After a long journey to fruition, Obscura Gallery and Brant Mackley Gallery have opened their doors. A joint venture between Mackley, a dealer in antique Native Americ…

Inspired by the concept of kinesthesis, the title of the show refers to our individual human “spheres,” or spaces within which we maintain our emotional and physical selves, sometimes to isolating and detrimental effect.

Downey is no stranger to the art scene here — his first studio occupied the current Rail Runner train station in downtown Santa Fe. When he recently donated a large painting for permanent display at the train station, Mayor Javier Gonzales designated Oct. 12 as “Dennis Downey Day” in his honor.

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.”

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. 

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 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).

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.

To celebrate its one-year anniversary, Form & Concept gallery hosts a party, an exhibition, and a superhero masquerade contest — entrants to which get to snack at a VIP “cereal bar” — from 5 to 8 p.m. on Friday, May 26. Form & Concept’s mission is to explore the boundaries between art, craft, and design.

Those who remember the Riot Grrrl- and punk-fueled DIY zine movement of the 1990s — in which a pre-internet generation of teenagers and twentysomethings all over America took to their local Kinko’s to lay out, photocopy, and staple personal and political mini manifestos by hand — can check out a new generation of zine producers at the event. 

Some of the artists in Sanctuary faced life-and-death situations in their homelands before ending up in the U.S. Those include Kemely Gomez, who was forced to flee her native Guatemala during the country’s civil war, and Issa Nyaphaga, a former political cartoonist and reporter for Cameroon’s satirical newspaper Le Messager Popoli, whose activities made him a target of the nation’s political regime. 

One can talk about Marshall’s monolithic ceramic sculpture, currently on view at Peters Projects, as hybrid forms, but to do so implies a division of equal measure: half this, half that. Rather, each sculpture is singular, whole and complete in itself, the result of a cohesion of forms.

Two exhibitions open on Friday, Feb. 3, showcasing the work of master ceramic artists from across the country who will be teaching summer workshops at Santa Fe Clay — Monday-to-Friday classes that begin in mid-June and end in mid-August.

A home can feel like a sacred place for some people, and no space within it is more intimate than the bedroom — the one room where you might feel safe and secure enough to let your hair down and be naked. It is a place where we can be most truly ourselves. But how would you feel if a stranger came in, not to rob or assault you, but to inhabit your room, to live in it — even if just for a few moments — as you do?

The mesalands south of Las Vegas, with their cliffs and metate-like depressions, make a charged environment for artist Jill O’Bryan. Feeling the presence of people who were there long ago — “grinding corn and cooking in a location that’s also an amazing lookout,” as she describes her “fantasy scenario” there — she spreads a large sheet of paper on a boulder and rubs graphite over it.

“Post-truth” might be a newly coined term, but Francisco Goya (1746-1828) knew its meaning two centuries ago when he created one of his most famous series of etchings, The Disasters of War.

"The animals I work with are habituated to humans — although as one trainer told me, 'My animal’s greatest trick is not killing you.' Basically, he doesn’t sit; he doesn’t roll over or play dead; he just comes out, and he doesn’t kill you," said the photographer and Santa Fe resident whose Affinity series opens at Photo-eye Gallery.

Their curvaceous trunks may hold the suggestion of movement, but they know how to stand still. Among the species Moon favors are baobabs, quiver trees, bristlecone pines, junipers, Joshua trees, sequoias, and oaks.

The veteran photographer and writer Art Shay cites Honoré Daumier as a longtime inspiration for his focus on civil rights, social justice, and crime. The 19th-century caricaturist “taught me to aim my predatory camera at the contumely, at snobbery, pretensions, cruelty, and the machinery of petty power,” Shay writes.

Week after week, she accompanied Brother Jim, the humble and last remaining member of a Catholic ministry called The Brothers and Sisters of Love, on his rounds of underprivileged neighborhoods on the south and west sides of Chicago. Doherty met Brother Jim after hearing a former gang member — an acquaintance of Brother Jim’s — give a poetry reading at a book event she attended.

An artist’s sketchbook is by nature a private space, a visual journal, and an intimate, judgment-free zone in which to think through ideas. Yet sketchbooks are coveted by art lovers as well as other artists. 

An enigmatic figurative painter, Tarahteef combines realism with a sort of contemporary Mannerism. His paintings of elongated, almost unnatural-looking characters can be humorous and unsettling, striking emotional chords in the viewer.

The Santa Fe Art Project, an exhibition series that highlights emerging talent in the city’s contemporary art scene as well as artists without gallery representation, continues at David Richard Gallery. The format pairs a Santa Fe Art Project exhibition curated by gallery staff with a guest-curated show of local and regional artists.

A look back at 19th-century American landscape painting reveals a world quite different from our own. But in the paintings of Daniel Morper, there is an affinity with the idyllic, sun-dappled, virgin landscapes of the past. 

Since the 1930s, Taos has flourished as a haven for abstract painters. Two of its best known were influential in creating the Northern New Mexico city’s enduring artistic legacy. Pierce (1918-2007) was the youngest member of Raymond Jonson and Emil Bisttram’s Transcendental Painting Group, based in Taos and founded by the artists in 1938. She was just seventeen in 1935 when she arrived in Taos to study under Bisttram.

"You’ve seen cave paintings?” Nick Timbrell asked Pasatiempo during an art class at the Santa Fe Clubhouse. “I always ask myself, Why? Why did we do that? Why did we go down into a cave underground, underwater, crawl up here, crawl down there, get all our paints ready, and paint that? It’s because we have to.”

In the late 1960s, after the success of the self-published counterculture series Zap Comix, cartoonist Robert Crumb began to publish work by other artists. Among those is Robert Williams, born in Albuquerque in 1943, whose antihero Coochy Cooty made one of his earliest appearances on the pages of Zap. The first solo exhibition of Williams’ drawings and paintings in New Mexico opens on Friday, Sept. 23.

Diettes, whose exhibition Drifting Away/Río Abajo opens Friday, Sept. 16, at the Marion Center for Photographic Arts, has experienced firsthand the trauma suffered by victims and their families.

A lone figure, a staff in his hand and carrying a knapsack loaded with provisions, walks the streets of a dystopian landscape —possibly an American city of the future or an urban center on a planet not unlike our own. He passes a massive stone gargoyle, perhaps once a sentinel that stood at the city gates but now just a broken relic from a nightmare world. Scavenger birds reel in the sky as menacing, cathedral-like towers loom in the background.

Aug. 5, 2015, 3 million gallons of wastewater contaminated with arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, and lead, among other toxic elements from a spill at the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado, poisoned a tributary of the Animas River. Within five days, the waste had reached the San Juan River on the Navajo Nation, contaminating ranch and farm lands, affecting cattle and crops. Santa Fe-based artist Drew Lenihan examines issues surrounding the mine spill in a multimedia installation at David Richard Gallery.

Nests are the predominant subject in Mothner's new body of work. Sticks, mud, grass, and spiderwebs are common nest-building elements, but you occasionally see wire, bits of plastic, fabric, even human hair in them — and Mothner paints these, too, adding a human element to the compositions, deepening their metaphoric sense of home and domesticity.

New York-based artist Karen Gunderson didn’t always make monochromatic paintings using only black. But when the gallery director Aladar Marberger was dying of AIDS, a painting intended as a tribute to him took Gunderson in a new direction that has defined her work ever since.

Ralph T. Coe Foundation’s exhibit A View From Here: Northwest Coast Native Arts includes a plethora of these striking masks by some of the most well-known carvers from the region. 

“Kali Spitzer from Canada (Kaska Dena/Romanian Jewish) has been going up and doing these camps with her older relatives who are still living a land-based existence, hunting caribou and tanning the hides. She has a documentary series of her last few summers doing that, and they’re pretty captivating,” said curator Will Wilson.

Though ethnographic in their intent, 19th-century expeditions up the Missouri, which roughly followed the route mapped out decades before by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, were tinged by a Romantic idealism that would come to dominate artistic representations of Native Americans and the American West. The transition from scientific inquiry to Romantic idealism is the general theme of the exhibit of historic artwork, maps, and books at William R. Talbot Fine Art, opening Friday, Aug. 12.

The Pueblo Indian artists who were the first to take brush to paper, establishing the easel-art tradition in Native America, are the focus of the current exhibition at Adobe Gallery.

Herrera, who will be a recipient of the 2016 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts this fall, joins fellow santero Muñiz in a show opening Friday, in time for Spanish Market weekend. The show offers visitors an opportunity to view pieces that are more eclectic than the traditional bultos and retablos seen at the market, although both artists draw from, and expand upon, tradition.

Yares Art Projects recently moved from its Grant Avenue location to a bigger space in the Baca Arts District and is set to grow even further, with plans to open an extension, Yares Art, on 5th Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan. The official announcement comes at the reception for the gallery’s 25th-anniversary exhibition.

After 19 years in the Railyard District, owner James Kelly is closing up shop in Santa Fe and taking his expertise to California, where he has accepted a position with the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles.

The New Mexico Coalition for Literacy states that 20 percent of New Mexicans age sixteen and older are at the lowest level of literacy on a scale of one to five, and 46 percent are at level two, indicating an insufficient degree of education required to hold many types of jobs. Artist Edward Gonzales believes that literacy begins in the home.