During the first week of June, many of the artists selected to participate in SITE Santa Fe's Seventh International Biennial, Lucky Number Seven were busy preparing their spaces and artworks. In the unfussy work atmosphere, amid the sounds of hammering and drilling and sawing, there was laughter, as well as concentration, camaraderie, and sometimes intensity.

Entering the SITE space on June 3, I just missed biennial curator Lance M. Fung lambasting one of the artists. "My work is so transparent, the same as how I speak, just like you would have heard me screaming at this artist, saying some really heavy-duty stuff, which I meant and I won't take back," Fung said. "It is what it is. Look at Lucky Number Seven. My work is me, and I'm my work. I'm not conceiving anything here. Lucky Number Seven is just an evolution of all my work and is an extension of me."

Fung, who was chosen by SITE executive director Laura Steward Heon, is best known as curator of The Snow Show exhibitions in Lapland (2004) and Italy (2006). They featured collaborative works by more than 30 artists, including architects Tadao Ando and Norman Foster and artists Yoko Ono and Kiki Smith.

On June 3, Fung flitted from artist to artist, dealing with various concerns. He walked past Japanese artist Hiroshi Fuji, who was sitting alone with a laptop, and asked him if everything was OK. Fung visited with painter Soun Hong of Korea for 10 minutes or so, talking about the ways the artist planned to use his triangular exhibition space. Then he talked to student videographers at work on documentary films about the 25 biennial artists, who hail from more than a dozen countries.

Lucky Number Seven opens its seven-month run at SITE on Sunday, June 22. This exhibition has several distinctions: there is no "theme"; it largely features emerging artists (each is contributing a new work for the show); and every piece is ephemeral. Most important to the energetic, loquacious Fung is the notion of community and, in sync with that, he practices a collaborative curatorial approach.

In his essay for the biennial catalog, Fung writes, "Quite often, an artist creates a work — even a site-specific work for a group exhibition — in a relative vacuum with little interaction with the curator or even the other participating artists. In the unique case of Lucky Number Seven, however, the artists were given substantial opportunities to socialize as a fundamental part of the process." In person, he said the social environment has benefited every artist in the show, both directly and over the long term, as the process works to develop the larger artist community.

Another passage from the catalog speaks to Fung's insistence that the biennial is as much about creating an experience for the artists, through sharing and working in a community, as it is for the audience. It's crucial to remember, he writes, "that the history of art is more than a catalogue of masterpieces or a roll call of heroic individual artists. It's also a history of the movements and moments that surround and support them — the lived context of daily experience from which great art and great artists emerge."

His collaborative methodology shows in the way Fung assembled the cadre of biennial artists. Rather than reveling in the role of Mr. Big Curator, he involved curators from 18 institutions around the world whose objectives and goals are similar to SITE's. In all but one case, each curator gave Fung a list of artists, from which he chose one. The anomaly was the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Fung went along with IAIA curator Joseph Sanchez's suggestion that he choose a local family of artists — Nora Naranjo Morse, her daughter Eliza Naranjo Morse, and her niece Rose B. Simpson — rather than an individual.

Most of the artists and some of the curators met Fung in Santa Fe in January to learn about the architecture, landscape, and history of Northern New Mexico and to meet its people. Although the artists of the Naranjo Morse family, as natives of Santa Clara Pueblo, did not need to be there, they toured with the artist group.

"They already know about this area, but they have a particular perspective, and their influence was phenomenal," Fung said. "I have never curated a show where there was one entity that had more influence on the artists than I had. I mean, I'm setting up a situation, I'm getting them excited, I'm developing this community, but they [the Naranjo Morse team] impacted how people saw and thought about themselves in this situation."

In early June, the Naranjo Morse trio and a handful of interns gathered by Fung were busily working on a snakelike, clay-covered "line" that would meander through the various spaces at SITE. Coincidentally (perhaps even synchronistically), German artist Mandla Reuter has contributed a big, live power cord that twists through the biennial's exhibition spaces.

Yet another echo of this coincidence appears in the catalog essay "Mapping the History of Lucky Number Seven" by Liza Statton, Thaw Curatorial Fellow at SITE. She writes about the "interconnectivity between ideas, objects, time, and space" in her description of Marcel Duchamp's "16 miles of string" installation for the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism exhibit in New York. The piece involved a barrier that snaked through the show and blocked views of adjacent works; the construction was designed to reflect the émigré artists' experiences with dislocation and isolation.

"Mandla came up with his idea independently of Nora and her team," Fung said. "They are somewhat similar but absolutely the opposite: European male versus Native American and technology versus earth. And Liza's essay was done without knowing what Nora and Mandla were doing."

Fung's overall idea for the exhibition revolves around risk, experimentation, and community. Those ideas are behind his directive that none of the artworks will survive the biennial. Not only will they be unavailable to the art market — this subtracts an obstacle to sincere, unimpeded creativity on the artist's part, Fung said — but this rule makes the challenge of coming up with a worthy piece less daunting for the emerging artist.

"Through his weblike approach, Fung has created an exhibition that resists casual reductionism and the burdens of authorship," Statton writes in the catalog. "Like the orchestra conductor who guides the performers, Fung ultimately allows the artists to create works that speak to the very essence of what we all seek in art: a transcendent experience."

Fung's approach to organizing the exhibition is basically subversive, and it is really just an extension of the atmosphere at his New York venue, the Lance Fung Gallery, which he started in 1996 after working as director of the Holly Solomon Gallery in that city. "One of my mentors was Nam June Paik, who is credited as the inventor of video art," Fung said. "He was a seminal artist in the Fluxus period. In fact, he helped me find my gallery space, which was in the house that belonged to George Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus."

Fluxus was an international art movement, or artist collective, that began in the early 1960s. Many Fluxus artists had their work published in New York-based New Observations magazine. Diane Karp, director of the Santa Fe Art Institute, was editor of the magazine in the 1980s and has been a friend of Fung's since that time. During the days or weeks spent working on their pieces, most of the biennial's artists were housed at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

Fung considers the way New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien shaped the exhibition spaces (with the assistance of Santa Fe architect Greg Allegretti) as one of the best things about the biennial. "I wanted to have people walk through the building and have it be unrecognizable," he said. "And since it was a group show, the best way was through a strong exhibition design."

Fung said he chose Williams and Tsien "because Tod and Billie are nice people. They're also open-minded and think outside of the box, and they are brilliant with materials and surfaces and forms. And of all the architects I've worked with, these are the ones who most appreciate and seek out great contemporary art."

"Lance is an unusual collaborator," said Williams, who teamed up with Tsien and German artist Carsten Höller to create works for The Snow Show exhibitions. "He's always asking us to work with him in unusual places and, in a way, asking us to stretch our sensibilities. He doesn't really tell us what to do. I mean Billie has described Lance as giving us the simplest of instructions, like saying, 'Do something wack.' He thought the SITE design should be something with movement and something where we would take over the space like a roller coaster. That was about as instructive as he was."

The "roller coaster" idea didn't quite happen. The exhibit design's central feature — a 463-foot-long, zigzagging, inclined walk — has no curves, but it is impressive.

"A lot of our work is about movement," Williams said, "so I think the idea of moving up and down in space came very easily. But doing something that was as seemingly invasive as our installation design was [the new walls and the inclined walkway] surprised us, and that's the sort of wack aspect.

"We had the idea for the incline to go up and actually plow a hole right in the roof. The alternative was to use a small lift or two that would allow people to rise up through the skylights so people could look out over Santa Fe."

That didn't happen, either, but the architects added interest by employing partial walls of varying heights punctuated by full-height slots where the walls don't meet (affording sneakier views of the art) and by the use of subtly converging lines.

"In our work we're always trying to create alternative routes for people so there's always something interesting wherever you step and something that piques your curiosity and carries you on a journey through space," Williams said. "We thought this would be a really good place for the artists to do their work because it wasn't a neutral box; it was kind of a charged box."

The entry into SITE Santa Fe is enlivened by a yellow mesh tunnel, although Fung noted that the show actually begins in the community with the "archaeological dig" by Nick Mangan (Australia) on Alto Street, the replica of a vintage flour factory by Martí Anson (Spain) on Museum Hill, digital-design grave-marker tiles by Erick Beltrán (Mexico) at various locations around Santa Fe, and other projects.

Heon initially expressed apprehension about British-American artist Nadine Robinson's "XXX" form on top of the SITE facade. "Laura was concerned like, 'I don't want it to look like a porn shop,' but I liked that," Fung said. "In a way the art world is sort of obscene, and only certain people go into it, like a porn shop — only really motivated people."

Overall, the process of working with Heon was flexible, Fung said. "She gave me a long leash. I had certain milestones, like finalizing the institutional partner list, but aesthetically it was all me. SITE's mission is to select a curator who has something to say and let him say it, and that's what biennials should be."

details
Site Santa Fe's Seventh International Biennial, Lucky Number Seven
Opens noon-5 p.m. Sunday, June 22; exhibition through Jan. 4, 2009
SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta
$10, $5 students & seniors, no charge for June 22 opening
& on Fridays; 989-1199 (for a complete list of special
opening-week events, see sitesantafe.org)

Lucky Number Seven Summit, a panel discussion with curators & artists
5 p.m. Saturday, June 21
National Dance Institute of New Mexico, Dance Barns, 1140 Alto St.
$5-$10, 989-1199

Locations, locations, locations

The scene at Lance M. Fung's New York gallery from 1996 to 2004 was all about artists meeting artists. Poetry readings and happenings stood out as much as the installations. And it was a place where youth and age mixed. Fung is not afraid of youthful enthusiasm and energy.

"In the first Snow Show, I brought in an army of MFA students or grads to work side by side with the artists, and that was tremendously succrator said during preparations for SITE Santa Fe's Seventh International Biennial, Lucky Number Seven. "Now here we have about 30 unpaid MFA interns from all over the country, and maybe 50 local artists, to assist the biennial artists.

"These are super-dedicated, fresh, young people who are not doing this for money. They're excited and are learning something from this, so they're giving more. That's the most radical message of the biennial: it's about community."

Fung feels the same way about 10 local students who have documented the artists at work. "The biennial is about process," he said. "You can't experience that from a work of art or a catalog, but you get a glimpse into that with documentary."

The youthful team includes seven video-graphers from New Mexico Highlands University, the College of Santa Fe, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. The project coordinator is Eliot Fisher from the College of Santa Fe. Three Highlands University students are posting updates about the biennial on a special Web site, santafelucky7.com.

"Usually people turn a certain shade of green when you say 'student,' but Lance just embraced this idea," said Mimi Roberts, director of media projects for the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, who initiated the documentary project. "The Web site offers behind-the-scenes glimpses into the process. What it takes to put something like this together is not something most people ever see."

The student videographers' segments on the artists are shown in one of the exhibition spaces at SITE. — P.W.