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.
January 30, 2019
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.
January 30, 2019
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.
January 30, 2019
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.
January 30, 2019
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.
January 30, 2019
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.
November 28, 2018
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...
November 28, 2018
“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...
November 28, 2018
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.
November 28, 2018
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...
November 28, 2018
"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..."
November 27, 2018
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...
October 30, 2018
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...
October 30, 2018
The Printed Page Series: Thomas Christopher Haag, Look What I Can Do
October 30, 2018
Phil Binaco’s recent body of work was inspired by a poem by W. H. Auden...
October 30, 2018
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...
October 30, 2018
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...
October 30, 2018
Aaron Honyumptewa imbues his katsina carvings with the traditional ethos of the Hopi people combined with an undercurrent of...
October 30, 2018
On a recent Tuesday afternoon, I find myself embarrassed by my own lack of creativity. I’m making my way through...
October 30, 2018
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...
October 29, 2018
Forgotten (symbol) by Thomas Christopher Haag
October 01, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
“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...
October 01, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
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...
October 01, 2018
