Dec 01
The presence of so many cartoon characters, plus, on one painting, the block-printed phrase “Everything Will Be OK,” might suggest that the title of this exhibition (on view through December 4) reflects a state of mind. Along with toy monkeys and a thumbs up sign, various icons of “optimism” turn out to convey a more ambiguous message...
Dec 01
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...
Dec 01
Matthews Gallery presents a major retrospective of Janet Lippincott, a pioneer of Southwest Modernism. Born in New York in 1918, Lippincott had attended the Art Students League of New York at age fifteen before departing for Paris where she was introduced to the work of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and other early modernists...
Dec 01
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...
Nov 01
Earl McBride works across a variety of moods, methods, and vibrations—predominantly in the realm of abstract painting. Throughout, his layered markmaking against clean white or softly patinaed panels creates compositions that buzz with tension. In more vigorous pieces, pigment and line are suspended, about to collide in a frenzy...
Oct 15
What a felicitous curatorial idea, the juxtaposition of this trio of artists. Pokrasso, Stanford, and Glovaski continue to explore new media...
Nov 11
Let us sing the praises of art galleries who dare set up shop in risky neighborhoods...
Nov 01
Nüart Gallery, Santa Fe October 7-30, 2016 evolution of a sculptor (or of almost any artist, for that matter) is a series of comprehensible and logical steps leading to a fully […]
Nov 01
When I think of Mabel Dodge Luhan and her company, celestial analogies spring to mind: a constellation of disparate personalities, a system of spinning bodies suspended and connected, held in balance by the gravitational force of a central figure whose brilliance is both perilous and life-giving...
Dec 01
By all accounts, Elaine de Kooning had a roaring good time in Albuquerque. The abstract expressionist painter was a guest professor at the University of New Mexico for two years in the late 1950s, and longtime faculty members still tell tales of her exuberant ways. She drove her...
Dec 01
Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe: It’s impossible to convey the monumental quality present in Tom Joyce’s exhibition. The scale of some of his forged iron and steel pieces is something to consider along with the works’ refined Platonic sense of form. In addition, there...
Dec 01
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art: In an influential column in the New York Times in 1970, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called Paolo Soleri “the prophet in the desert,” positing that his ideas on the necessary comingling of architecture and ecology, or...
Dec 01
Some advice before visiting the Hammer Museum to view Radical Women: make sure you have a few hours, and bring a notebook and pen. The exhibition, a dense and sprawling display of hundreds of works, deserves focused attention, and there will be many artists that most viewers...
Dec 01
Central Features Contemporary Art, Albuquerque: Central Features is blank in all the right ways. treading across the unassuming polished concrete floors to the center of the gallery—which is partitioned into one large immaculately white room and several smaller ones...
Dec 01
Etiquette, Santa Fe: My first visit to Etiquette, for the opening of 8 Photographers at Etiquette in early September, I was shocked. In a warehouse-esque space behind Siler Road I saw, at a single glance, more people under thirty than I have seen in the year and...
Dec 01
Taos Art Museum at Fechin House, Taos: The Taos Art Museum at Fechin House has recently completed the reinstallation of portions of their permanent collection on the museum’s first floor. The collection highlights the work of the Russian émigré Nicolai Fechin...
Dec 01
Blue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe: In his exhibition title, the artist martin spei introduces his viewers to the concept of tramoya, defining the Spanish term as “various leftover stage props and devices that may or may not be seen as detritus by the next play’s crew when they...
Dec 01
516 Arts and the Albuquerque Museum: The US-Mexico border has come to occupy an intellectually and emotionally charged space as well as a territorial one. Much of the creative production around the border unearths ways in which artists, architects, designers...
Dec 01
Michael Bergt has been in deep dialogue with art history over the course of his more than thirty-year career. Working across drawing, sculpture, and primarily egg tempera painting, Bergt has engaged art’s long history of grappling with representational and abstract sensibilities...
Nov 01
This Thanksgiving, learn how to carve a turkey, illustrated by designer and illustrator Chris Philpot...
Nov 28
Alert arts community members may remember Thais Mather as one-third of the Victory Grrrls, who performed at form & concept earlier this year as part of the gallery’s programming around an event featuring feminist pioneer artist Judy Chicago. I’ve been keeping my eye on for this artist...
Nov 01
Faye Gleisser, the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center’s current postdoctoral fellow, finds inspiration in the work of scholars and artists who disrupt linear historical periods. Fred Wilson is particularly influential. Gaining renown in the early nineties, Wilson juxtaposed...
Nov 01
SITE Santa Fe: The future is now, at least in the context of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. When the book debuted in 1970, the year 2017 was a figment of the journalist-turned-futurist’s locomotive imagination. He daydreamed personal spaceships and underwater cities for us, but also ...
Nov 01
Sanitary Tortilla Factory: In Lesbian Art in America, Harmony Hammond asks a number of questions about what, precisely, is “lesbian” about lesbian art. “Is the quality ‘lesbian’ embodied in the art object, the sexuality of the artist or viewer, or the viewing context?... Is lesbian art ...
Nov 01
Few artists have explored flatness as deeply as Kota Ezawa. Using digital tools, for the past several years Ezawa has transformed appropriated imagery into deceptively simple compositions. A Rembrandt loses its impasto and atmospheric perspective to become a series of...
Nov 01
Join the New Mexico Museum of Art for a “once-in-a-century community birthday party,” as the institution turns one hundred on the day of the celebration. From 10 am to 5 pm, the museum will re-open after two months of building renovations with a plaza-wide party with events...
Nov 01
The Palm Springs Art Museum, as part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, is exhibiting two major installations. Kinesthesia: Latin American Art, 1954-1969 features...
Nov 01
One of humanity’s most important accomplishments, after the invention of written language, is the application of systematic measurements to things like distances, weights, codified sizes of this or that object. Applying number to the concept of a standard measurement has at its...
Nov 01
To borrow a word used by Peruvian artist William Cordova to describe a wall-sized projection of open ocean in a screening room within his show, I think of Marfa as a portal...
Nov 01
Jill O’Bryan spends her winters in New York and her summers perched high in the desert on a remote mesa outside of Las Vegas, New Mexico. She has been trekking back and forth, from coastal city grid to off-grid entirely, for twenty years, and for twenty years has sought a personal, physical relationship with the desert, its big skies...
Oct 01
Vija Celmins has long been known as an “artist’s artist,” in part because she attends to her drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptures with meticulous detail. Centering on the expanses of the moon’s surface, the desert, ocean, and night sky, her works always ...
Aug 01
It’s March and Thais Mather sits in her Eldorado living room with a great firmament of inky constellations hanging above her head. She recently completed the artwork for a solo exhibition titled The Anonymous Author, and its centerpiece is a series of densely detailed pointillist...
Oct 01
Monsters of the Santa Fe Art Scene: illustrations by Chris Philpot
Oct 01
Tom Harjo’s Portraits from Standing Rock provide insight into an event that was difficult to see. Using still photography, he portrays the people, the emotions, the interactions, and the violence that law enforcement in South Dakota tried to shield from public view in 2016. Harjo’s...
Oct 01
The thick metal door swung shut behind me, and the momentum of its thud closed off the thrum of traffic from Coal Avenue, quieting the world inside the gallery. In the small exhibition space of Sanitary Tortilla Factory, machinery began to whirr, set off by the movement of my body in...
Oct 01
The box can be a thing and an idea, sometimes diffuse, other times quite literally bounded. To think outside of one is a ready adage, one of those sayings that’s so overused it’s actually lost most of its ability to make a point. But when I think about the box in this exhibition...
Oct 01
Houston-based artist Dario Robleto was recently described by Krista Tippett of onbeing.org as “famous for spinning and shaping unconventional materials—from dinosaur fossils to pulverized vintage records, from swamp root to cramp bark. He joins words and objects in a way that distills ...
Oct 01
The bees have proven themselves remarkably commodifiable, not only through the products they manufacture that humans enjoy, like honey and beeswax, but also as a pattern, a motif, a caricature. The market loves a stripe found in nature. If panda bears are the symbol of neoliberal...
Sep 01
Aspen is something of a wonderland. Tucked away and remote in the Roaring Fork Valley, vestiges of the town’s founding as a mining town turned ski resort are still visible in the now multi-million dollar Victorian homes [...]
Dec 01
Franco Andreshas a thing for textures, surfaces, and sensory information. Throughout his sculptural assemblages, wax, fur, feathers, soil, or charred wood create finishes both sumptuous and visceral. The artist’s [...]
Sep 01
Jami Porter Lara came upon the map with no border line in 2011, during a trip to the Paquime archaeological site in Chihuahua, Mexico. She was a BFA student at the University of New Mexico [...]
Sep 01
En route from one Southwest Arts Oasis to another, determined to see the works of Doris Cross (1907-1994) in Marfa and carrying a friend's artwork in our trunk, we passed through the heart of darkness [...]
Sep 01
Lannan Foundation: Roni Horn’s series of photographs of the river Thames—each one capturing a different texture of the opaque and oily water—creates a portrait of the river as if it were [...]
