EVOKATION | art + culture + inspiration | April 2025

EartVO K AT I O N culture inspiration

2O25 ISSUE

An Evoke Contemporary publication

A Note from Evoke

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rt is more than a form of expression; it is a fundamental part of human existence that enriches our lives in immeasurable ways. It shapes cultures, sparks imagination, and offers solace during difficult times. As a sanctuary from reality, art allows individuals to explore beauty, creativity, and emotion. Whether through painting, music, literature, or dance, it provides a medium for self-expression, healing, and reflection. Engaging with art stimulates the mind, nurtures emotional well-being, and deepens our understanding of the world around us.

Beyond personal enrichment, art fosters a sense of connection and community. It brings people together through shared experiences—bridging gaps between cultures, generations, and backgrounds. The universality of art reminds us of our shared humanity, fostering empathy, dialogue, and understanding. Even in the face of adversity, art continues to be a source of strength and transformation, proving its timeless and unifying power.

We are embracing this vision with a dynamic lineup of exhibitions and events for 2025. Our summer salon has become an intrinsic part of this mission, serving as a platform for conversation, inspiration, and the convergence of critical and creative thought. This year, we will expand our programming with more public talks featuring artists, curators, and visionary minds, alongside artistic demonstrations and multidisciplinary events spanning performance, literature, and the visual arts.

Join us at Evoke Contemporary for a year of vibrant creativity, thoughtprovoking dialogue, and immersive artistic experiences!

Kathrine Erickson and Elan Varshay Owners / Publishers

CONTRIBUTORS Mara Christian Harris is a marketing and communications professional. She has been associated with Evoke since its inception.

Kelly Koepke is a freelance arts, culture and food writer who loves talking to smart people about what they are smart about.

Richard Lehnert is a poet, music critic, and freelance copyeditor who for 40 years has edited arts copy for many New Mexico publications. After 30 years in Santa Fe, he now lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Kate Nelson, based in Placitas, NM, has been managing editor of New Mexico Magazine and The Albuquerque Tribune, and wrote the artist biography Helen Hardin: A Straight Line Curved.

John O’Hern retired from a 35-year career in museum management and curation and now writes full time as Santa Fe Editor for the five magazines of International Artist Publishing.

MaLin Wilson-Powell is a writer and independent curator who lives in Santa Fe.

3 Calendar of Events 4 Cake | Lee Price 10

Fool’s Spring | Jeremy Miranda

16 Habitat and the Preternatural | Michael Scott

CONTENTS

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Summer Salon | Group Exhibition

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Vanitas | Kent Williams

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Mitos y Memorias | Patrick McGrath Muñiz

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Blurred Lines | Andrew Shears

48 SITE Santa Fe | Once Within a Time

EVOKATION is published by Evoke Contemporary, 550 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe, NM 87501. © EVOKE Contemporary. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

On the cover: Michael Scott, Origin of Species (detail), oil on linen, 120" x 120".

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INDIGENOUS DESIGN: NOT NEW—JUST NEXT .

NATIVE FASHION WEEK SANTA FE | MAY 8-11, 2025 SANTA FE RAILYARD 30+ Indigenous designers. Leading the future of fashion.

Where legacy shapes the avant-garde. Featuring Vogue’s Christian Allaire, with models Ashley Callingbull and Dakota Beavers.

Captured in an upcoming documentary by Violet Beast.

For more information: info@nativefashionweeksantafe.com nativefashionweeksantafe.com | @nativefashionweeksantafe 2

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Sponsors / Partners

CALENDAR OF EVENTS 2O25 All events take place at Evoke Contemporary, 550 S. Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501.

Visit evokecontemporary.com to sign up for special previews and for further information.

Apr 25 Cake | Lee Price Through her realistic paintings of desserts, Lee Price captures the intimate tension be- tween pleasure and introspection, inviting viewers to savor both the sweetness and the deeper narrative beneath.

On display through May 24, 2025.

Jul 25

May 30 Fool’s Spring | Jeremy Miranda draws viewers into the quiet, contemplative world of winter —where light fades fleetingly, silence lin- gers, and the landscape shifts between dor- mancy and renewal.

On display through June 21, 2025.

Sep 26 Vanitas | Kent Williams delves deeply into the complexities of the human condition, capturing raw emotion and personal introspection through his evocative, expressive style.

On display through October 25, 2025.

Jun 27 Habitat and the Preternatural | Michael Scott expands on his Preternatural landscapes, confronting viewers with arresting new narra- tives where nature reigns supreme and ani- mals stand as sentinels in a world in flux.

On display through July 19, 2025.

Oct 31 Mitos y Memorias | Patrick McGrath Muñiz presents a richly layered meditation on the tension between past and present, mythology and memory.

On display through November 22, 2025.

Jul 25

Summer Salon | Evoke Contemporary carries forward the rich tradition of salons as cata- lysts for artistic dialogue and intellectual exchange, challenging perspectives and inspiring deeper engagement with contemporary art.

Exhibition and events take place through September 20, 2025.

Junkyard Diaries | Nicholas Herrera unveils raw, unfiltered creations deeply rooted in the traditions of his northern New Mexico homeland –blending folk art with a bold contemporary perspective, reflecting a narrative of heritage, resilience, and social commentary.

On display through August 23, 2025.

Nov 28 Blurred Lines | Andrew Shears invites viewers into a realm where memory, perception, and abstraction intertwine.

On display through December 20, 2025.

Dec 26 Monochrome Visions | Works in black and white offer a radical perspective on what happens when artists abandon the color spectrum, focusing instead on the expressive depth of black, white, and everything in between.

On display through January 24, 2026.

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CAKE: Lee Price Everybody likes cake, right? The confection conjures special celebrations—birthdays, weddings, graduations, holiday and retirement parties. And each of us has our favorite cake, don’t we? Carrot, red velvet, chocolate, pineapple upside down.

There’s something happy about the notion of eating a piece of cake. Even the famous remark attributed to Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat cake,” implies that cake is better than ordinary, life-sustaining bread (despite its obvious disconnection from the economic realities of Marie’s 18th-century subjects).

Lee Price, Summer, oil on linen, 42” x 38”.

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Lee Price, Spring, oil on linen, 42” x 41”.

For Lee Price, though, cake often conceals sadness, and especially in her favorite of the eight paintings in her exhibition Cake, opening at Evoke on April 25. Titled Summer, this large, realistic oil painting is an overhead selfportrait of the artist sitting at a table topped with a cloth of bright orange and yellow flowers. Whole and squeezed lemons provide contrast to a large chocolate cake covered with creamy-white, swirled frosting. Before the lone, forkwielding woman, her face hidden by the work’s point of view,

is a half-eaten slice of that cake.

“I was reminded of summer in childhood, when my mother would bake a particular cake with marshmallow frosting that I tried to replicate for this painting,” Price said. “The scene is melancholy, like all my paintings of elaborate cakes that are pretty and colorful. But it’s over. There’s been a gathering that is not anymore, and there’s something sad to me about that.”

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Lee Price, Cake, oil on linen, 40” x 62”.

The show’s largest painting, titled simply Cake, well illustrates this dichotomy. Again from overhead, we see a big, rectangular table. On it are nine different cakes, each intricately frosted in cheerful blue, pink, and yellow icings, and surrounded by halfemptied coffee cups and plates dotted with cake crumbs and remnants. “You can see that people had been eating, and they are finished,” Price explained. “Obviously, there was some elaborate preparation for an event. Now the plates are dirty, and the scene has come to an end. What I want people to feel is how transient life is.”

While Price initially doesn’t create with an idea of, or overly concern herself with, what the audience will take away from a painting, she hopes that this time they get the idea of the transience of life, or that the paintings remind them of something nostalgic from their own lives. However, she added, this theme of

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time’s passage was not premeditated, but emerged strongly as she began creating the paintings in this show, each of which features baked goods. “I would like people to feel a sense of time passing.

At the same time, I like that people get what they get. I appreciate that people look and get anything out of them, but my paintings don’t really have an intention.”

Neither was the contrast between her saturated, lively color palette of reds, blues, and yellows and the deeper message of the paintings a conscious one. “I’ve always gravitated toward making scenes that, if you think about them, are dark psychologically, yet they are painted with happy colors. I like looking first at this superfun happy scene, and then looking more deeply at something not so happy. Those happy, brilliant colors pull people, and then they see there’s something amiss.”

An obvious question: Does Price’s body of work mirror her own psychological state? To a certain extent it does, she said. The youngest of three sisters, Price was brought up in Elmira, New York, by a single mother who worked as an art teacher, and was raised to present a happy, shiny face to the world. It was she who made everyone laugh, she said; instead of being able to express negative emotions, she was quiet. These two modes—everything is funny and nothing’s wrong—effectively hid her own issues from herself, and Price struggled with binge eating.

Her early work expressed this relationship with food in selfportraits in which the artist appears in bathtubs and beds surrounded by snacks and junk food. First addressing the way women distort themselves with diet and surgery to conform with societal expectations, over the years it has transitioned toward images of acceptance and expansion, and emerging from these damaging states into positive, emotional transformation.

difficult to do, but I had a tolerance for not making money and eating ramen noodles for a year.”

After graduating from Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art with a BFA in painting, she became a technical designer in the fashion industry. At no point, she said, did she ever know what she was doing, but she kept getting promoted because of her disciplined work ethic and ability to figure out how to create what the designers wanted. Her painting career took off when images of her bingeeating self-portraits struck a chord with people all around the world via a new thing called the internet. She received e-mails from women telling her their own food-related stories, and interview requests from India, Italy, England, and elsewhere. “Wow,” she now remembers thinking. “This resonates with people.” Her paintings soon sold well enough that she was able to quit her job.

“Women don’t often feel like we can fill up a room, or that we are important enough that we can create 20 paintings all about ourselves,” she explained. “We’re told not to take up space. But I want women to come in and think, ‘I can do that same thing’.”

Of her self-portraits in which the background matches the dress she’s wearing, Price added, “I think it looks like I’m melting into the background. But the intent is to take up the whole space.

Young women in this country forget that we have a whole lot more rights and freedoms than in other countries. I grew up in an atmosphere where everything was done by women, but also a time when I remember my mother coming home and saying very angrily that she had gotten a look at the paycheck of a young man just hired as an art teacher. He was 20 years younger but was making more money than her, who had been at the school for 20 years. I remember stuff like that.”

When Price was very young, her mother took her to museums and galleries. She soon began to draw, and by the time she was five years old she knew she wanted to be an artist. Nothing dissuaded Price from that goal—not the prospect of struggling for money or recognition, not family pressures. “I honestly think that was the main reason I could [become an artist]. It was very

Lee Price, Self Portrait in Pink Pajamas, oil on linen, 40” x 30”.

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Above: Lee Price, Winter, oil on linen, 39" x 49”. Opposite: Lee Price, Autumn, oil on linen, 55” x 27”.

Today, she’s especially proud that two of those paintings will be part of the permanent collections of two museums. The Muskegon Museum of Art, in Michigan, will house Tea Cup, another overhead perspective of the artist, this time in a bathtub, drinking tea. Summer, from the Cake exhibition, will find its new home at the Arnot Art Museum, in Price’s hometown of Elmira.

Price’s intricately detailed, realistic style was influenced by her favorite artists: Caravaggio, Bo Bartlett (with whom she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art), and Vincent Desiderio, all of whose works are known for their focus on the human figure, strong emphasis on realism, and thematic complexity. “I don’t think I’m a hyperrealist, but do wish that I was much looser. If you 8

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look at my paintings, you’ll see teeny passages of loose areas that I like.”

Price’s creation of each painting is time-consuming and deliberate: She first sees an image in her head. Then, to set the scene, she gathers materials: fabrics for the custom-made dresses in her self-portraits, flooring, furniture, and other props. From original concept to a professional photo shoot of the vision in her mind’s eye can often take months. From the shoot she chooses the most representative image to project onto her canvas, first sketching the outlines and then painting them in. Price’s skill in envisioning the scene and realizing it in oils is anything but easy or reductive—especially the intricate background and floor patterns,

which are often geometric or floral designs that hark back to a 1970s aesthetic.

For the Cake paintings she created a wall of printouts and searched for recipes for the kinds of cakes she wanted to make, shuffling the images to decide which cakes would go into which paintings. Then she baked and frosted the desserts, often borrowing friends’ freezers to preserve the components until final assembly. Next came choosing and buying the tablecloths, cake stands, dishes, and utensils that would complete each tableau before she called in the photographer.

The eight paintings in Cake are twice the number Price normally produces in a year, and are bigger than her usual format. “It was a brutal year, and now I need a spa vacation!” she laughed. “I’m slow, not prolific, and painting patterns is time consuming. I wanted to make smaller works, but that didn’t happen. It normally takes me about three months from start to finish of a piece.”

While for most of us indulging in a piece of cake is a special treat, viewing Lee Price’s Cake exhibition should be savored for the message of appreciating the celebration that occasioned its eating—and, after the celebration is over and all that remains is dirty dishes, to recognize not only the time and effort that went into its making, but also the social and cultural messages it conveys. And the memories.

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Photo: Brett Wiese Saunders

Jeremy Miranda, Early Morning After Storm, acrylic on panel, 20” x 17”.

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FOOL’S SPRING: Jeremy Miranda The more it snows, the more you feel closed in. So Jeremy Miranda described his Maine winters, very different from what we experience here in New Mexico. But not at all different is what many of us experience in winter: spending more time indoors, we become more internally focused. Whether it’s less daylight, more snow and wind, more freezing weather in general, in winter months we cocoon, even here in the West.

In the 30 smaller paintings Miranda represents the passing of the days of a single month. Each work captures a quiet moment during a day—a snow-covered landscape, or a still life of oranges, or the curving metal of an opened sardine tin on a table—things that occupy his world as it shrinks along with the shortened days.

“Because there are enough of them, I want the paintings to kind of feel slightly cinematic—like a montage. Through the series you’ll get a real sense of the space that is winter here for me. Many of the paintings are interiors with stuff, and about family life. Anybody who has kids will recognize the mess that is the reality of being a parent.

Photo: Brett Wiese Saunders

Fool’s Spring, Miranda’s exhibition of 33 new semi-abstract works, opens May 30. The title is a phrase Miranda uses to describe a quick, fleeting warmup during the cold season—only a fool believes that winter is over and spring is on the way.

Thirty works measuring 16” x 20” and three larger paintings, each spanning 60” x 72”, constitute a series confronting premature celebrations of the end of something. “Don’t fall for things warming up and start planting, because winter is coming back,” Miranda said. “The show leads up to a transition point, though not explicitly. The series is a spiritual ride from late winter to spring, where things slow down and a stillness comes. Slowly but surely, what starts off as a real embrace of the comfort of winter slowly turns into a kind of locked-in feeling. This is what occupies my world as it closes in.”

green is one of most frustrating colors to deal with. It’s in the middle of the spectrum, so it’s very hard to grasp what kind of green it is. Is it cool? More yellow? I look forward to the warmth of summer, but not the visual of it.”

Though Fool’s Spring is his first winter-focused show, Miranda said that winter has long been the most visually exciting season for him as a painter. At first blush, winter might seem monochromatically white. But the colors of the landscape and sky, and their relationships, change quickly and often. Periods of cold make way for rain, sleet, hail, and blankets of snow— then, thawing and refreezing result in ice. “The light is different because of the angle and how it translates,” Miranda explained.

“Most people think summer is full of color, but for us in New England, it’s mostly green once the leaves descend on us. And Jeremy Miranda, Middle of March, acrylic on panel, 20” x 17”.

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This is my visual reality, and these paintings are an embrace of that.”

resistance. So of course, taking the path of least resistance, I pursued it.”

This painter certainly knows what New England winters are about.

Born and raised in Middletown, Rhode Island, he graduated in 2004 from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (aka MassArt), in Boston, with a BFA in painting, and where he’d spent free moments paging through art books in the library. Like many children, he’d drawn in childhood, and still finds it the most natural way for him to process things. “I had trouble in school with reading and other subjects, but this thing—drawing and thinking creatively—was something that didn’t feel like it gave me any

Miranda was fortunate to take art classes as a youth, paid for by his grandparents, at an art museum in Newport, Rhode Island, that occupied a Victorian-era mansion. He remembers the dusty, worn state of the building, which he describes as romantic. But it wasn’t until he was in high school and took a studio workshop in an old mill with the late Rhode Island painter Luke Randall that he understood what an artist really does. Until then, he hadn’t connected paintings with the artists who had created them, or pictured their lives.

Photo: Brett Wiese Saunders

Jeremy Miranda, Dried Hydrangea, acrylic on panel, 20” x 17”.

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Photo: Brett Wiese Saunders

Jeremy Miranda, Bending Light, acrylic on panel, 20” x 16”.

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Photo: Brett Wiese Saunders

Jeremy Miranda, Prickly Pear, acrylic on panel, 20” x 17”.

“In that moment, with the paintings and the smell of the space in the old mill, I immediately thought, This is what I want. I want to always be surrounded by this. Near the end of high school, I was an assistant for Thomas Deininger, a painter and sculptor. I was a terrible assistant, but we’re still friends.”

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From Deininger, Miranda learned discipline, and to spend time immersing himself in diverse works. Deininger would take him out foraging for materials for multimedia sculptures, then back to the studio to paint for at least an hour. That commitment—to paint and think about his work every day—became a habit that

Miranda has yet to break. “For me, it’s the idea that working with the material all the time and thinking about foundational things all the time, as a way to arrive at a kind of looseness, both technically and stylistically, is a way to reach an open state. This wrestling with self-consciousness is much about weeding that out until you get to fly above the weather, so to speak.”

Miranda’s work has become known for its intricate and detailed depictions of surreal, often dreamlike scenes and figures. He points to the birth of his first child, a son who is now nine, as the event that cemented his style and subject. Before children, he says, he was consumed by the idea of inventing each painting anew, pulling references from many directions. Now, he says, he’s preoccupied with being open to witnessing the sublime in the everyday, trying to be present in the moment as a way of uncovering a certain kind of magic hiding in plain sight, concealed in the things we ignore.

“Very unexpectedly, I abruptly turned my back on an entire way of thinking and making things. I became completely focused on just observational paintings, painting simple, quiet things around me.

Something turned on in my brain that made me very aware of my own mortality. Life slowed down but became more complicated.

Because of that, I wanted to drink up what was in front of me, not turn away and create fictional spaces. Having a kid re-explained to me that there is an entire world in front of me equally as mysterious as the things I was trying to invent before. I can extract an amount of poetry or magic only by painting—by slowing down a moment and sustaining it, picking away at it, ruminating on it, by having to decode and paint it. I want to train myself to identify when magic and mystery appear—but stop before understanding it. I don’t want to understand it, just keep it in this state. At the risk of seeming impossibly corny, in those moments it seems possible that something bigger is trying to communicate.”

Unlike many painters who work on only one or two canvases at a time, Miranda has been creating all 33 of the paintings in Fool’s Spring simultaneously—even the three large-scale works. He described the process as a conversation in which the paintings

are all talking to each other at the same time. Like a chess master playing multiple opponents at once, he circulates among the works in progress, never working on something he doesn’t want to, directing his energy where it is most demanded and needed.

The three larger canvases serve the same purpose, their size playing off each other and the smaller works. “I’m excited to see the larger ones finished, because they seem impossible. A large painting is a whole different language, not like a smaller painting simply blown up. I wanted to experience that, because I needed two different modes to occupy myself. Big paintings are a chance to make something immersive. I’ve not done a lot of them, because there aren’t a lot of big gallery spaces in New England.

I’m looking forward to seeing how they will play off the smaller ones in New Mexico.”

—Kelly Koepke

Photo: Brett Wiese Saunders

Jeremy Miranda, February, acrylic on panel, 30” x 16”.

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HABITAT AND THE PRETERNATURAL Michael Scott Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but not more interesting than looking.

—J.W. Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

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For Michael Scott, nature is sovereign. This exhibition, an extension and expansion of the artist’s sublime Preternatural landscapes, features new narrative paintings that confront the viewer in disconcerting ways. Scott began a dramatic pivot of his gaze in 2022, after Preternatural was exhibited at the Cincinnati Museum Center. That museum commissioned Scott to paint a monumental canvas celebrating the Edge of Appalachia Preserve System, a 20,000-acre expanse of ten adjacent nature preserves in Adams County, in southern Ohio, whose deep ravines, rolling forest, and prairies mark the edge of glacial activity in Ohio.

Scott painted The Edge after multiple visits to The Edge itself, as the system is commonly known, in different seasons. He found his deepest inspiration in early winter, when the dense foliage was gone, and he saw a standing rock that seemed to him an altarpiece. Scott positions the viewer as supplicant below a

majestic red stag that looks directly at the viewer. The display of the crown of antlers beneath a tumultuous sky harks back to ancient cultural reverence for stags as godlike symbols of strength, regeneration, agility, nobility, and—for the resemblance of antlers to tree branches—the forest itself.

In the current show, Scott’s The Flame, the Moth, and the Stag is a tense portrayal of a stag in a winter landscape. A fire holds and illuminates a red deer larger and closer than the one in The Edge, its liquid brown eyes confronting the viewer more directly. As in all of Scott’s work there is a totality of appearance, correspondences between tree trunks and fur, flames and leaves, clouds and rocks, hot and cold. It is as if the sky is in mourning. As always, there is in Scott’s phantasmagoria an irrepressible, palpable sense of experience in flux for the viewer.

Opposite: Michael Scott, The Edge, oil on linen, 120” x 120”.

Above: Michael Scott, The Flame, the Moth, and the Stag, oil on linen, 56” x 88”.

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Michael Scott, Wolf Moon (field study), oil on linen, 13.5” x 16”.

All of the works in this new show embody the signature elemental qualities of earth, air, fire, and water that Scott developed in his Preternatural paintings. The seven large canvases are from that series, and twenty new, smaller paintings were made in the four years since that traveling exhibition. In the Preternatural works, Scott’s tribe of animals were ghosts; in these more recent paintings, animals are the main players in more confrontational, theatrical narratives.

Scott painted his first environmentally conscious landscapes in 1975, and in the fifty years since has brought to this task his formidable skills and impeccable craft. His new work continues to deploy his tried and true method of working. He first paints 18

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small oil sketches, then develops midsize studies to work out composition, dynamics, and format. Both stages underpin the grand allegorical paintings that ultimately result. The haunting complexity of his large-scale imagery evolves over years, as he constantly changes and refines the interactions of color, tactility, spatial relationships, scale, and size. The appearance of each element in a mise-en-scène is of whole cloth steeped in a world of Scott’s making. In each major composition, a giant letter X is explicit or implicit. A forest of upright trees may serve as a stabilizing grid, while the precipitous angles of fallen or leaning trees, raking beams of light, and ruined boats, masts, and sails destabilize and energize.

Scott’s paintings are sumptuous at every scale—his glorious, saturated colors make everything worth looking at. The quick, small oil studies are tokens of the moment, conveying a kind of effortless, unfettered joy in the act of painting, a sprezzatura as his rapid brushstrokes revel in the surface excitement of wet, juicy paint. No single element prevails. Previously, these loose oil sketches served only as plein-air studies at the Grand Canyon, Redwood, and Yosemite National Parks. In the new work, Scott’s repertoire of animals takes center stage in places he’s never visited or in conditions he couldn’t survive. Polar bears roar as Arctic

icebergs melt. Wolves growl and snarl, surrounded by fire. These paintings rely on a lifetime of imagination and visits to naturalhistory museums.

In his midsize canvases, Scott depicts worlds that have depth, environment, and atmosphere. Air surrounds figures bathed in different kinds of light—dawn light, moonlight, winter light, storm light, firelight. He works out the format, palette, and interactions by a process of invocation, calling up a wholeness.

Michael Scott, Wolf Moon, oil on linen, 56” x 88”.

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Scott’s new, large-scale canvases gather dense meaning mixed with mystery. What are we looking at? We are bound up in in the act of looking at something we can’t know, something dangerous with dire consequences. To be truly seen, these major paintings must be seen in person. Face to face with the viewer, the polar bears in the grand diptych Origin of Species look weary, haunted, hungry. They paw at human artifacts in a ruined boat, but there is nothing to eat. Origin of Species is an extravagant, asymmetrical, delirious constellation of intersecting vectors of activity. Everything about the wrecked boat is askew. The point of view is from the freezing water below the calamity—the implication is that civilization, represented by the flimsy wooden boat, can no longer stay afloat.

Traditionally, the polar bear is a symbol of resilience, perseverance, and survival in the harsh and unforgiving Arctic. In the midsize study Melting of the Ice Cave, the bear is indescribably sad, the ice cave rendered in centrifugal strokes of cool blue—but in the larger, finished canvas the cave is hot and cold. In a remarkably balanced blend of divergent and fleeting flashes of light, Scott’s use of pink and red is particularly striking. In reproductions, it is impossible to fully see and feel these accomplishments.

Opposite: Michael Scott, Origin of Species, oil on linen, 120" x 120".

Above: Michael Scott, Melting of the Ice Cave, oil on linen, 56” x 78”.

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Michael Scott, Wolf in Fire (field study), oil on paper on panel, 11” x 8”.

The terrifying power of out-of-control fire has been unleashed on our warming planet many times since Scott made the Preternatural fire paintings. The magic he invoked by naming one of those paintings Fire Orb returns in his more recent canvases. In Wolf in Fire (field study), an angry wolf dominates as witness. The wolf, like the polar bear an apex predator, is a primal symbol of resourcefulness and freedom in the wild. Just as fire transcends boundaries, Scott’s lurid magic transcends our limited and culture-bound experiences to emphasize how little attention we are paying to greater forces at work.

Michael Scott, Deer in Life Boat, oil on panel, 7.5” x 10.5”.

A group of paintings featuring water presents two symbols that have appeared in past work by Scott. The wooden boat first appeared as early as 1993, in a small Scott painting—a fanciful self-portrait of the artist as a deer tossed about on a turbulent sea of brushstrokes, without paddle, oars, or rudder.

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Michael Scott, Fire Orb, oil on linen, 80” x 57".

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Michael Scott, Firebird 2, oil on linen, 56” x 73”.

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The other allegorical figure, a “firebird,” soars in splendor above the drama unfolding as lava drips into the tumultuous water below. The firebird, as invented

by Scott, represents an ominous warning of Earth’s rapid changes, and first took flight in his Preternatural series. The bird has the curved beak of an eagle— fearless and tenacious high fliers with keen eyesight who can reputedly spot another eagle fifty miles away.

By comparison, humans are shortsighted and subject to forces beyond their control.

In his new paintings, Michael Scott has continued to develop his propensity for invention, fantasy, and magic. His noble creatures directly confront the viewer, integral witnesses to the earth’s majesty.

—MaLin Wilson-Powell

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Thomas Couture, Los Romanos de la Decadencia (detail), 1847, oil on linen, 186” x 304”. Courtesy: Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.

SUMMER SALON: Group Exhibition Before written and, perhaps, even spoken language, our ancestors painted on the walls of caves. Some say these images were a way of communicating spiritual insights, or to illustrate the animals seen and hunted outside the caves—or were merely an early form of “Kilroy was here.”

Many millennia later, communicating through art evolved, as we did, into the Enlightenment, the 18th-century era of intellectual and scientific discovery. During the French Enlightenment, salons—social gatherings for the informal exchange of ideas as expressed in literature, politics, philosophy, and the arts—were a prominent part of intellectual life. In early 20th-century Paris, Gertrude Stein, her brother Leo, and, later, her life partner, Alice B. Toklas, entertained the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and Ezra Pound in rooms displaying the art of Picasso, Matisse, and Renoir—their house has been dubbed by some “the first museum of modern art.” And Picasso brought along to Stein and Toklas’s Saturday-evening salons artist friends of his own, such as Georges Braque and André Derain.

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Emulating that tradition, last year Evoke presented its first Summer Salon, and continues this year with an exhibition to be held July 25 through September 20. Evoke’s founder, Kathrine Erickson, described the 2025 edition as “a two-part group show featuring more than a dozen artists over a two-month period. In addition to the exhibitions in the galleries, watch for a series of artist and curator talks, demonstrations, and studio visits throughout the season.

“The exhibition is curated as a visual journey,” Erickson continued, “guiding viewers through an exploration of connections between the artists’ work. The placement of the pieces will create an intentional visual dialogue, while an underlying series of conversations unfolds between the artworks, inviting deeper engagement and reflection.”

A few of the participating artists include Francis DiFronzo, Jeremy Mann, Kristine Poole, Michael Scott, Thomas Vigil, and, in his first show at Evoke Contemporary, Nathan Budoff.

Kristine Poole often inscribes texts on her figurative clay sculptures, juxtaposing body language with narrative description.

For the Summer Salon, she revisits works incorporating graffiti. On “Commodity,” an earlier work, Poole scrawled layers of words in 14 languages including “chattels,” “property,” and “possession,” representing the desecration of a young person’s life and calling attention to the atrocities of human trafficking. She says, “Graffiti is often vandalism, but it also has the potential to communicate identity, ideas, archetypal motifs and calls to action.” Her new works combine figurative sculpture with graffitied sociocultural commentary.

Kristine Poole, The Monkey, fired clay, 26” x 23” x 15”.

Kristine Poole, Commodity, fired clay, 31” x 22.5” x 16”.

Complementing these allegorical graffiti-based sculptures, Poole will also exhibit “The Monkey”: a crouched female, on her back a smaller figure, its elegant hand positions alluding to those of one monkey grooming another by plucking insects from its fur. Here, however, the top figure picks at the lower one, symbolically tormenting her. Upon further consideration, it can be seen that the figures represent the same person, personifying the notion that “the monkey on your back” might be yourself. The crouching figure’s gestures reveal her inability to brush the monkey off, but the tensed muscles in her right thigh and her facial expression indicate that she has realized she can free herself from the menace simply by standing up.

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Thomas Vigil grew up in Española, north of Santa Fe, influenced by the artworks of local santeros given to the church his family attended, and by the graffiti he saw all over town. When we spoke, he told me, “I’ve always had an eye for graphic arts. Graffiti changed the definition of art for me. I developed an addiction for art in public spaces at a young age. I indulged in my fair share of unlawful expression. It was in the streets that I received an education that I would have never found at any conventional art school.”

A graffiti writer himself, Vigil combines in his fine art graffiti, found signs, and posterized religious and photographic images. “I want to have that authentic street feeling but still be aesthetically pleasing to the general collector,” he said.

“It’s a really hard balance.”

Above left to right: Thomas Vigil, Vincent the Performer, mixed media, 36” x 36”; Thomas Vigil, Know Way, Know Truth, Know Life, mixed media, 30” x 30”; Thomas Vigil, Mad Max, mixed media, 36” x 30”.

In addition to his interpretations of the iconic images of Catholic tradition, Vigil has turned his attention to the unhoused, the drug-addicted, and the otherwise challenged people of his community. “When I see people,” he explains, “I see people. Everyone is an individual, and I guarantee everybody in this world has made bad choices, maybe some of them worse than others. That doesn’t dictate who they are.”

Along with the original words on the signs, Vigil quotes the often-optimistic subjects of his paintings. In the portrait Mad Max, the unhoused subject says, “I wouldn’t do anything different. You have to accept who you are in life. I’m single, wild, and free. I accept who I am!” In another painting, Vincent the Performer, also unhoused, says, “God gives my spirit the ability to learn, and my spirit has wings.”

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Francis DiFronzo, At Sunset, Part 5, oil over mixed media on panel, 36” x 72”.

Francis DiFronzo often paints once-inhabited places and signs of once-shining dreams—for example, railroad boxcars formerly loaded with produce and journeying to distant markets, now rusting away on desert sidings. For the 2025 Summer Salon, DiFronzo has painted boxcars emblazoned with graffiti—signs of new life painted atop once-proud but fading corporate logos. “I give my audience just enough information where they can conjure up a story,” he says, “but never enough to feel entirely grounded, or sure of what the story is or where it is going.”

About 30 years ago, DiFronzo spent 9 weeks in the Mojave Desert, absorbing the subtleties of its desolate beauty and observing the signs of long-gone habitation. He recalls the experience from his memories and his imagination as he paints his evocative images in his studio. “When you’re painting from memory,” he says, “you’re not connecting with the actual sky but what we all think of as sky . . . My work reminds people of how things look in their own minds.”

Francis DiFronzo, Pantheon, oil over mixed media on panel, 36” x 72”.

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Jeremy Mann, Clouds Before the Storm, oil on paper on panel, 4” x 5”.

Jeremy Mann, The Fields Across the Valley, oil on paper on panel, 4” x 5”.

Jeremy Mann, Morning with Mom #22, oil on paper on panel, 4” x 5”.

Jeremy Mann’s journeys have been literal and figurative. Twelve years ago, when I first corresponded with him, we talked about his

exhibit in Summer Salon. “I always wanted to paint the inside of a forest,” he wrote recently, “and I thought it was going to be

black-and-white cityscapes of San Francisco. “Of all the moods of the city, you seem to choose the darkest,” I noted. He replied, “Quite frankly, I think the gray and the sad is beautiful, and nothing moves my heart more than to be able to paint it.”

difficult, so I didn’t. Now, living in a forest, I’m addicted. And I was right.” Mann often walks to town through the forest, and he often contemplates it over a cup of tea as he prepares to paint. In A Place I Stopped on the Way to Town #1 he captures the forest’s dark, mysterious depths, as well as the luminous green lichen on the trees in the foreground, and the forest floor’s riot of subtle colors, which most of us would dismiss as “brown.”

In the interim, Mann and his wife gathered their art supplies and moved from San Francisco to a forest in rural Spain; evidence of his change of venue is manifested in small landscapes he will

Jeremy Mann, The Top of Carreterra de Santa Fe Trail #1, oil on paper on panel, 5” x 4”.

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Jeremy Mann, A Place I Stopped on the Way to Town #1, oil on paper on panel, 5” x 4”.

Jeremy Mann, A Place I Stopped on the Way to Town #2, oil on paper on panel, 5” x 4”.

Michael Scott, Origin of Species (detail), oil on linen, 120” x 120”.

Michael Scott often journeys north from his studio in Lamy, just south of Santa Fe, into other landscapes and other worlds both physical and metaphorical. In his Origin of Species, polar bears maraud a wrecked boat littered with its former occupants’ tools of exploration, including a copy of Charles Darwin’s diary laid across the bow. The bears live in an environment of snow and ice that is rapidly ceasing to exist. Scott notes that his painting is about “the survival aspect and the adaptation that not only animals, but everybody is going to be going through to survive, because it’s coming at us.”

“An artists’ salon is a gathering of creatives—painters, writers, musicians, intellectuals—who come together to share ideas, critique each other’s work, and engage in artistic and philosophical discussions,” Erickson explained.

“Because salons serve as incubators for creativity, networking, and inspiration, often fostering collaboration and new artistic movements, throughout the exhibitions Evoke will host interactive events to encourage further conversation.” Summer Salon offers us many such opportunities to come together and converse, and not to pass each other in futility

—John O’Hern

Far from the icy north, Nathan Budoff paints in a very different environment also under existential threat.

Born in Massachusetts, he now lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In his painting Like Stars in the Sky, a raven and a bear float incongruously through an airy world. “My paintings and drawings focus on the interconnected nature of flora and fauna,” Budoff writes. “Birds, bears, trees, and fish combine in unlikely spaces and groupings, as if conversing or passing in futility.”

Nathan Budoff, Like Stars in the Sky, charcoal, shellac ink and acrylic on canvas, 60” x 66”.

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VANITAS: Kent Williams

Above: Kent Williams, Vanitas, oil on clay board, 36” x 36”. Opposite: Kent Williams, With Klimt Looking On, oil on linen, 76” x 67”.

“I’ve been drawing since I could remember,” said Kent Williams, but he marks the beginning of his ability to draw the human figure from the sixth grade, when he saw a poster for Bruce Lee’s film Enter the Dragon (1973). A theater across the street from his elementary school was displaying the poster on the marquee, and he could see it each day at the far end of the school yard—leaning 32

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out as much as he could, just shy of tumbling into the street— trying to make out the details of the poster. “ I must have drawn hundreds and hundreds of pictures of Bruce Lee. That’s what started my love of the figure. Bruce Lee had a beautiful body, toned, worked and built to perfection.

“My interest in Asian culture grew, and I studied martial arts with a real-deal sensei from Okinawa from when I was about 12 right into college. In the ’70s we only had three channels on the TV, and no VHS tapes to rent. I soon discovered films by Akira Kurosawa, like Seven Samurai and Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior.

Met I was blown away. I couldn’t soak enough in. I love art books, but you have to get out and look at the original thing. There was a film series at Japan Society in New York. I joined and went every week or so to see another film. I became interested in film in general—Polish, Russian, European, there was so much to discover.

“I also started collecting art books, magazines on Bruce Lee, and Frank Frazetta’s work. It wasn’t [Frazetta’s] content so much, but the work was so good. Going to New York to study at Pratt Institute was the best thing I ever did. I’d never been to a major museum up to that time. At the

“My mother thinks my interest in art came from my great-grandmother, who would take care of me when I was a baby and my mother had to go out.

She would keep me busy in the middle of the bed on a quilt she had made with lots of patterns and color. She would make mobiles out of coat hangers

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Kent Williams, Self-portrait as Rodin’s Striding Man, with Appendages (Redux) (2000, 2018), oil on linen, 84" x 144".

with pictures she had cut from magazines. I think maybe that’s what got me interested in image making.”

About his present work, Williams explained that “Most of my art deals with the human condition and is sometimes wrapped around myself and where I am emotionally. Naturally that touches on things a lot of people experience and feel. Being able to relate to someone else going through similar things can bring comfort to people—knowing you’re not alone.

“I love to make drawings first, to establish at least the structural part of a composition. I’ll start with a bank of drawings, and the ones I gravitate to usually have a figure. They’re static and frozen in time, but there’s also that underlying charge that seems to be bubbling up and wants to expand outward. I’ll start painting and, if I’m successful, I’ll maintain the drawing aspect while allowing myself to be bold with the brushwork. I want to maintain some of that linear suggestion and straightforwardness of the drawing. The

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act of painting, though, wants to push away from the simplicity of the line. I work in many layers. Each pass is very broad, and the painting starts to refine itself in certain areas. If I begin to lose what I like, I sand it back down to a certain degree and knock enough paint off to allow the line to show through. It’s a push and pull endeavour.”

I mentioned the expatriate American painter John Singer Sargent’s tendency to combine in a single painting highly realized images with areas of quick, nearly abstract brushstrokes. “Sargent had the ability to make it look so easy,” Williams replied. “His paintings don’t have the kind of probing I respond to. There’s a passion in Degas. You can see his searching, and it doesn’t take anything away from the painting—it’s all laid out in front of you. Klimt began to do that as well to a degree. He, along with other artists of the time, started seeing Japanese prints and he began adding flat patterns, etc. in the background. That’s when he really became Klimt as we know him.”

For centuries, the passing of time has been a theme of vanitas paintings: still lifes that often include skulls to suggest life’s brevity. Two skulls appear in Williams’s With Klimt Looking On (2018), as well as in the more recent Vanitas (2025). In the older painting, a framed collotype print of a drawing by the Austrian artist hangs above a shelf on the right. “When I was composing the piece and developing what I wanted to do with it, I chose to weave it into the composition,” Williams explained. “As a serious, passionate artist, I’m a big fan of contemporary art as well as the art of the past. I feel like I’m part of that tree of art—a bit of bark, or maybe a leaf. Putting the Klimt in the painting, maybe he’s looking down on me and the other people who love his work— maybe he sees that and smiles.

When Williams returned to the painting years later, he felt it was unfinished. “My ideas about painting had developed over time, and I wanted to take it further without losing the thrust of the piece,” he said. “I thought that I would take away, obscure things and add to at the same time. The big white shapes were somewhat of an abstract element, my first pass at obscuring. I thought I would take the shapes further, but as time passed I felt they worked just as they were.

“Life is fragmented,” Williams said. “It’s not as simple as I first imagined. It’s a battle to stay organized. When I was finished with a show, I used to clean up my studio and start fresh. I used to have the time. Maybe, as you get older, time does go by faster.”

With Klimt Looking On, Williams said, “allowed me to take something some people consider not contemporary, maybe even boring—still life—and bring juice to it. That makes it interesting to me, and to others as well I hope. I want people to respond to it. People who like the boldness of my figurative paintings can possibly enjoy a still life or a landscape by me as well.

Recently, Williams returned to a painting from a dark period of his life nearly two decades ago. Auguste Rodin is among Williams’ top five favorite artists. “I can’t imagine anyone having more love and respect for his work than I have. I feel I understand it so completely. In 2000, I chose his sculpture l’Homme qui marche (The Striding Man) to use as a vehicle for what I was going through—a deep dark place.” He made several paintings on the theme, depicting himself as the striding man. “The sculpture is fragments, and I had to represent my fragmentation at the time,” he explained. l’Homme qui march (ca. 1907) is an assemblage of fragments from other sculptures. Rodin was trying to portray movement, omitting as unnecessary the arms and head. The slightly disjointed connection of torso and legs adds to the sensation of movement.

Self-portrait as Rodin’s Striding Man, with Appendages (Redux) (2000, 2018) depicts Williams striding forward: “I’m going to walk out of this dark period.” In a disjointed way, he holds the hands of his sons. “My boys are important to me,” he said. “I never wanted them to feel unsafe. It was my burden, not theirs.”

The French Impressionist Edgar Degas wrote, “A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.”

“I want to expand on this. When you acknowledge something from one piece and use it in another piece, if the image allows for it, it becomes part of your language. I want it to come natural, not a gimmick. I want it to ring true. I want to be very much aware and to know when to employ it.

“Style isn’t something you choose to do. It’s not something you put on or assume. It’s something that develops with thought and sweat equity.

“It may be something of which I may not be fully aware. I’ll see a thread I’m responding to and it becomes part of my natural vocabulary—something I put work into. I have to paint and draw to move forward. I need to be prepared to meet what comes.”

—John O’Hern

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MITOS Y MEMORIAS: Patrick McGrath Muñiz

Patrick McGrath Muñiz, Entre Tierras, oil on canvas, 45" x 65".

In 2022, as the world began emerging from its COVID-19 cocoon, a troubling brew simmered within Patrick McGrath Muñiz. Although he had relished nesting with his wife and son, he couldn’t help tallying up the cultural downsides of our shared isolation: a reliance on social media, especially doom-scrolling; the rise of conspiracy theories; algorithms that governed which ideas reached us; and the fast-growing threats of artificial

“We came out different,” he said of the pandemic’s lasting effects. “There’s something we’re missing today. We’re so distracted, there’s so much bombarding us. There’s no time to sit back and reflect.”

intelligence.

artist, and his emergence as an internationally lauded painter who blends Old Master techniques with satirical commentary on social justice, climate change, and consumer culture, among other pressing themes.

Together, they crystallized his fear that the distance between what we can control and what controls us had evaporated.

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So Muñiz did just that, sifting through memories of his childhood in Puerto Rico, his early years struggling to find his way as an

That inner search spurred an evolutionary shift in his artwork, on view to the public for the first time in his new show, Mitos y Memorias (Myths and Memories).

“I have this feeling of nostalgia for the past,” Muñiz said.

“I’m trying to explore personal memories through the lens of mythology. It’s a way of finding that these memories can be universal. I want to strike a chord with that sensibility, that need for us to connect with our past.” Doing so, he insisted, provides hope. “Knowing where we come from, we can know where we’re going.”

Muñiz spoke with me in early February, when his 12-by-12-foot home studio near Houston was packed not only with ideas but with works in progress.

Among his goals was to retain his sense of retablo-inspired pieces that blend an intensity of iconography rooted in the past while now also addressing of-the-moment concerns. To accomplish this, he had to increase the size of his panels and canvases. Where an altarpiece might once have measured 18 by 24 inches, his new works are more than twice that.

Two of the estimated 12 pieces Muñiz’s will exhibit were nearing completion when we spoke, and a numbered key helped decipher their layered meanings. Entre Tierras (Between Lands), the only oil on canvas in the exhibit (the rest are oils on panels), stretches to 45 by 56 inches, every bit of its area populated with details. A crowded boat on troubled waters addresses migration, displacement, and the search for belonging. The boat moves away from a tropical land toward an industrial wastescape. A baby resembling Santo Niño de Atocha is held aloft as he focuses on a Gameboy.

Three mermaids in the water hold sodas and fast foods as they attempt to lure the travelers away from their true path, while an angel modeled on John Gast’s famous painting American Progress, depicting the concept of Manifest Destiny, leads them westward.

Patrick McGrath Muñiz, Des Conecta Dos, oil and metal leaf on panel, 40” x 21”.

For a formal statement about this work, Muñiz wrote: “At its core, Entre Tierras is a reflection on the complex feelings of being between two worlds—between analog and digital, past and present, nature and civilization. It ties into the overarching theme of the exhibition . . . highlighting the tension between what is lost and what is gained as we navigate a world driven by progress and economic necessity, always in motion but never truly at home.”

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Patrick McGrath Muñiz, The Bloom – Alegoría de la Primavera, oil and metal leaf on panel, 48” x 34”.

While such themes—and certainly the painting’s style—echo Muñiz’s past works, the themes are now less political and far more personal.

“I used to think art should be about waking up people and being very mindful about social-political discourse—to be an agent of change,” he said. “But artists have been doing that for a long time, and you can see what’s happening. Art should be more than that.”

The “more” that Muñiz envisions for Mitos y Memorias is the core question of mythology, religion, and philosophy: What does it mean to be human?

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“These paintings are going to be full of figures,” he said. “There’s lots of inspiration from art history, the Spanish colonial era, my own art. Each one is very complex. There’s so much to unpack in each piece. They’re going to be very baroque. It’s all going to connect to the grand picture of humanity.”

Muñiz begins each piece by sketching in pen on paper, his hand so finely trained as to put the lie to the verb doodle. From there, he dives into research, poring over books, wandering museums, and hunting the internet for connections that can inspire him.

Patrick McGrath Muñiz, The Glitch – Alegoría del Invierno, oil and metal leaf on polyptych panel, 48” x 34”.

“I’ve started using AI as a research tool,” he said, describing how he queries a variety of apps to help him identify and categorize the archetypes that will rule each sketch, such as the father or the emperor. From there, he assembles collages of images, layer on layer, until he achieves the “ah-ha” that spurs hours of applying oil paint and gold leaf to his surfaces. On any day, he might hop from one piece to another, and then another, as he waits for each one’s paint to dry enough for the next stage.

works. These 18th-century divination decks from France, with connections to German playing cards, “speak of day-to-day things that are easier to interpret than tarot,” he said, citing a tree or an animal. “It’s like I’m trying to connect with simple things in life, and that is almost an antidote to the overwhelming and saturating information environment we live with in today. I’m pulling back and getting into really reflecting on what’s important in life. Art has that capacity of reminding us of things that are important.”

The Catholic roots of Muñiz’s artwork hold firm, but just as past pieces drew additional inspiration from tarot cards, he turns now to La Isla, an image from Lenormand cards for four of his new

For Mitos y Memorias, Muñiz combines ideas from the deck’s imagery into polyptych altarpieces. Apotheosis delves deeply into the personal—the monk depicted at its center is a self-portrait.

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Patrick McGrath Muñiz, Apotheosis, oil and gold leaf on panel, 42” x 26”.

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The monk holds an open book displaying an Aztec double-headed serpent. Other figures represent Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck and fate and fortune; a sage reminiscent of Saturn, the Roman god of time; and the Lady of the Apocalypse, whose robotic face and hands embody Artificial Super Intelligence. “The ominous eclipse around her,” Muñiz said, “suggests that this could be a moment of revelation or cataclysmic change.”

his confidence in the stories he wanted to tell grew stronger—to the point where he can now be described as a New Master, using timeless techniques to address the present moment.

“We have deep memories of things as simple as touching a tree,” he said. “There’s value in that. We’re so driven by high ideas, stupid ideas, conspiracy theories. That’s not contributing to our well-being.

That precipice defines the balance he is seeking, one that he hopes will tip us into a future in which digital tools serve as helpers “Another reason I’m going back on things that I had forgotten so that we can focus better on one another. is that I’m remembering things along with my son,” he said of six-year-old Francis. “He’s always asking questions. ‘Why do “I just turned 50, and I feel like I’m looking back,” he said. “The plants need sunshine? How do you draw a three-D building?’ The first half of my life was in Puerto Rico, and it was analog—preessence of art is asking questions, and there’s something beautiful internet, no Google, no AI.” Hurricane Maria, in 2017, destroyed about that. his studio there, and the loss of his work has haunted him.

“I wouldn’t want to go back to the COVID time for anything in the But when Muñiz moved to Georgia, to earn his master’s degree world. But it put things in the context of what’s important; being at Savannah College of Art & Design, he at last connected human.” with teachers who understood his yearning for a classical style.

—Kate Nelson His color palette became more muted. As his career advanced,

Patrick McGrath Muñiz, El Perro, oil on panel, 11” x 7”.

Patrick McGrath Muñiz, La Luna, oil on panel, 11” x 7”.

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BLURRED LINES: Andrew Shears “I have a natural inclination to draw realistically,” said Andrew Shears. He developed his drawing skills while studying at the Pratt Institute, in New York, where he earned his BFA; during the Drawing Year at Grand Central Atelier, in New York City; and at the Ryder Studio, here in Santa Fe. The results now include some exquisite portrait and figure studies, and continue to underlie his depictions of landscapes in graphite and in paint.

Much of Shears’s interest in drawing came through his father, an architect. “I grew up learning about the importance of drawing.

He would often show me stuff through drawing—drawing instead of speaking. It was so powerful.

“One of the things that might be hard to tell from my paintings and drawings is my interest in abstraction,” Shears added. “Some of my favorite paintings are by abstract expressionists. When I visit my parents in Colorado, I often go into Denver to visit the Clyfford Still Museum, designed by Brad Cloepfil, of Allied Works Architecture. It’s such an amazing building that works well with the paintings.

“Another interest is designer furniture—steel, leather, a certain kind of color. I’m obsessed with the Bauhaus.”

Prominent on a wall outside Shears’s studio are original prints by Josef Albers and Herbert Bayer, Bauhaus students who later taught there. Albers’s Homage to the Square, a series of paintings and prints, explores the physical and emotional interactions of the juxtapositions of colors. “Art should never be stagnant,” he wrote; “it should always be evolving.”

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, by the architect Walter Gropius. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Its core objective was a radical concept: to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts.”

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In the evolution of Shears’s art since Still, his first exhibition at Evoke, in 2021, all of these influences, and the workings of his own inner life, have come together. His new exhibition, Blurred Lines, on view at Evoke November 28 through December 20, continues his overall theme of stillness on a larger scale. “I love to be sort of enveloped by a massive image,” he explained.

“That’s one of the reasons I like the work of Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, and Anselm Kiefer. I love that feeling, so I’m interested in that. But I’m also interested in small-scale paintings.”

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce writes about the experience of art: “The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure . . .” Joseph Campbell, the writer on comparative mythology, summarized this: “The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object. . . . [Y]ou experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest.”

Shears has been exploring the idea of aesthetic arrest and the difficulty of expressing vast landscapes on a smaller scale. “I was talking with my friend Dan Pullen about scale. He is an architectural illustrator and painter. I told him that I have to make big paintings because I don’t think I can achieve that feeling that we always talk about—aesthetic arrest—on a small scale. I just don’t know if it’s possible. He pulled a matchbook out of his pocket that he had found, like, 30 years ago. It had a little image on it of a landscape. There’s something intimate about these small images.”

In his memoir, Speak, Memory, Valdimir Nabokov wrote: “He made me depict from memory, in the greatest possible detail, objects I had certainly seen thousands of times without visualizing them properly: a street lamp, a postbox, the tulip design on the stained glass of our own front door. He tried to teach me to find

Andrew Shears, Acid Rain, oil on panel, 12" x 9".

the geometrical coordinations between the slender twigs of a leafless boulevard tree, a system of visual give-and-takes, requiring a precision of linear expression, which I failed to achieve in my youth, but applied gratefully, in my adult instar . . .”

In his paintings, Shears invites his own memory to speak— memories of music, films, books, experiences. Unlike Nabokov, however, Shears finds memories blurred, despite his practice of “visualizing them properly.”

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“After looking at a bunch of photos of birds and trying to paint them, I found there’s so much freedom—how much do I actually have to paint them to suggest what they are and where do I put them, how far away they are. And I can play with color. These are things I’ll be thinking about as the paintings get bigger.

They’ll be a bit less obviously landscapes and a bit more playful.

I’m taking some of these things and sort of turning them into patterns.

“I’ll also be thinking about the minimal in the context of the larger paintings. The size will make them more abstract and a bit more mysterious. I’ll be looking straight up into the sky and not out at a landscape.

“It’s kind of exciting to me, after painting pretty realistically for a long time, to just let the paintings unfold and be surprising to me. I’ll start with something, often from a reference, and then when I abandon that reference, I feel free.”

Andrew Shears, New Mexico Rain, oil on panel, 12” x 9”.

“I’m thinking about memory a lot, and some of them are specific memories, like an experience with my mom. We were driving along, and all of a sudden we looked up and there were millions of birds in the sky. It was absolutely crazy. It was just so beautiful.

People were pulling over. There was kind of an apocalyptic, orange-pink sky behind it all—very subtle. I had never seen anything like that. I was just arrested by the whole thing, so I decided I was going to make a painting someday.

“I have done a drawing of birds migrating, and in Migration, I’m continuing to draw from that memory. The memory is never accurate. It’s always maybe a bit more dramatized. Or certainly different from what actually happened. The inaccurate memories and muddled distinctions blur the line between realism and fantasy. It’s harder to differentiate or to tell them apart. So I guess in a way I’m trying to embrace those false memories in order to create a dramatized image of them.

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Andrew Shears, Flamboyance, oil on panel, 10” x 8”.

Andrew Shears, Migration, oil on panel, 12" x 10".

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Andrew Shears, Iron Oxide, oil on panel, 14" x 11".

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Shears’s mark making—his application of paint—implies reality from a distance, but allows the viewer to experience the painting as an object from close-up, when his small brushstrokes become visible.

“As I was struggling with the small beach scene with the mountains and clouds above,” he explained, “I wasn’t liking the marks, and the color felt off. I decided to slow down and make smaller marks, and to make slow color transitions with those marks that also brought texture to the mountain and the clouds.

“You’ll notice in my landscapes they’re totally void of any human interaction or material. This idea of desertedness is something that I want to capture because it suggests a kind of a stillness. The more or less centralized compositions, I think, also lend a level of stillness that I like. I want them to be quiet. In terms of the palette, even the rainbows are soft. In these paintings the palette

is subdued, and all of them are turning out to be blue. Maybe this is my Blue Period.

“I think in a limited language of color, shape, and tone. The novels, films, and music I love all have a very specific tone and palette.”

The arousing of one sense by another, such as a word or a sound causing you to experience a color, is known as synesthesia. One of Andrew’s favorite Bauhaus artists, the Russian painter and color theorist Wassily Kandinsky, wrote “Color directly influences the soul. . . . The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite, awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural. . . . The brighter it becomes, the more it loses its sound, until it turns into silent stillness and becomes white.”

—John O’Hern

Andrew Shears, Redneck Riviera, oil on panel, 7" x 9".

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Photo: SITE Santa Fe

SITE SANTA FE | Once Within a Time The 12th SITE Santa Fe International

Since its founding, in 1995, SITE Santa Fe has built a reputation for its innovative approach to exhibitions of contemporary art and community engagement, and for its commitment to showcasing emerging and established artists from around the world.

SITE Santa Fe has always been driven by its vision of fostering dialogues among artists, curators, and audiences. In its sleek, architecturally striking building, designed by SHoP Architects, this contemporary arts institution provides an open canvas for exploration and creative expression. What sets SITE apart is its dedication to presenting exhibitions that challenge traditional narratives and push boundaries to reflect diverse, global perspectives on contemporary art. The organization’s past exhibitions have touched on such crucial topics as identity, climate change, migration, and the intersection of technology and culture.

The 12th SITE Santa Fe International, Once Within a Time, opens June 27, 2025, at SITE and other locations around the city. The exhibition features contemporary artists whose works challenge viewers to reflect on the lived experiences of a range of figures from New Mexico’s rich and multilayered history.

The International, formerly named the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, was established in 1995 as the first community-wide biennial or triennial of its kind in the United States. The 2025 edition, the 48

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first since 2018, is curated by Cecilia Alemani.

“Conceived as a vast family album, Once Within a Time centers people—specifically, those who have inhabited, traversed, or left their mark upon the Santa Fe region across the centuries,” says Alemani. “Transcending a single theme or narrative, the 12th SITE Santa Fe International manifests as a symphony of voices rather than one overarching narrative, engaging with the city of Santa Fe and its myriad identities and histories.”

SITE Santa Fe’s galleries will serve as the nexus of the International, with outlying exhibitions throughout the city, including both partner institutions and nontraditional spaces—a local park, a former foundry, a movie theater, empty storefronts, the lounge of a cannabis shop—to better integrate it into the fabric of Santa Fe. Participating cultural institutions include the Museum of International Folk Art, the New Mexico History Museum, the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, and the New Mexico Military Museum.

“In a groundbreaking departure from tradition, SITE Santa Fe is proud to partner with multiple institutions and venues to spark new conversations around contemporary art in the context of our city’s momentous history,” says Louis Grachos, Phillips Executive Director of SITE. “Cecilia Alemani’s enthusiasm to encourage artists to respond to New Mexico’s culture and guide the development of the exhibition is superbly aligned with SITE Santa Fe’s ethos of collaboration and artist-centric exhibition making.”

Seventy-one local, national, and international artists, alongside more than twenty “figures of interest” (real and fictional, historical and contemporary) with strong ties to Santa Fe, will probe the power of storytelling. Once Within a Time will include more than 300 works of art made from 1926 to the present. Around half of the participating artists will present new commissions that engage directly with the experiences and lore of the figures of interest, each with strong ties to New Mexico’s rich artistic and literary history breathing new life into forgotten tales and objects.

In these extraordinary times, the 2025 SITE Santa Fe International serves as a reminder of the power of art to inspire change, provoke thought, and connect individuals across cultural and geographic divides. It is more than an exhibition—it creates spaces for storytelling and transformation.

A complete list of artists, venues, events, and public programs is available at sitesantafe.org.

—Mara Christian Harris

Courtesy: The Highline, Photo: Liz Ligon

Cecelia Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York City. Since 2011, Alemani has been the Donald R. Mullen Jr. Director and Chief Curator of High Line Art, the public art program presented by New York City’s High Line. From 2020 to 2022, she served as Artistic Director of the 59th Venice Biennale, where she curated the acclaimed exhibition The Milk of Dreams, visited by more than 800,000 visitors. More recently, she has curated several exhibitions, including Tetsuya Ishida: My Anxious Self, the first American retrospective of Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida at Gagosian Gallery in New York (2003); Making Their Mark, the first public presentation of the Shah Garg Collection, a major exhibition showcasing the works of more than eighty of the most significant women artists from the last eight decades (New York, 2023; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2024); Anu Põder: Space for My Body, the first solo exhibition of works by Anu Põder presented outside of Estonia, at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland (2024).

Alemani also served as artistic director of the inaugural edition of Art Basel Cities: Buenos Aires in 2018 and was the curator of the Italian pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Over the last two decades, Alemani has developed expertise in commissioning and producing ambitious artworks for public space and unusual sites.

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12th SITE SANTA FE International Curated by Cecilia Alemani 06.27.25–01.12.26 50 | E V O K A T I O N 2 0 2 5

1606 PASEO DE PERALTA, SANTA FE, NM 87501 | 505.989.1199 | SITESANTAFE.ORG