Visual Art

Oct 01

[sponsored] Claire Kahn Creates Signs of Life through Color and Pattern

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. By Tamara Johnson

Aug 30

New Mexico Women: Virginia Dwan

New Mexico Women

Virginia Dwan, best known in the Southwest for her support of land art and artists, as well as the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico, boasts a career that reaches far beyond the desert. Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Dwan got her start in Los Angeles with the Virginia Dwan Gallery, which eventually expanded to New York, where she represented artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Sol LeWitt, Edward Kienholz, and many, many more. Dwan, the heiress of manufacturing conglomerate 3M, was able to take risks on challenging art. She played a major role in supporting some of the most definitive earthworks, such as Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, The Lightning Fields by Walter De Maria, Double Negative by Michael Heizer, and the still-in-progress Star Axis by Charles Ross. She is still a passionate supporter of the arts and speaks fondly of working with artists and being a part of the creative process. By Angie Rizzo

Aug 28

All Work and All Play: At Home with Artists Cannupa Hanska Luger and Ginger Dunnill

Feature

We took a seat at the table in the center of the warehouse-turned-home (turned-“work, brainstorming, and studio space”) where artists Cannupa Hanska Luger and Ginger Dunnill live in Glorieta, New Mexico. Taped to the kitchen cabinet was a wall-size paper schedule of impending deadlines for numerous projects. Every line was filled out, and notes were made in black marker, even in the margins. “Welcome to my life,” Dunnill laughed as, never skipping a beat, she outlined their individual projects—while the couple’s two children ran in one door and out the other... By Maggie Grimason

Aug 28

Studio Visit: Ted Larsen

FeatureStudio Visit

The tone of my studio visit with Santa Fe artist Ted Larsen was set early when he declared that he would likely be both circumspect and like a blowtorch when talking about his thoughts on his studio practice, life, and work. Now fifty-five, the trained painter has been showing his art since before he graduated college. By the time he was twenty-two, he had already exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, making big strides early on in a career that has now spanned decades. By Clayton Porter

Aug 28

southwestNET: Shizu Saldamando

Review

Sashiko greets me as I enter the gallery for Shizu Saldamando’s show, held at SMOCA as part of southwestNET’s series showcasing mid-career Mexican and U.S. artists from the Southwest. Hushed and intimate, each work seems to demand all of one’s attention, a bid made more poignant by Saldamando’s insistence on portraying friends and family and, according to the wall text, “refus[ing] any notions of subjugation” in the artist-subject relationship. A multifaceted artist of Mexican American and Japanese American heritage, Saldamando focuses on “often-overlooked communities of color: punks, queers, activists, and artists.” By Aviva Dove-Viebahn

Aug 28

Rapheal Begay: Lest We Forget

Review

Rapheal Begay is a Diné photographer and curator from Window Rock, Arizona, (the capital of the Navajo Nation) currently showing his work at Trapdoor Projects, near downtown Albuquerque. The medium is photography, but the methods are strikingly conceptual, requiring viewers to finish the work in their minds. His work evokes memories of family, as well as harshly beautiful landscapes and the animals who populate them—especially sheep—in the Navajo Nation. By Krittika Ramanujan

Aug 28

Hung Liu: Catchers

Review

Catchers helps us see into the past and, through the past, to recognize those we ignore in the present. By Jonah Winn-Lenetsky

Aug 28

Weekday Detour: Street Art in Albuquerque

Feature

Briana Olson meditates on belonging as she tours the murals and street art of Albuquerque, New Mexico. By Briana Olson

Jul 30

Building the Legacy of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson

Feature

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. By Janet Abrams

Jul 26

Studio Visit: Dorielle Caimi

FeatureStudio Visit

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. By Kate Wood

Jul 29

Nina Elder: What Endures

Review

"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." By Briana Olson

Jul 29

Jonathan Saiz in Denver

Review

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. By Deborah Ross

Jul 29

Alicia Stewart: Unfinished . . .

Review

"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." By Kate Wood

Jul 29

Mira Burack: Sleeping between the Sun and the Moon

Review

Mira Burack’s artwork on view at 516 Arts in Albuquerque evokes themes of rest, comfort, and home—with a dark underside. By Robin Babb

Jul 29

Raven Chacon: Still Life No. 3

National Spotlight

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. By Briana Olson

Jul 27

[sponsored] Preview: Ian Kuali’i

Preview

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. By Maggie Grimason

Jun 26

James Drake: Que Linda la Brisa

Review

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. By Shane Tolbert

Jun 26

Studio Visit: Stuart Arends

FeatureStudio Visit

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... By Clayton Porter

Jun 26

Gendron Jensen: Bidden

Review

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... By Sarah Bradley

Jun 26

Judy Tuwaletstiwa: The Dream Life of Objects

Review

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... By Kate Wood

Jun 26

New Mexico Women: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

New Mexico Women

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.” By Jenn Shapland

Jun 26

Whitney Biennial 2019

Review

Often taken as a bellwether of U.S. artistic culture, the Whitney Biennial is renowned for its tendency to provoke political/aesthetic furor... By Janet Abrams

Jun 26

Judy Chicago: The Birth Project from New Mexico Collections

Review

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... By Matthew Irwin

May 24

West by Southwest: Considering Landscape in Contemporary Art

Feature

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... By Shane Tolbert

May 24

Meet Your Makers: Subhankar Banerjee

Meet Your Makers

“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”... By Maggie Grimason

May 24

Studio Visit: Paula Wilson and Mike Lagg

Studio Visit

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... By Angie Rizzo

May 24

New Mexico Women: Lucy Lippard

New Mexico Women

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... By Jenn Shapland

May 24

Bauhaus Centennial: 1919-2019

Review

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... By Deborah Ross

May 24

[Sponsored] Contemporary Voices: Ken Price Preview

Preview

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... By Shane Tolbert

May 24

Cauleen Smith: Give It or Leave It

National Spotlight

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... By Briana Olson

May 24

Robert Stokowy: [structures] Albuquerque

Review

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... By Robin Babb

May 24

Interlopers

Review

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... By Sarah Bradley

May 11

Collectors Collect New Mexico I: Jugnet+Clairet, Christian Mayeur, Anne Poux

News

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 […] By Lauren Tresp

Apr 26

Studio Visit: Grace Rosario Perkins

FeatureStudio Visit

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... By Maggie Grimason

Apr 26

Field Report: El Paso + Juárez

FeatureTravel

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... By Jenn Shapland

Apr 26

My Love Affair with Sandro’s Ghosts: Alexander Girard’s Legacy in New Mexico

Feature

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...” By Rachel Preston Prinz

Apr 26

Out There

Review

Out There at Gallery Fritz pairs the work of two New Mexico artists, painter Terri Rolland and sculptor Jeff Krueger. Their work naturally invites comparisons, though... By Sarah Bradley

Apr 26

Migration

National Spotlight

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... By Marina La Palma

Apr 26

Aftereffect

Review

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... By Deborah Ross

Apr 26

Qué Chola

Review

Qué Chola is an homage to the characteristically Chicana figure of the chola. The show features street photographs and paintings inspired by old snapshots, plays on pin-up ads and Lotería cards, constructed photos, and graphic art... By Briana Olson

Apr 26

Book Review: Nature’s Nation

The Library

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. By Matthew Irwin

Apr 26

Timothy Jason Reed: Vortexting the Muses

Review

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... By Kate Wood

Mar 27

Studio Visit: Harmony Hammond

FeatureStudio Visit

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... By Jenn Shapland