XYZT: Abstract Landscapes
Can we materialize time? Does light have roots? Can we see something when there is nothing?...
Jul 30
Visual Art
Jul 30
Beautiful Test Sites/Now I Am Become Death
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” quoth J. Robert Oppenheimer from the Bhagavad Gita...
Jul 30
Everywhen: Indigenous Photoscapes
Time, as many a physicist, mystic, and indigenous American can tell you, is not linear, despite our human perception of it as such...
Jul 30
Jetsonorama: Messages for the Future
"I am the son of J.E.T., or Jetson," Chip Thomas said, referring to his own initials and those of his father. Thomas’s full name is Dr. James Edward Thomas, Jr., and his father, James Edward Thomas, Sr., was the original J.E.T. It’s how Chip Thomas came to his own moniker, Jetsonorama.
Jul 30
Daisy Quezada
Early in her artistic career, Daisy Quezada came across a real-life scene with all the power of an omen. She and her mother had ventured to their old house in Jalisco, Mexico, which was long abandoned.
Jun 29
Raychael Stine
As Raychael Stine guided us to her studio on the fringes of the University of New Mexico campus, where she has been an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing for the past five years, I realized that all my questions were actually the same question: Why dogs?
Jun 29
Recall, Recapture, Remember
Tansey Contemporary: The title of this fiber-art exhibition smacks of redundancy—if you couldn’t guess, it’s about memory—but it’s surprisingly economical in other respects. Recall, Recapture, Remember features twenty-two artists from across the Southwest, selected...
Jun 29
Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer
Words, whether in the form of slogans, mantras, or hip-hop lyrics, matter, and they are treated reverentially and humorously by multimedia artist Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band Choctaw, Cherokee), whose work is the subject of Like a Hammer, a show on view at the Denver...
Jun 29
Two-Fold: A Pairing of Frederick Hammersley + Matthew Shlian
Paper has a memory. Each crease is recorded in the impression left where it was once folded. It can expand like origami, and it can collapse into flatness again, but its history remains pressed into the stuff it’s made of. It is this material and all the marks worn...
Jun 29
Larry Bell: Hocus, Focus and 12
Larry Bell: Hocus, Focus and 12, currently on view at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, is a large-scale exhibition focusing on the artist’s minimalist, architectonic works that reference the clean modernism of Southern California as well as the sleek geometric forms of...
Jun 28
Inner Orbit
form & concept: For most people who aren’t astronomers or astrophysicists, outer space is a nebulous concept (no pun intended). How we relate to ideas like space-time, the Big Bang, and black holes often has more to do with our immediate material surroundings than with...
Jun 28
The Folk Art Universe
This year the International Folk Art Market celebrates its fifteenth birthday. IFAM first began in 2004 with sixty-one artists from thirty-six countries. Now, that number has more than doubled to 162 artists from fifty-three countries. Officially, the vending is two days...
Jun 29
Unpacking the Archives: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian
If an object you hold dear could speak, what would it say? Would it talk about the circumstances of its making, who it came into contact with, or where it’s traveled? You see, objects are born into the world, moving about from place to place. Sometimes they are passed...
Jun 01
Futurition Santa Fe
Futurition Santa Fe is a collaborative effort to bring awareness to a number of events taking place across several Santa Fe institutions and businesses that involve the intersections of art, science, and technology. The primary participants include Santa Fe Institute, Currents New Media, the Thoma Foundation (Art House), form & concept...
Jun 01
Larry Bell: Hocus, Focus and 12
The Harwood Museum of Art in Taos is gearing up for a large-scale exhibition of local luminary Larry Bell’s work. The show, titled Hocus, Focus and 12, is curated by Gus Foster, Taos photographer and Bell’s friend and collaborator. Highlights of the exhibition...
Jun 01
Stuart Arends: Tin Man, Slabs, and My Father’s House
Mayeur Projects: Stuart Arends is fond of saying that he lives in the middle of nowhere. Ever hear of Willard, New Mexico? The landscape around the artist’s house is austere, almost barren, with a view of some mountains off in the distance. He is “off the grid and under the radar”...
Jun 01
Taos: 1960s-Present
Soon after moving to northern New Mexico, almost seven years ago, and after doing a welter of studio visits, I noted the number of exceptional draftspersons in the area and pulled together a proposal for a show of drawings by artists who live in the general area of Taos...
Jun 01
Because It’s Time: Unraveling Race and Place in NM
National Hispanic Cultural Center: Identity. It’s one of those words, concepts, ways of making sense of the world and ourselves that could fill volumes. Indeed, volumes of stories: self-made, inherited, or, in many instances, projected. Identity is that way...
Jun 01
Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru
Museum of International Folk Art: On the wall of Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru reads a statement describing the Peruvian capital’s thriving artistic communities: “Popular arts in Lima are all about remixing.” Moving through the show, it becomes clear that...
Jun 01
Patrick Nagatani: A Survey of Early Photographs
UNM Art Museum: The whir of air conditioning swells as viewers descend the stairs of the UNM Museum of Art into the cave-like rooms that contain Patrick Nagatani: A Survey of Early Photographs. Blonde wood chairs sit at the bottom of the staircase in the...
Jun 01
Nikesha Breeze: Within This Skin
Harwood Museum of Art: Late in the process of making artwork for her solo exhibition, Within This Skin, Nikesha Breeze started a series of ceramic and oxide wall sculptures titled Written in Water. She calls the works “death masks,” and each coppery visage was...
Jun 01
Shane Tolbert
“This rock formation is forty million years old.” Shane Tolbert is guiding me through a narrow passage whose walls contain countless miniscule pebbles and stones—remnants of a mudslide caused by a rush of prehistoric water that cut through the area around the Colorado...
May 10
Michael Hedges: In Bloom
David Richard Gallery: Michael Hedges is a painter based near Chicago. He is youngish, what we might call “mid-career,” and I would suggest that he’s an artist to watch as he continues making art over the years. In Bloom consists of fifteen oil paintings whose style and...
May 01
Gloria Graham
Spending a morning with Gloria Graham in her drawing studio is like being in the world's most inspiring chemistry class. She speaks with sheer awe about the structures and movements of molecular particles, telling personal anecdotes about carbon and silicon, acting out the effects...
May 01
Agueda Salazar Martínez
In a video taken in 1995, Agueda Martínez stands at her loom wearing a long floral dress, an apron, and a faded baseball cap with the logo of a local café. She works the threads quickly with both hands, tapping out a rhythm on the treadles below. She is 97 years old...
Jun 02
Field Report: Naoshima
For us the journey to Naoshima, the art island of Japan in the Seto Inland Sea, will necessarily be long. You’ll have taken a plane or two or three, a Shinkansen, a train, a bus, a ferry, a shuttle. You’ll have overcome the inevitable travel dramas of buying the right...
May 01
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
In a recent interview in Artforum, the artist Howardena Pindell recalls her first efforts toward protesting the oppressive and exclusionary practices of art institutions in the 1970s: “Because I was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I needed to remain anonymous, so...
May 01
Young Curators Present: Guises
Since 2000, SITE Santa Fe’s Young Curators program has given high school students the opportunity to plan every step of a museum exhibition. Students from across New Mexico meet weekly to plan an exhibition theme, create calls for artwork, jury submissions, and install...
May 01
Jane Lackey: Shifting Pulse
Central Features Contemporary Art: The term shibui refers to a particular aesthetic in Japanese art, and it can mean a variety of things that are like spokes on a wheel organized around a central core of perceptions: simplicity, unobtrusive beauty, a spare elegance, and implicity...
May 01
Shaelin Jornigan: Home Whispers and Jazmyn Crosby: Eggs in the Rain, Eggs on the Floor
Orpheum Community Hub: A narrow entrance and hallway separates two exhibition spaces in downtown Albuquerque’s Orpheum Community Hub, a building that features classrooms, art spaces, and more, as well as offices for the Homewise Albuquerque Homeownership Center. Word is that...
May 01
Work by Women
Harwood Museum of Art: On the walls of major museums, only five percent of artwork is by women. The Harwood Museum flips this number in its current exhibition: there’s a small display featuring some men upstairs, but most of the institution’s galleries are devoted to Work...
May 01
David Naranjo
Poeh Cultural Center: It only takes a few seconds of looking before the optical illusion begins to work on my eyes. The white on the canvas jumps forward and begins to pulsate softly against the black ground. I simply stare without moving until my consciousness snaps...
Apr 30
Let Nature In[side]
“I love coming back home and being surrounded with things that have some connection or meaning to me,” Aimee LaCalle tells me. An avid traveler and founder of her eponymous Santa Fe–based textile design company, LaCalle makes soft home goods, like bedding, table linens, and fabric...
Jan 30
Zahra Marwan
Zahra grew up in two deserts that vary drastically and have many similarities in culture. One close to the sea, the other close to the mountains. She studied the visual arts in France, and continues various pursuits to further educate herself. She currently lives...
Apr 06
Shelley Horton-Trippe: High Brow Low Ride
Phil Space: Shelley Horton-Trippe, in her recent exhibition High Brow Low Ride, references the great twentieth-century French writer Colette, and she does this by way of a large painting titled The Pure and the Impure (Colette). Horton-Trippe draws on Colette’s book...
Apr 01
Colette Hosmer
In Colette Hosmer’s living room, a bookcase contains shelves full of jars of turtle bones, porcupine quills, dead insects, and other sundry specimens the artist has collected from the natural world. Having long informed her sculpture practice, these specimens now inspire a...
Apr 01
Everything I Lost in the Flood: Essays on Pictures, Language and Code
For fans of Laurie Anderson, and I certainly count myself as one, the book Everything I Lost in the Flood archives her forty-plus-year art career, beginning with a 1974 performance piece called Duets on Ice. This work, even in its simplicity, constellates a certain inscrutable...
Apr 01
Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design
Albuquerque Museum: Making Africa approaches the design of a huge, diverse place through many media with the intention of providing a fuller understanding of the contemporary work being developed in the creative sector across the continent's 54 countries.
Apr 01
Between the Waters
Fishing nets once connected the communities along Colombia’s Magdalena (Yuma) river with the water and its populations, but now the waters are so polluted the nets cannot be used for fishing. Carolina Caycedo, whose parents are Colombian, repurposes the nets as hand-dyed sculptures...
Apr 01
Nancy Holt
Nancy Holt is known for artworks that engage the celestial: stars and sunlight, orbiting bodies, and the earth’s rotation. But getting to know her work more thoroughly through Sightlines, a retrospective edited by Alena Williams in 2011 and still the only and most complete...
Apr 01
Lucy Maki: Double Take
Exhibit/208: Remember that magical automobile from Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, the one that whisks a stuttering Owen Wilson back to the 1920s to party with Gertrude Stein and company? I like to imagine that was just one cab in a fleet of cosmic taxis, each with its own art...
Apr 01
Quest for the New: Modernism in the Southwest
LewAllen Galleries: Tucked into a quiet nook in the northwest corner of LewAllen Galleries’ rather showy structure is a gem of an exhibition. Quest for the New: Modernism in the Southwest features artworks by a who’s-who litany of Santa Fe’s early twentieth-century art colony...
Apr 01
Field Report: Austin
I keep waiting for New Mexico to embrace the taco. I love a burrito as much as the next guy, and the enchiladas at La Choza are life-changing, but with so much green chile and red chile flowing here in Santa Fe, the taco and its valiant hero, salsa, have been eclipsed. I visited...
