PREVIEWS
ART Santa Fe 2010 July 15 to18 Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 West Marcy Street, Santa Fe. 988-8883 Opening Night Gala Vernissage: Thursday, July 15, 5 to 7 pm. Tickets $100. It’s an auspicious year for ART Santa Fe as the art fair turns ten years old. Emblematic of ASF’s growth over the past decade is the return to its original downtown location, at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. As part of its expanding How Things Are Made program, ART Santa Fe welcomes the artists’ cooperative Bullseye Glass. They will share their unique kiln-forming glass program with a demonstration of various methods of glass application by Ted Sawyer, director of the Research and Education Department at Bullseye. Demonstrations will take place every day of the fair. Building on its track record of presenting lectures by art notables such as TIME Magazine art critic Robert Hughes, former Guggenheim director Thomas Krens, architect Frank Gehry, and New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman, this year ART Santa Fe Presents features the Times’ Senior Art Critic Roberta Smith as its keynote speaker. Smith has been writing about art for forty years, and earlier in 2010 she raised a ruckus when she called on contemporary art critics and curators to “think outside the hive mind” and create daring and imaginative exhibitions that don’t play it safe. Smith gives her lecture on Saturday, July 17, at 6:30 pm, at the New Mexico History Museum. www.ticketssantafe.org Jean-Marie Haessle, Untitled 12, oil on canvas, 68” x 54”, 2007. Courtesy David Richard Contemporary, Santa Fe.
Like Death, New Mexico Will Catch Up With You in the End July 16 to August 18 The Fisher Press, 307 Camino Alire, Santa Fe. 984-9919 Opening reception: Friday, July 16, 5 to 8 pm. With its rather ominous exhibition title, you probably wouldn’t be shocked to find a tumbleweed somewhere in the visual vocabulary, but it might come as a surprise that said tumbleweed is, according to a press release, “a metaphor for teaching, in which often otherwise moribund ideas remain alive… through students.” The tumbleweed as an intellectual spore? “Why not?” ask New York–based artists Christopher K. Ho and Kevin Zucker. Their project consists of a chainsaw-chiseled log, an oil painting of that tumbleweed, and a book titled The Late Work, published by The Fisher Press, and containing images and descriptions of the (imaginary) “late” or endof-career works by the artists, envisioned by their former students, graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design. The duo conceived of the exhibition while considering their own current career trajectories, the direction of contemporary art, and the average productive lifespan of humans.” Rather than imagining a promising future for themselves based on contemporary culture’s fascination with the young, the beautiful, and the new, Ho and Zucker have consigned these artists to “the product of creative exhaustion, repetitiveness, capitulation to commercial pressures, irrelevance, and laziness, even senility.” Apparently the same environment that creates the tumbleweed is responsible for prematurely desiccating the futures of young artists—at least conceptually. Kevin Zucker, The Flowers of Romance, watercolor, pencil, silkscreen, and inkjet on canvas, 76½” x 52½”, 2007
SOFA WEST July 8 to 11 Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 West Marcy Street, Santa Fe. 989-1234 Opening reception: Wednesday, July 7, 6:30 to 9 pm with VIP ticket. Since 1994, SOFA—the International Sculpture Objects & Functional Art Fair—has been taking place in Chicago and New York. As postmodernism allows for broader definitions of art, SOFA’s identity has crept upwards from the crafts exhibition into a must-do for the global contemporary art-expo set in general. This year, SOFA WEST’s second incarnation establishes Santa Fe as one of the big three locations for the exposition, which is celebrating with extracurricular activities such as the pre-fair symposium, Historic Bond/Contemporary Spirit: Collecting New Southwest Native Pottery, taking place from July 6 through July 8. Lectures sponsored by Santa Fe’s Jane Sauer Gallery, Blue Rain Contemporary, SWAIA, and Stacey Neff’s New Mexico Experimental Glass Workshop are set for various days and times throughout the long weekend. Details: www.sofaexpo.com/santa-fe/2010/lectures.html. The fair itself features such stars as Joan B. Mirviss, Ltd. of New York, specializing in contemporary Japanese ceramics; top contemporary ceramics dealers Clark + Del Vecchio of Santa Fe; eminent fiber-art dealer browngrotta arts of Connecticut; New York’s Charon Kransen Ltd., a leading European art-jewelry dealer; and Linda Durham Contemporary Art of Santa Fe, featuring the ever decadently delightful Meow Wolf performance group. Christine Nofchissey McHorse, Untitled, ceramic vessel, 28” x 14” x13”, 2010 Courtesy Clark + Del Vecchio
46| THE magazine
| july 2010