Albuquerque’s contemporary art scene stands out—and bands together.
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 car like a maniac around the city, presided over fantastic dinner parties with martini in hand, and once passed out among the coats at a particularly wild soirée.
“It might be said that the sun chased the modern artists indoors,” de Kooning wrote in a catalogue essay for a group show of Albuquerque artists that she curated for the Great Jones Gallery in NYC in 1960. “Space-rich, they do not need to escape into big canvases as New Yorkers seem to, and their forms are compressed and immediate.” That’s not the only contrast de Kooning noted between avant-garde Burqueños and her famous friends back East. The shape of the Duke City’s art scene was markedly different from anything she’d experienced.
“Having certain attitudes towards their surroundings in common, these artists do not form a ‘school’ as is usual in art colonies,” she wrote. “Indeed, ‘art colony,’ with its connotations of bohemianism, exhibitionism, and conformism, seems an inappropriate term for this group of individualists.”
De Kooning’s conception of a “school” was probably based on her own circle, the most notorious and disruptive art clique of the twentieth century. At the time, critics and scholars were already at work compressing AbEx brushstrokes into a towering conceptual framework destined for the history books. Even if de Kooning set a high bar for what might constitute a movement, there’s something about her assessment of Albuquerque that still feels true today.
“Having certain attitudes towards their surroundings in common, these artists do not form a ‘school’ as is usual in art colonies,” she wrote. “Indeed, ‘art colony,’ with its connotations of bohemianism, exhibitionism, and conformism, seems an inappropriate term for this group of individualists.”
To an outsider, the city’s contemporary art milieu looks spare and disjointed at first glance. Albuquerque’s art history is punctuated by frustrating fits and starts, a pattern that the current scene can’t seem to shake. It’s easy to dismiss the local creative community as trapped in medias res, so mercurial in its identity that it reflexively defines itself in opposition to a more established art center sixty-five miles to the north.
Dive just past the gritty surface, however, and you’ll drop into de Kooning’s version of Albuquerque: a raucous art community centered on the University of New Mexico but possessing spindly arms that stretch across the city. Here you’ll find a vibrant, experimental pack of lone wolves who have found remarkable ways to support each other and are determined to connect with the larger art world.
On a daylong, slapdash tour of Albuquerque, I eschewed institutions for a selection of the scrappy art spaces that generate the city’s avant-garde energy. Free from the crushing pressure of a strong art market—but influenced by the financial constraints of this reality—this community is home to some of New Mexico’s most daring artistic statements. Call it collaborative individualism.
“These questions about how Albuquerque is perpetually transitional and unformed come up a lot,” says Suzanne Sbarge, Executive Director of 516 Arts in downtown Albuquerque. “It can be a great thing for artists, because there’s no particular style or idea of what Albuquerque is that artists have to conform to, the way Santa Fe struggles with this very touristy image.”
Sbarge is sitting with her staff in the office of the nonprofit art space, a cozy cubicle tucked in a corner on the second floor. From this crow’s nest on Central Avenue, she and her team have worked to guide and shape Albuquerque’s art scene since 2006. 516 shows local, national, and international artists in exhibitions that explore socially relevant topics. The space has helped organize citywide arts partnerships, and funds local, emerging art projects through the Fulcrum Fund annual grant program.
516 is a rare anchor in the constantly shifting patchwork of downtown art projects and works in conjunction with the city’s ongoing revitalization efforts in the district. Josie Lopez, who joined the staff as the space’s first ever full-time curator last August, points to Albuquerque’s past to explain the temperamental nature of its contemporary art scene.
“I think there have historically been possibilities for the development of strong artist communities, but we haven’t quite figured out what contemporary art is,” she says. “Raymond Jonson’s circle could easily have been a defining moment of art in Albuquerque, but the city didn’t rally around it. A lot of artists like that ended up leaving. We can become part of the antidote to that by making art accessible to people so that artists can thrive here.”
“I think only showing local artists is actually doing them a great disservice, because it isolates them,” says Sbarge. “We’re placing local artists in a larger dialogue and connecting them to the rest of the world. If we only focused on local, we wouldn’t be helping break down that isolation.”
516 often fields criticisms for not focusing exclusively on local artists, but Sbarge insists that the space’s broader curatorial scope is a vital part of its mission. “I think only showing local artists is actually doing them a great disservice, because it isolates them,” says Sbarge. “We’re placing local artists in a larger dialogue and connecting them to the rest of the world. If we only focused on local, we wouldn’t be helping break down that isolation.”
It’s a charter that largely bypasses one common art-world element: sales. “Our mission is around education and communication and dialogue; it’s not around selling,” says Sbarge, noting that most of the space’s funding comes from grants and donations. “We do try to sell work, but there’s not a big art market in Albuquerque. We wouldn’t be able to stay open if we depended on art sales.”
One door over from 516, Richard Levy Gallery depends entirely on the art market—but not at the local level. The staff is busy preparing for December’s PULSE Art Fair in Miami Beach. Levy himself rummages through stacks of boxes at the front of the space, listing artists whose works will fill his booth in Florida.
“We’re taking Earl McBride, who’s here in Albuquerque, Hayley Rheagan, who’s in Santa Fe, Xuan Chen, who used to be here and just moved to New York,” he says. “I don’t care where the artists are from, though. I work with artists from across the country.” Vivid twenty-five-color silkscreens by Alex Katz, who is based in Maine, where Levy resides for a few months each summer, currently line the walls.
Levy bought the building and founded his for-profit gallery here twenty-seven years ago. The physical space functions as a home base and showroom, while the big sales happen at art fairs across the nation. Rather than drawing national and international artists to New Mexico à la 516, he sends local artists sailing straight into the larger contemporary art scene. Levy says Albuquerque affords him this mobility.
“I have a big space; I have my own building,” says Levy. “People have asked me why I don’t have a place in Santa Fe, but I want to be in scrappy Albuquerque. Anything is possible here: it’s not that expensive; it’s not that difficult.” In recent years, Levy has helped manifest this reality for other artists and arts professionals on the local scene. He strides out the back door of the gallery to examine a colorful mural on the rear of the building that he commissioned from Mick Burson, an MFA student at UNM who’s a recent addition to Levy’s stable.
Zastudil says. “Economically, it’s really difficult to have a business here, let alone an art-based business. On the other side of that, the only reason I’m open is because of the opportunities here and the people that are buying work from me. The city itself is the reason that I’m able to do what I do.”
Back into the building and up a narrow staircase is Central Features Contemporary Art, a separate enterprise that occupies Levy’s entire second floor. Nancy Zastudil founded Central Features in a downtown storefront in 2014 and moved the gallery here a year later. She operates it as a hybridized for-profit and nonprofit LLC with a fiscal sponsor that manages her finances. Levy is a lynchpin of this arrangement, as he rents Zastudil the space at a below-market rate.
“I have a conflicted relationship with Albuquerque,” Zastudil says. “Economically, it’s really difficult to have a business here, let alone an art-based business. On the other side of that, the only reason I’m open is because of the opportunities here and the people that are buying work from me. The city itself is the reason that I’m able to do what I do.”
The gallery exhibits mostly local artists whose practices emphasize environmental stewardship and social progress. At the moment, a solo exhibition of densely detailed drawings by Nina Elder fills the main space, while paintings by Donald Fodness occupy a smaller project space called the Venture Room.
Zastudil works two other jobs to make ends meet and doesn’t pull a salary from Central Features. Originally from Ohio, she has worked as an arts professional in Chicago and San Francisco. “Every city that I’ve lived in, I’ve recognized really strong bridges in the art community,” she says. “Here, it’s intensified because it’s a smaller city. We’re here because Richard Levy made the space affordable to us, which you wouldn’t necessarily see in more competitive art communities. That’s not happening in New York.”
Like 516 and Richard Levy, Central Features is working to chip away at barriers between Albuquerque and the national art community. Zastudil received a Fulcrum Fund grant from 516 this year for a program that will invite regional curators to visit Albuquerque, conduct studio visits with local artists, and remotely mentor them for six-month periods. “We’re trying to forge some new relationships so that we can send some of the strong work that’s showing here to different cities and spaces,” she says.
North of downtown in the city’s Wells Park neighborhood, the Factory on 5th has adopted a hyperlocal strategy to build bridges between the art scene and Albuquerque’s larger community. “This is kind of a cool neighborhood because it’s split: industrial and commercial stuff on one side and residential on the other,” says David Cudney, the building manager and sole full-time resident of the Factory. “We have to act as mediators sometimes at neighborhood association meetings.”
Founded in 2001, the for-profit gallery and studio space encompasses two warehouses with brick walls and sprawling concrete floors. Together, they house thirty artist studios, two large galleries, an aerialists’ studio, and a new restaurant called The Kosmos. Currently, individual studios start at $225, and community members can rent the gallery spaces on a monthly basis for around $600. Painters, photographers, ceramicists, a full-time florist, and other artists and makers work side-by-side here. UNM students often reserve the galleries for BFA and MFA shows.
“If you ask a lot of people in town, they would say we are a public service. We jokingly call ourselves a ‘for-profit nonprofit,’” says Cudney. He works part-time at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, and though he’s observed a recent uptick of avant-garde art energy in that city, there’s something about Albuquerque—and his seven-year stint at the Factory—that has held his interest.
Cudney is particularly excited about recent changes to the Wells Park neighborhood. Brewpubs and food trucks have popped up around the Factory, attracting younger crowds to the area. Rather than allowing the new development to run artists out of the district, the Factory hopes to harness this fresh energy to subsidize further art activity. Cudney has been working with the building’s owners to convert their longtime performance venue, The Kosmos, into a swanky restaurant and bar filled with glowing art installations. If this new wing of the business is a success, it will help maintain affordable rental rates for the gallery and studio spaces.
“There’s a lot of back-and-forth support here, and I think that enables people to feel free to just do what they want,” Cudney says. “If you’re trying something crazy, this is a good place to be. One of our artists was out in the parking lot, lighting stuff on fire the other day.”
On the southern edge of downtown, Sheri Crider runs a similar operation on a smaller scale. She purchased the Second Street structure that houses the Sanitary Tortilla Factory with the last of her savings in 2015, after closing another art space that she ran for nearly a decade in Wells Park. In this former factory building, she has built fifteen studio spaces, a thousand-square-foot gallery, and a small apartment for artists-in-residence. The business is technically for-profit, though Crider says she has only recently stopped running in the red.
“The thing that I like most about Albuquerque is that it’s kind of a mess,” Crider says. “All of the fissures of culture are really dramatically evident here. Everyone’s up against each other. That makes the city an incubator for thinking about culture, and that’s what I’m interested in making art about.”
“Right now, I’m just breaking even, because I really want to make it affordable for the artists,” Crider says. “I never charge for exhibitions, and I do all the installation. Everyone pitches in somehow, so it’s an equitable situation.” A show of queer artists titled The Alchemical Trace, curated by Ray Hernandez-Duran, currently occupies the gallery. Part of Crider’s goal for Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s exhibition and residency program is to bring different subsets of Albuquerque’s community together.
“The thing that I like most about Albuquerque is that it’s kind of a mess,” Crider says. “All of the fissures of culture are really dramatically evident here. Everyone’s up against each other. That makes the city an incubator for thinking about culture, and that’s what I’m interested in making art about.”
When she hears de Kooning’s observations about Albuquerque, Crider laughs. “Individualists? It’s more like schizophrenia,” she jokes. “But I think there’s dialogue here; there are little movements. We all coalesce and support each other.”
Further south, in Albuquerque’s Barelas neighborhood, one such movement has coalesced over the last few decades on the 1400 block of Fourth Street. Three experimental art spaces—Small Engine Gallery, The Tannex, and GRAFT Gallery—occupy old storefronts a stone’s throw away from each other.
Jazmyn Crosby and Beth Hansen, who are among GRAFT’s five cofounders, are halfway through de-install of their latest show. Experimental photographs by Ren Adams span part of the four-hundred-square-foot room, and there’s an old candy dispenser that has been converted into a fortune-telling machine by the front door.
“The scene here is so cool, but the reason that anything happens is because someone really wants it to happen,” says Crosby. “Everyone is really friendly and excited about it, but it’s not like there’s any infrastructure for it. If you want to make something happen, you can totally do it. . . but you have to have the drive.”
This is a long-held truth of the neighborhood. Over the past three decades, GRAFT has been called Donkey Gallery, Normal Gallery, and Tan Gallery, changing names as it passed from one generation of experimental young artists to the next. Crosby, Hansen, and their collaborators took the reins three years ago. Small Engine Gallery has a similar history, and The Tannex is a newer performance space that spun off from Tan Gallery.
Crosby grew up in Santa Fe and moved to Albuquerque in 2009. She sees a striking difference between her hometown and her current residence. “Santa Fe has such an established art scene that I feel like there’s a bit more pressure to do it a certain way,” she says. “I don’t know what it is, but I feel more comfortable doing really crazy, weird, experimental things here.”
GRAFT just received a grant from the 516 Arts Fulcrum Fund, and Hansen pulls up the proposal on her laptop to tally the number of happenings they’ve hosted. “We’ve done thirty-seven exhibitions and about forty-five additional public events,” she says, her voice filled with wonder and a hint of weariness. “Until now, we were splitting the rent between us. The next ten months of gallery are funded now, so we just get to do so much more for the artists.”
A number of other microcosmic creative communities have appeared around the city lately, from the artisan markets of the Sawmill District to a fresh constellation of downtown art and performance spaces, such as Relic and The Box. It’s a labyrinthine root system full of forks and gaps, but that seems to be part of this art community’s DNA. When you’re making art on the jagged edge of culture, it pays to stick together—but not too closely.
