Figure/Ground: Beyond the White Field
Whitney Museum of American Art: At first I noticed the smell, earthy almost. Then there was shade and a flush of coolness. I had entered Rafa Esparza’s Figure/Ground: Beyond the White Field [...]
July 01, 2017
Visual Art
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Kerry James Marshall has said of his childhood, “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility. [...]
July 01, 2017
The Radical Eyes of Virginia Dwan
Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971 is a bold and illuminating exhibition in honor of Virginia Dwan and is now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) [...]
July 01, 2017
Nicola López
Studio Visit: Nicola López uses printmaking, drawing, collage, and large-scale installation to create work that explores the physical and psychological experience of the contemporary city [...]
July 01, 2017
David Taylor: Monuments
The series of obelisks punctuating the US-Mexico border west of the Rio Grande is ostensibly the subject of David Taylor’s 276 photographs in Monuments. These boundary markers resulted from multiple treaties [...]
June 01, 2017
Sanctuary
Mill Contemporary: Mayor Javier Gonzales knows as well as any Santa Fesino that we can ill afford to part with funding of any sort, but he, along with several other mayors across the nation, has maintained a steadfast stance [...]
June 01, 2017
Origins: Life is a Lover
5. Gallery:
June 01, 2017
Marcus Zúñiga: Ya Veo
No Land Gallery: There is one segment in the episodic Bayeux Tapestry—the famous 230-foot long textile (ca. 1070-1080) that depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066 [...]
June 01, 2017
Ilona Pachler: Memory, Places and Measures
Art.i.fact Gallery: Fukuda Chiyo-ni’s famous haiku bloomed from the mists of Edo Period Japan to inspire Ilona Pachler’s solo exhibition [...]
June 01, 2017
Cryin’ Out Loud
Center for Contemporary Arts: In the early 1970s I worked on a radio show at KPFA in Berkeley called Unlearning to Not Speak. It was a historical moment when educated, middle-class, Western women articulated how we had been silenced [...]
June 01, 2017
Michael Namingha
Studio Visit: Michael Namingha has the admirable ability to reveal the irony of language and words on the one hand and, on the other, to cut landscapes apart, fracturing them into sometimes-repetitive images that cascade beyond any typical frame [...]
June 01, 2017
WISC Fellowship Presentation with Judy Chicago and Curator Chad Alligood
The Women’s International Study Center (WISC) and form + concept gallery collaborated to present a lecture by Chad Alligood, curator at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art [...]
April 01, 2017
Jill O’Bryan: Mapping Resonance & Madelin Coit: Interface
Center for Contemporary Arts: How do you sum up a solo exhibition? You could measure it in studio hours, or leagues of thought. Jill O’Bryan counted Mapping Resonance in breaths [...]
April 01, 2017
Frank Buffalo Hyde: I-Witness Culture
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture: By altering technology humans alter their perceptions. By altering our perceptions we alter our minds, our thoughtways. Euro Medicine exploits aboriginal ethno-botanies [...]
April 01, 2017
Erin Fussell: Deep Waters, Thin Places
Sanitary Tortilla Factory: In the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, among the tufts of brush, cacti, and tangles of hiking paths and winding mountain-bike trails, sits the Embudo Dam, just one of the many flood-control structures that exist throughout the neighborhoods of Albuquerque [...]
April 01, 2017
Park Place Gallery: Founders and Friends, Then and Now
David Richard Gallery: The Park Place Gallery is probably not as prominent as it should be in the art-historical canon. Founded in 1962 by nine artists working in New York City, many of whom were recent West Coast transplants, the gallery’s program was decidedly anti-dogmatic [...]
April 01, 2017
Confected
Richard Levy Gallery: In this two-person show, with paintings by Matthew McConville and photographs by Jason DeMarte, both the genres of still-life painting and nature photography are given a conceptual once-over [...]
April 01, 2017
La Lucha Sigue
There is no order in this hellish landscape: two policemen raise billy clubs against a figure slouched at the foot of a parked police car [...]
April 01, 2017
Mimbres Multiplied: Ancient Pottery and Modern American Visual Culture
I first met Janet Catherine Berlo when she invited me to her home for dinner. It was 2009, and I had just arrived in Rochester, New York, where she is Professor of Native American Art History [...]
April 01, 2017
Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place
Denver Art Museum: Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place is an exhibition of site-specific installations by emerging and mid-career Latino artists that express experiences of contemporary life in the American West [...]
April 01, 2017
Richard Kurtz
Richard Kurtz paints prolifically on almost any substrate he can find. Appropriating everything from children’s books to football helmets, vintage flash cards to large pieces of leftover plywood, Kurtz combines pictorial characters with hand-written aphorisms [...]
April 01, 2017
David Chickey | Maker of Radius Books
"We do this bookstore every December," says David Chickey. He stands in the lofty, second floor office of Radius Books on Palace Avenue, a rare example of midcentury modern architecture in Santa Fe. [...]
February 01, 2017
Something I Need You to Know
Something I Need You To Know debuted on Wednesday, November 9, 2016, the day after the United States presidential election. During the opening reception, visitors staggered through the hallways of Santa Fe [...]
February 01, 2017
Native Realities: Superheroes of Past, Present, and Future
A recent exhibition at one of Santa Fe's truly contemporary galleries conveyed a tenet of what makes an art space in Santa Fe “contemporary” in the first place. The word is largely misused—by myself and [...]
February 01, 2017
Garo Antreasian: Innovation in Print
The Tamarind Institute has been operating since 1960; in 1970, Albuquerque became its home base. It is hard to imagine American printmaking, certainly lithography, before its existence when artists who [...]
February 01, 2017
Paula Castillo
Paula Castillo is a priestess of postmodern metallurgy, recombining the scrap and detritus of Industry into abstract sculptures that quietly reckon with earth and man. A metallurgist only in a poetic, alchemical [...]
February 01, 2017
Cate White: The Keys to the City
One art critic from the Bay Area, Jessica Zack, referred to Cate White’s work as “vivid tragicomic painting... with its skin-in-the-game vitality” and that is what first hits you—White’s go-for-broke passion for art, life, social justice, and racial fairness. It seems that there is nothing that White won’t investigate...
December 01, 2016
Alcoves 16-17 #5
Al-qobbah, “the vaulted chamber,” a recessed space, within a room or without, like a bower. “Alcove” has many applications, and the New Mexico Museum of Art has one of the best of them. The NMMA Alcoves 16/17 exhibition series comprises seven small group shows, each featuring five New Mexico artists and running for five weeks...
December 01, 2016
small
A new off-the-beaten-path exhibition space founded by Max Baseman, 5. Gallery has had a number of small exhibitions, primarily featuring local emerging artists. The raw, warehouse-style space is one of the latest to pop up in the budding—perhaps now burgeoning—Rufina arts district. For its next exhibition, small, a selection of small-scale...
December 01, 2016
Nathan Carter: Meet the Dramastics, Kim Dickey: Words are Leaves, and Bodacioussss, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver
If you’re Denver-bound this ski season, the MCA Denver has a trifecta of concurrent exhibitions on view through January 29. Kim Dickey: Words Are Leaves is a major survey of work by the Boulder, CO–based artist. Primarily working in ceramics, but also other media including textile and photography...
December 01, 2016
