neighborhoods, almost every house front is covered with original murals in a dazzling array of styles. Chile is saturated by the long trail of migrations...
Apr 26
Aftereffect: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Painting is not only a vibrant and eye-catching show but also an exercise in understanding how artists can be influenced by legendary painters without resorting to outright imitation. Aftereffect gathers together twelve...
Apr 26
Apr 26
Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, which catalogues an exhibition that opened last fall at Princeton University Art Museum, proposes a reorientation for American art history around ecology and environmental history.
Apr 26
Vortexting The Muses is the inaugural show of Niomi Fawn’s new brick-and-mortar curation project in Santa Fe, Show Pony Gallery. Drawings and paintings on paper, wood, glass, and brick by artist Timothy Jason Reed...
Mar 27
Harmony Hammond is lying on the floor beneath one of her paintings, craning her neck within inches of the canvas. “I’m doing edges,” she tells me. I first heard of Hammond when I came across the catalogue for Out West, a 1999 show...
Mar 27
After an afternoon insisting that I was impatient, though my date didn’t believe it was true, it was significant to walk into the UNM Museum of Art together. Galleries, of course, with their windowless, static light...
Mar 27
It is an exciting time to be Jeremy Thomas. With shows opening in Santa Fe, Munich, and Paris in the next six months, New Mexico is lucky to claim Thomas as a local and to have his work on view at the CCA Tank Garage Gallery...
Mar 27
In a video interview installed in Returning the Gaze, painter Jordan Casteel says her encounters with portraiture in museums and galleries have typically involved “dead white people” in staid poses. Her large-scale oils on canvas subvert that trope in a number of ways...
Mar 27
It’s late June 1969, and the young people clustered on Christopher Street look giddy, some performing, others a bit shy before the camera. Neither they nor Fred McDarrah, the Village Voice photographer who shot Celebration After Riots Outside Stonewall Inn (1969)...
Mar 27
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe July 27, 2017 – July 7, 2019 There’s a valuable history lesson in pedagogy and modernism upstairs at the IAIA Museum of […]
Mar 27
All of the five installation artists in Harwood Art Center’s Future Perfect wrote their artist’s statements, appropriately, in the future perfect tense. This formation encourages thinking that is forward-reaching, idealistic, and reflective at the same time...
Jun 01
the micro- and the macrocosmic. Having recently opened the show Drawing, Reading, and Counting at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans (May 7 – June 18, 2016), the Texas-born, Santa […]
Jan 30
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.
