Under the careful guidance of entomologist, artist, and Hollywood bug wrangler Steven Kutcher, six-legged insects, eight-legged arachnids, and other creatures craft abstract compositions. Kutcher makes appearances at Calliope in Madrid, New Mexico, to demonstrate the process.
As curator Jadira Gurulé writes, despite the chola’s ubiquity in Chicanx and, increasingly, popular culture, “the complexity of who and what she represents is a story that largely remains untold.”
Cochiti Pueblo artists Mateo and Diego Romero are being jointly honored with the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture’s 2019 Living Treasures award at 5:30 p.m. Friday, May 24.
Looking at Ryan Singer’s painting Scorched Earth Policy, in which Star Wars archvillain Darth Vader is in hot pursuit of an X-wing fighter through a high-walled canyon, it’s easy to see how a young Navajo man, familiar with his tribal history, could relate to a movie story about a fight for freedom from tyranny.
GenNext: Future So Bright had a planned closing date of Nov. 25, 2018, but the show was given an extension to March 29, 2019, so that more works and artists could be added to the mix.
A recent museum crawl through the Mile High City afforded experiences that ranged from the internationally impressive to the regionally intriguing.
At the New Mexico Museum of Art, four photographers — Christopher Colville, Scott B. Davis, Michael Lundgren, and Ken Rosenthal — present their visions of the nighttime world in Shots in the Dark.
Using imagery derived from a pre-Columbian divinatory manuscript, artist Moira Garcia created a series of mixed-media works on paper that commemorates the artistry of the Mixtecs. She gives a talk on Sunday, Dec. 16, at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Store.
Today, the term "nocturne" is applied generally to any nighttime scene and is as common a subject for art as it is for music. The New Mexico Museum of Art has a surprising number of nocturnes of its own, including some by the more prominent 20th-century artists in its collection: Gustave Baumann, Gerald Cassidy, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
When a selection of more than 200 of the Hispanic Society’s works was on tour at the Prado Museum in Madrid in the spring of 2017, nearly 500,000 visitors turned out to admire the collection. Following a three-month stay at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, the third stop of that royally recognized, New York Times-dubbed “blockbuster” show is Albuquerque. Visions of the Hispanic World: Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum & Library opens at the Albuquerque Museum on Saturday, Nov. 10.
More than 17,000 recruits from New Mexico served in the U.S. military during the war that lasted more than four years. Their service is celebrated in The First World War, opening Sunday, Nov. 11, at the New Mexico History Museum.
As any New Mexico resident knows, our state is an amalgam of cultures and traditions, both indigenous and imported. The artistic productions that have emerged from that commingling of cultures are as diverse as the people who live here.
Before the publication of The Birds of America, painter and ornithologist John James Audubon’s monumental avian survey that first saw print in 1827, flora and fauna were primarily depicted by naturalists as specimens, separate from any rendering of an ecological context. Gottlieb, whose Invasive Species series is a hybrid of Audubon’s images and her own original work, depicts a variety of invasive botanicals integrated into prints from The Birds of America.
More than a half-century after his death, J. Robert Oppenheimer — or “the father of the atomic bomb,” as the charismatic, conflicted, poetry-quoting nuclear physicist is often called — is popping up all over his old stomping grounds this summer.
To Paint without Thinking, an exhibition of works by Frederick Hammersley (1919-2009) that premiered at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, in October 2017 and opens at the New Mexico Museum of Art on Friday, May 25, presents viewers with a conundrum: that Hammersley’s meticulous practices also allowed him ample room for freedom of expression.
In Diné (Navajo) philosophy, hózhó is a complex set of principles to guide one’s actions, thoughts, and speech for the purpose of maintaining wellness and balance. The best way to approach and appreciate the work of artist Melanie Yazzie is from such a perspective, which enables a person to see beyond a facile reading of her art — as expressions of a lightness of being — to its deeper philosophy.
A staple on Garcia Street for more than two decades, Photo-eye Bookstore and Project Space has made a recent move to the up-and-coming arts district developing in the vicinity of the Meow Wolf Art Complex, a move that enabled the shop to expand its footprint. The bookstore's grand opening in the new location includes an exhibition of the works by the Santa Fe-based photographer.
Nagatani, who died in Oct. 2017, is being honored at the University of New Mexico Art Museum with an exhibit of works made near the start of his career. The show provides a fascinating look at his influences and career-long interest in a cinematic style of photography.
Former Museum of International Folk Art director Marsha Bol's new book, The Art and Tradition of Beadwork, accompanies MoIFA’s latest exhibition, which opens on Sunday, April 22, and paints a detailed picture of recent and contemporary uses of beads on all continents.
The Spanish Colonial Arts Society has a long history in Santa Fe as an outgrowth of the Society for the Revival of Spanish Arts and the Society for the Restoration and Preservation of Spanish Mission Churches of New Mexico, both of which date from the early 20th century. But on Oct. 29, 1929, writer Mary Austin and artist and author Frank G. Applegate, along with a committed group of collectors, officially founded the society, which still exists today.
Since the 1969 Agrarian Reform in Peru, folk artists have used their crafts as means of economic survival through times of political violence and upheaval. In conjunction with its current exhibition, which is on view through March 10, 2019, The Museum of International Folk Art brings three Quechua artists and activists whose work is at the forefront of the struggle for truth and reconciliation to discuss their work and experiences.
The artist is deeply committed to honoring those whom history has forgotten. The Chinese and American subjects of her works are laborers, refugees, and others whose names may not be recognizable but whose lives Liu commemorates with portraits that are at once intimate and noble.
Most professional photographers love seeing their images big, but Jan Pietrzak is going in a different direction. Long an aficionado of the large-format view camera, he is now using smaller cameras and making much smaller pictures. His new prints (none of them larger than 6 by 17 centimeters) are on view with works by Kirk Gittings and Philip Augustin at Santa Fe University of Art & Design’s Marion Center for Photographic Arts.
Ati Maier’s 10-minute, single-channel video The Placeless Place (2016) supports the intention behind the museum’s three current exhibitions, the openings of which were timed to coincide with its centennial in November. Maier’s video seems complementary to the exhibitions’ themes of bridging past, present, and future, and is among the last works you’ll encounter in the show Contact: From Local to Global, tucked at the far end of the museum’s New Wing Gallery.
Clift is a master photographer of the old (film) school who also loves capturing portraits with his phone. Consider inspiring landscapes taken at La Bajada, for example, as well as an iPhone series of his granddaughter.
"Athabaskan” is a word every New Mexican should know -- Athabaskan is a family of languages spoken all around the state by its Apache- and Navajo-speaking tribal members.
Before anyone could really call Santa Fe’s Second Street an “arts district,” Phil Space was quietly doing its thing in the area. Unabashedly funky and unique, it’s a t…
The show features work by SFCC faculty and students made from decommissioned gun parts, as well as juried work by local and international artists that focuses on gun violence.
In his essay that shares the book’s title, editor Stephen Perkinson writes that during the early 16th century, a Dutch engraver known simply as Master S created an image of a cadaver rising from the grave below. He bears a banner with a Dutch phrase that exhorts viewers, “Mirror yourselves, people, on the mud of the earth: I am so as you will become.” Could a truer portrait of humankind be rendered?
The power, clarity, and style of the prints of Santamaría owe much to the technical mastery of the artists of the Taller de Gráfica Popular. The TGP, an influential print workshop formed in 1937, was most active from the 1930s to the early 1960s and was formed, in part, to address injustices and rights issues among the Mexican people.
The new SITE opens to the public with The Reveal, a 21-and-over party on the evening of Friday, Oct. 6; and community days Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 7 and 8, with fortune tellers, a photo booth, a time capsule project (bring your objects to be photographed), SITE tours and talks — and cupcakes.
When it comes to historic processes, whether it’s making paper or weavings, the Farnsworths don’t just seek inspiration — they learn the old processes, refine them, and adapt them to modern technologies.
Andrade consciously conflates the innocence generally associated with childhood with the violence of border towns that strips children of the freedom to run around and play. His first Santa Fe exhibit opens Friday, Sept. 8.
In Light Echoes, the artist expands upon long-standing tenets of her practice: elegantly arranged prints and collaged works whose subject matter wavers gently on the cusp of abstraction, and is often adorned with gold-and-silver-leaf detailing that’s simultaneously dazzling and restrained.
Ross spends a lot of time looking and observing the desert landscapes of the Southwest. He draws inspiration from canyonlands and mesas and the slow and fast (but mostly slow) forces that shape those environments, such as the erosion wrought by water and wind.
The American painter John Sloan (1871-1951) wrote, “Nature is the fountain at which the artist drinks. We can’t survive on museum study alone.” Sloan’s exhortation of the outdoors may come as a slight surprise to those who think of him as strictly an urban modernist.
The exhibition’s introductory wall text explains that beadmaking in North America dates back more than 1,000 years. Following European entry into North America, beads became items of trade; Meriwether Lewis described trade beads he and William Clark brought on their expedition as “answer[ing] all the purposes of money.”
It isn’t necessary to see allusions to Native history and culture in Seneca artist Marie Watt’s mixed-media piece Canopy: Ledger to appreciate it as a sculptural form, but it adds considerable dimension. The sculpture makes reference to an object with which Native peoples from many tribes have a long, culturally rich history: the blanket.
The latest exhibition by Axle Contemporary is a community-based art project comprising original short stories by five New Mexico writers — Melody Sumner Carnahan, Jamie Figueroa, Nasario García, Joe Hayes, and Lily Hoang — that are wide-ranging in style and tone.
Kim Tschang-Yeul’s fascinating water-drop paintings and Kim Tae-Ho’s textured color field paintings are on display at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe. The show’s thousands of objects also include rare books, African sculpture, Persian rugs, Plains Indian quillwork, and opal jewelry from Haig’s of Rochester, Michigan.
At first glance, Thicket II resembles a giant three-dimensional asterisk or a frozen moment in an explosion, and the reality of the work’s materials and intention are as intriguing as its appearance.
The city of Icheon, located in Gyeonggi, South Korea’s most populous province, has been a center of ceramic production for hundreds of years. A delegation of ceramic artists from the city's Ceramics Village, in town for the annual Art Santa Fe international art fair, are doing a series of demonstrations as part of Art Labs, curated demonstrative programs made in conjunction with local galleries and institutions.
Historically, quilts were of no particular value or interest to collectors, or to urban Chinese, because the Communist government favored progress and assimilation over the traditional handiwork of its ethnic minority populations. But the government’s current emphasis on preserving the intangible cultural heritage of these groups in the face of industrialization has given life to a tourist economy in which these quilts have become quite marketable.
Two exhibits now on view at Form & Concept explore internal and external worlds through a lens of abstraction. Basing her work on scientific data and observances, Rutstein takes elements of her research and recontextualizes them. Weiss works from memory, or rather the lack thereof. Pasatiempo spoke with the artists about the exhibitions that opened on June 30.
For her newest photographic project, Leaken is using a thoroughly organic toning process for a series of still lifes. She soaks the images, which she prints on photo canvas, in tea.
The New Mexico History Museum exhibit features amazing photographs of ancient buildings, many of which have been destroyed by ISIS in the past few years. Drawing from the collections of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, the show highlights images of Syrian people and grand historic buildings with carved stonework that were photographed more than a century ago.
The show at Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd. includes Gilpin’s 1932 closeup portrait The Little Medicine Man, the wonderfully detailed Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Steps of the Castillo from the same year, and the dramatic Picuris Church that she shot in 1961. Viewers witness an experimental mindset in the 1929 Self-Portrait, in which Gilpin somehow photographed her own hands holding a small print of her 1924 photo Untitled (Tree Limbs in Snow).
On Sunday, June 4, the Museum of International Folk Art opens a Syrian folk art display, with a representative sampling of various historic and contemporary art forms including textiles, basketry, blown glass, and metal work. The exhibit of works from the collection of the late Lloyd Cotsen (1929-2017) is shown in collaboration with the New Mexico History Museum’s show Syria: Cultural Patrimony Under Threat.
Ceramic artist Daniel Johnston brings a large-scale pottery installation to Peters Projects where it opens to the public on Friday, June 2, with a 5 p.m. reception. Johnston is at the center of a growing large-pot movement in his home state of North Carolina. His massive pots can each take up to 100 pounds of clay to make and hold 35 to 40 gallons apiece. Johnston picked up techniques from master potters in the Thai village of Phon Bok, where he learned efficient ways of producing large pots and jars using processes that are mostly unknown in the U.S.
Jeanine Michna-Bales’ 2014 photograph Approaching the Seminary, taken near Spartanburg, Indiana, is a gorgeous, dusky-toned close-up of living stalks of corn. But the aesthetics of the view are not quite the point. This particular cornfield evokes the experience of fleeing African-American slaves who may have sheltered at night in such a place a century and a half ago. The photo is one in the series recently published in Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad and now on exhibit at Photo-eye Bookstore & Project Space.
Picasso made hundreds of drawings while working on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of which is on view in the exhibition Lines of Thought: Drawing From Michelangelo to Now at the New Mexico Museum of Art. The traveling show of works on paper, opening Friday, May 26, takes a long look at the techniques and process of drawing.
