Visual Art

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

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

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

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

Food + Drink

Have coffee with Tom Leech, Curator at The Press at the Palace of the Governors.

Lauren Tresp • October 01, 2019

New Mexico Women

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.

Angie Rizzo • October 01, 2019

FeatureStudio Visit

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?

Robin Babb • October 01, 2019

Sponsored

Claire Kahn’s design sensibilities are applied across a staggering range of media. From architecture to water features (she was the project designer and a choreographer on the team that designed the Bellagio fountain, among many notable others) to jewelry, she seeks to discover, distill, and express the essence of her subjects. Her upcoming jewelry exhibition at Patina Gallery, Signs of Life, explores the twelve months of the year through pieces composed of their birthstones and crocheted beads.

Tamara Johnson • October 01, 2019

PreviewSponsored

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.

Patrick McGuire • October 01, 2019

Feature

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.

Marya Errin Jones • October 01, 2019

Feature

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 […]

Titus O'Brien • October 01, 2019

Feature

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.

Maggie Grimason • October 01, 2019

Review

IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts showcases its student printmakers from the ‘60s and ‘70s in their explorations of form and psyche.

Asuri Ramanujan Krittika • October 01, 2019