Jacob Hashimoto’s installation at SITE Santa Fe seems to hover at the crossroads of painting and sculpture, but it transcends both. 

In the fall of 1917, as Santa Fe was blossoming as an artist colony, the New Mexico Museum of Art — known then as the Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico — opened to great fanfare. New exhibitions were occasions for everyone in the City Different to dress up and join together in celebration. That old-fashioned Santa Fe spirit is on tap for revival on Saturday, Nov. 25.

In the decades immediately following the Mexican Revolution, political themes, workers’ rights, and land reform were naturally reflected in the work produced by the Taller de Gráfica Popular (the People’s Print Workshop) or, simply, the TGP. The workshop advanced the concerns of a post-revolutionary populace, appealing as much as possible to the common folk in its imagery. 

If possible, it might be best to see Aitken’s single-video channel installation Migration with little or no foreknowledge of his previous work and let this astoundingly beautiful little film exist free of preconceptions. It opens with a brown horse in a motel room who seems nervous, almost pacing, its hooves kicking up fine clouds of dust from the carpeted floor. 

SITE Santa Fe includes Hershman Leeson’s functional replica of a genetics lab, The Infinity Engine, in its Future Shock exhibition. The piece, which she created in collaboration with scientists, contains reenactments of lab tests, printed scaffolds of noses and ears, microscopes, and other scientific equipment, with different areas defined by color-coding and signage. 

Inspired by meticulous renderings of insects in pre-photographic natural history publications, the Brazilian artist adorned the exterior walls and courtyard of the newly remodeled space with dozens of large black vinyl adhesive insects. 

As part of SITE Santa Fe’s relaunch, the Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist Patrick Bernatchez was given multiple gallery spaces to display Lost in Time, a multimedia project nearly a decade in the making. From a sensory perspective, the work is rich and nuanced, comprising sound, film, photography, and objects.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A new exhibit at the New Mexico History Museum revisits the counterculture that marked the Summer of Love and describes a world both radically different and strangely familiar.

A hodgepodge of public programs associated with the New Mexico History Museum’s Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest exhibit offers three seasons worth of lectures, workshops, and immersive experiences. The series is supplemented by the Jack Loeffler-produced radio documentary “Voices of Counterculture,” which airs in eight parts on several New Mexico radio stations, including KSFR 101.1-FM and KUNM 89.9-FM.

In Frida With Diego and Gas Mask (1938) by Nickolas Muray, Kahlo is captured in an embrace with her husband, a gas mask dangling from one hand. Rivera’s storied sexual allure does not often come across in pictures, but in this one — taken by a man with whom Kahlo engaged in a decade-long love affair — his charm is overt, complete with impish grin and bedroom eyes. The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art exhibit, which opens on May 6, offers a rare opportunity to view Kahlo as others saw her.

The Prado is known for its incomparable collection of works by painters who lived and worked in Spain, such as Diego Velázquez (circa 1599-1660) and El Greco (1541-1614), “The Greek,” who was born in Greece and immigrated to Spain in 1577. The museum also holds more works by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) than by any other artist. The museum is offering Santa Feans and visitors to the city the next best thing to seeing them in person: full-scale, high-resolution photo replicas of dozens of major works from the Prado’s collection on view in Cathedral Park. 

At the age of twenty-two, photographer Herbert Lotz was designing window displays for department stores. Then he was notified that he had been drafted and would be sent to Vietnam. During his tour of duty, he took hundreds of photos on a Nikkormat camera. 

Not much is known about Edward Miall Skeats. A native of England, he came to New Mexico in 1890 at the request of Charles B. Eddy — for whom Eddy County is named — to help locate sites for water wells in Carlsbad. But Skeats — an engineer, a chemist, and a geologist — is known today, and barely at that, for his watercolor illustrations of regional plant life in the southeastern end of the state.

A decade passed between the time of painter Cady Wells’ (1904-1954) first encounter with the Southwest in 1922 and his return. 

The name refers to a style of making the recycled wood art, not to the people who made it. Learn more about the art at a reception this Sunday.  

Kennedy learned fine letterpress printing at the University of Minnesota, but he uses his skills in a more free-form manner, creating layered posters in series about social responsibility, the value of books, art, and civil-rights pioneer Rosa Parks. He is in Santa Fe Friday and Saturday, March 3 and 4, for a talk, poster sale, and printing workshop at the New Mexico History Museum (the last of which was already sold out at press time).

It’s the last of the Alcoves shows at the New Mexico Museum of Art — for now, at least. While the shows — curated by Merry Scully, the museum’s head of curatorial affairs — have been an ambitious undertaking from start to finish, in part because of the short duration for each installment and the quick changeover, they have also offered a glimpse into Scully’s eye, which is geared more toward contemporary, conceptual works.

In his painting Four Dancers, a traditional buffalo dance is seen from the point of view of the spectator. Multiple hands holding cellphones obscure the view. The tech-driven world, the world of the small screen, plays a part in I-Witness Culture, a solo exhibition of Buffalo Hyde’s recent work on exhibit at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture.

Miss 505 is a visual feast of bling and glitter. You can see the car at the New Mexico History Museum, where it was wheeled in on Jan. 3 as the final full-size automobile entry of the exhibition Lowriders, Hoppers, and Hot Rods: Car Culture of Northern New Mexico. 

Printmaking has a rich history among Native artists. New Impressions features more than 40 prints by Native artists and was developed along the theme of how past histories — personal and collective — continue to inform the present. 

McCoy’s painting installation at MoCNA, an homage to his father and to the innocence of childhood, draws from artistic traditions in American comic book art and 20th-century Native studio painting styles.

The show contains a large-scale, floor-to-ceiling ink wash on paper called La Bajada Red that runs along one wall, from corner to corner. It’s an abstract work made with nontraditional tools. LaTocha uses things she’s gathered and has on hand to make her marks.

The role of science fiction in popular culture approaches that of myth. It’s a contemporary vision of a world looking to the future, and in Now Is the Time, it’s a vision sometimes gleaned through the prism of the past.

In the first half of the 20th century, the advent of radio and television helped to drive the final nails into the coffin of the paper theater. But during the previous century, paper theaters — also known as miniature or toy theaters — were a popular form of family entertainment in England, France, Germany, and other European countries, as well as in the United States.

After an extensive renovation, the museum reopens the exhibit on Sunday, Jan. 29, with an ongoing series of hands-on activities for all ages including origami-making, kite-coloring, and community basket-making.

“Block Printing! The very name sounds intriguing! Out of the East it came centuries ago! Temple bells of the Orient, sunlight of Italy, snow-crowned mountains of the North, and blue skies of Zeeland cluster about the craft of block printing, giving it a charm that lays hold upon our artistic affection!” Thus did Raymond W. Perry, lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design, leap into his presentation in his 1938 book Block Printing Craft.

Whaley has two ongoing projects involving work at the Scottish Rite Center: One is historical, the other is more creative and makes use of a number of backdrops from the building’s theater, which is still used as a venue for lectures, ceremonies, and performances.

Cigar boxes were often printed with elaborate Western scenes depicting cowboys and cowgirls in romantic settings, ranchers smoking by a campfire, and bandits replete with bandoliers.

This year’s International Archaeology Day free open house at the Center for New Mexico Archaeology offers both interesting activities and an immersion into the world of maize. Visitors can try shooting with a bow and arrow, make a cornhusk doll, see coiled basketry and pottery-firing demonstrations, and tour the Office of Archaeological Studies laboratories and the state’s repository of ancient stone tools, ceramics, and other artifacts.

Some of the works in Small Wonders are images by Denver-based photographer Susan Goldstein, whose humorous and sometimes disturbing pictures are collaged from found photos, and by photographer Liz Steketee of San Francisco, who starts with her own pictures and then cuts, rephotographs, and sews them into new compositions.

The romance and the rewards of Northern New Mexico’s lowrider lifestyle have been celebrated in two recent museum exhibitions. This curatorial focus on car aficionados who are obsessed with customizing their rides — and thereby broadcasting their cultural pride — has earned this season the moniker “Lowrider Summer” — and it’s not quite over.

Among Gustave Baumann’s papers are three undated accounts in which he reminisces about the Pasatiempo Parade of 1926. We are pleased to publish the most polished of the three, in which he provides considerable detail on the events he depicted in his painting of that celebration.

Slightly more than a hundred figures populate Gustave Baumann’s Pasatiempo Parade Santa Fe 1926. It may be that every one was a real person who attended the event, although Baumann mentions only 26 of them by name on the card affixed to the back of the painting.

Lee Krasner is among a group of female Abstract Expressionist painters — many of whom spent their careers in the margins of their male counterparts’ relative fame and success — who finally take center stage in a groundbreaking summerlong exhibition at the Denver Art Museum.

Thomas Nast published his political cartoon “Throwing Down the Ladder by Which They Rose” nearly a century and a half ago, in 1870. On the summit of a huge partition, labeled “The ‘Chinese Wall’ Around the United States of America,” angry citizens of European extraction gather to topple a ladder reaching up to them, leaving a handful of pigtailed Chinese people stranded perhaps 20 feet below.

The complicated 600-year evolution of crypto-Jewish identity is fleshed out in conversations between historians, anthropologists, genealogists, and musicians at Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, the Inquisition, and New World Identities.

Albuquerque artist and contractor Sheri Crider uses the waste materials from abandoned urban projects as the basis for her art. In Alcoves 16/17 #4, she has constructed a large, nearly floor-to-ceiling sculpture made entirely of reclaimed doors. The exhibit comprises five solo artist presentations that stand on their own.

In 2013, artist Rick Bartow suffered the second of two strokes that left him with a blind spot in one eye, memory loss, and speech difficulties. But his health did not dampen his artistic spirit and he returned to his practice with enthusiasm, creating works on a scale rarely seen in his earlier paintings.

One of the text panels in the exhibition Jicarilla: Home Near the Heart of the World at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian informs us that the heart of the world — “the place where, according to the Jicarilla origin story, they first emerged from the earth” — is located near Taos Pueblo, with whose people the Jicarilla have maintained a strong relationship for many generations.

A considered perusal of the Wheelwright Museum’s new Jim and Lauris Phillips Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry is a remarkable journey. The variety and creativity of the work is fascinating, as are the tales told in the roughly chronological sequence of cases.

Today, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) has a collection of about 200 Zuni pots, dating to the 1930s, that curator Valerie Verzuh told Pasatiempo were created as “secret ceremonial pots” to sell to the public.

In New Mexico, especially if you’re an art historian, the names Bert and Ernie may not put you immediately in mind of the popular Sesame Street characters as readily as they will the names of painters Bert Phillips (1868-1956) and Ernest Blumenschein (1874-1960). 

Photographer Donald Woodman, known for his wide range of work from formal architecture documentation and landscapes to fine art studies and commercial projects, knew Martin from an unusual angle: From 1977 to 1984, he served as her personal assistant, performing a staggering range of duties and devoting his life to hers.

One of the gems in the collection at the New Mexico History Museum’s Fray Angélico Chávez History Library is a map of the Southwest drawn in 1674 by Nicolas Sanson, royal geographer to King Louis XIII of France. It is a beauty, but is not entirely accurate.

The third Alcoves show includes a sculptural piece by local artist Heidi Pollard that was inspired by the tale of Queen Berenice II of Egypt, wife of Ptolemy III Euergetes, who made an offering of her hair to Aphrodite in exchange for her husband’s safe return from war.