12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Françoise Barnes
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.
Jan 30
Visual Art
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Mira Burack
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Vincent Campos
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Vanessa Gonzalez
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Dorothy Melander-Dayton
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Rosemary Meza-DesPlas
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Martín Wannam
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Heather Gallegos-Rex
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Yeshe Parks
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now: Jennifer Vasher
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.
Jan 30
12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now
New Mexico Artists to Know Now
When we first dreamed up the Artists Issue, we thought of it as a way to share—with New Mexico and beyond—a sample of the most vibrant and engaged artists working in New Mexico right now. Artists whose work deserves sustained attention, whether or not you’ve ever heard of them before.
Jan 30
Currency: What Do You Value?
Currency: What do you value? puts fifteen artists in conversation about the problem of value in a world where the dollar seems to be the one unit of measurement that everyone can agree on—even if few can articulate what a dollar measures, or means.
Jan 30
In the Ruins of the Anthropocene
I enter the gallery and see the word “Anthropocene” in vinyl on the wall, and my first thought is: it’s a tired conversation in an art context, but let’s shake the tree and see if anything good comes out.
Nov 27
Daniel McCoy
"Before, I was taught to paint in a traditional, old-school style in Oklahoma. But Santa Fe wasn’t into that. There was lots of activism back then. It was the four hundred year mark of Columbus in the Americas, and there was a certain kind of American Indian Movement (AIM) echo in response. That was my first eye-opener..."
Nov 28
Tara Donovan: Fieldwork
While many viewers stand mouths agape at the idea of clipping and adhering hundreds of thousands of straws, I’m indifferent to labor and duration. The work takes time: so what? Instead, I lose my mind over the honeycombed waves with optical clusters of tan and ochre that emerge from what I understand to be uniformly opaque white straws.
Nov 28
National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum
My third-grade field trip to a State Capitol was a muggy school-bus ride to Montgomery, Alabama. We visited the requisite sites, including the state senate chambers and a life-size statue of Jefferson Davis. We were taught that the Capitol building was the first headquarters for the Confederacy during the Civil War, which was fought to preserve “states’ rights.” Rights to do what? is a question nobody asked...
Nov 28
Darby Photos: 207
A collection of eight quilts by Darby Photos, some longer than seven feet, spreads across the white walls of the gallery. In them, violence is implied but not explicit. Each depicts a school where a mass shooting took place. The title of the collected work, 207, refers to the number of people injured across all eight sites.
Nov 28
Dorothy Stewart
“Dear Toad of My Heart,” begins one of the two thousand pages of letters between Dorothy Stewart and Maria Chabot in the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center. “Dearest Thing,” begins another. These letters are a remarkable record of two women in love in the 1920s and ’30s and their various heartbreaks, jealousies, friendships, and new loves along the way...
Nov 28
The Audacity of Art: Art for the Midterm Elections
The Audacity of Art: Art for the Midterm Elections plays on a phrase that President Barack Obama used in his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention...
Oct 30
Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts
In Santa Fe, Bruce Nauman feels to me like an invisible figure. I know he lives near, I know he frequents the same diner I frequent, I question every tall, bald man in my vicinity, but...
Oct 30
Aaron Honyumptewa
Aaron Honyumptewa imbues his katsina carvings with the traditional ethos of the Hopi people combined with an undercurrent of...
Oct 30
Mourning and Militancy: David Wojnarowicz’s ITSOFOMO
A snake rides in the grass. A rat materializes in front of it. There’s not much doubt how this encounter is going to end...
Oct 30
Matthew Mullins: The Sun in Our Bones
What does it mean to make landscape paintings in 2018? Just this morning I was reading the recently issued UN Climate Change Report about coming food shortages, growing wildfires...
Oct 30
Unpacking the Archives: Multi-cultural
At the mural’s center, a brown-skinned woman reaches her arms outward, one hand holding a microscope, the other a volumetric flask. She is the corn goddess—nose broad, lips full, and hair parted in the middle. Her gaze is fixed...
Oct 30
The Printed Page / Thomas Christopher Haag
The Printed Page Series: Thomas Christopher Haag, Look What I Can Do
Oct 30
Zone: Visionary and Contemplative Art
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I find myself embarrassed by my own lack of creativity. I’m making my way through...
Oct 30
Phil Binaco: The Affirming Flame
Phil Binaco’s recent body of work was inspired by a poem by W. H. Auden...
Oct 29
Art in Public Places
Public art finds itself at the center of a number of our era’s flashpoints: the controversy over Confederate monuments; a questionably placed statue of...
Oct 01
Karsten Creightney
In Karsten Creightney’s painting studio at Sanitary Tortilla Factory in downtown Albuquerque, there is a massive pile of paper scraps: richly colored vintage advertisements, newspaper clippings, blown-out images torn to bits, an array of textures, colors, and weights. This is the stuff of dreams...
Oct 01
Drowned River: An Interview with Rebecca Solnit and Mark Klett
Rebecca Solnit’s writing on the intersection of environmental damage and the human body has long captured my attention as a reader and as an inhabitant of this planet...
Oct 01
Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now
The upcoming exhibition, Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now, at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, highlights the work of modern Indigenous artists from the U.S. and Canada...
Oct 01
Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking
I’ve always maintained an irrational but polite envy of the orderly and meticulous artist whose studio is swept daily, whose works are steadily recorded, and whose supplies are inventoried as you might find...
Oct 01
Wilderness Acts: Art in the Land
It’s a pleasure to be taken by surprise in a place I had never heard of before—the Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve in La Cienega. Managed by the Santa Fe Botanical Garden, this thirty-five-acre gem is a kiss away from I-25, yet it’s a haven for flora and fauna...
Oct 01
Holly Wilson: On Turtle’s Back
“Anything or anyone you care for creates a responsibility for you,” reads a museum plaque beside Holly Wilson’s Guardian and Guide, one of six of the artist’s works currently on display at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. In the piece, a small bronze-cast woman perches...
Oct 01
The Printed Page / Thomas Christopher Haag
Forgotten (symbol) by Thomas Christopher Haag
Oct 01
GenNext: Future So Bright
n GenNext, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art assembles a group of contemporary artists working between traditional genres and contemporary subject matter. Each artist combines the materials and iconography of New Mexico’s traditional Spanish arts...
Oct 01
Yumiko and Kenro Izu: In Harmony
I am not a photographer. When I tell a friend I’m writing a review of Yumiko and Kenro Izu’s exhibition In Harmony at Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd., she asks me to forgive her before saying...
Oct 01
Archive Futures
One of the most difficult things for an artist to do is to reckon with her own legacy. This is not just a theoretical concern for where one fits into a particular historical narrative—it’s also of material importance...
Aug 28
Brandon Maldonado
It’s not hard to understand why Brandon Maldonado’s paintings are in high demand...
Aug 28
Cheryl Donegan: GRLZ + VEILS
Cheryl Donegan’s GRLZ + VEILS, curated by Heidi Zuckerman and Bill Arning...
Aug 28
Unpacking the Archives: Colorado Springs’ Fine Arts Center at Colorado College
On April 8, 1956, E. Boyd decided that a santo in the collection of Taylor Museum was a fraud...
Aug 28
Aug 28
American Jewelry
It is thought that prehistoric humans adorned their bodies with simple jewelry pieces...
