June/July 2010 www.santafean.com
Margarete Bagshaw
Copyright Cradoc Bagshaw
Helen Hardin (1941 - 1984)
Copyright Margarete Bagshaw
Pablita Velarde (1918 - 2006)
Copyright Margarete Bagshaw
Your Art Should Say Something. . .
3 Generations of Talking Art .
201 Galisteo St., Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 - 505-988-2024 - www.goldendawngallery.com *Exclusive Estate Representative for Helen Hardin and Pablita Velarde
Paul Stankard July 9 - August 2, 2010 Opening Reception Friday, July 9, 5 - 8 pm The artist will be present
TRIBAL RUG SERIES “NUMBER FIFTEEN”
~ Abrasive sanding belts, wood ~ 48" x 39" x 2 3/4"
Tom Morin June 18 - July 2, 2010 Opening Reception Friday, June 18, 5 - 7 pm The artist will be present
JANE SAUER 652 Canyon Road Santa Fe, NM 87501 505 - 995 - 8513
j s a u e r g a l l e r y. c o m info@jsauergallery.com
GALLERY
“CLOISTERED COLUMN WITH FLORAL EARTH CLUMP, FIGURES AND GOLDEN ORB” ~ Glass ~ 6 3/4" x 3 1/2" x 3 1/4"
24
th Contemporary Hispanic Market
JULY 24TH & 25TH, 2010 SATURDAY AND SUNDAY 8AM-5PM Lincoln Avenue, Santa Fe, NM next to Historical Santa Fe Plaza
Preview Show Friday July 23rd, 5:30-8pm At the Santa Fe Civic Center, 201 West Marcy Street in Santa Fe Light hors d’oeuvres and entertainment
Robb Rael
www.contemporaryhispanicmarket.com For information call Robb Rael at 505-424-6996
“Moonlite”
B.C. NOWLIN
Into Song, oil, 42” x 60”
New Works, Opening August 6, 5 - 7:30pm
MANITOUGALLERIES
123 West Palace Avenue Santa Fe, NM 87501 505.986.0440 ManitouGalleries.com 800.283.0440
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B U T T E R F LY Bronze Edition of 6 X X Š2007 Arlo Namingha
125 Lincoln Avenue s Suite 116 s Santa Fe, NM 87501 s Mondayâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;Saturday, 10 am to 5 pm 505-988-5091 s FAX 5-988-1650 s nimanfineart@namingha COM s www.namingha.com
JOAN WATTS MAY 7 – JUNE 7
CHARLOTTE JACKSON FINE ART 200 W. MARCY STREET, STE 101, SANTA FE, NM 87501 TEL 505-989-8688 WWW.CHARLOTTEJACKSON.COM LEFT: UNTITLED 11 , 2010, OIL ON CANVAS, 24 X 24'' RIGHT: UNTITLED 12 , 2010, OIL ON CANVAS, 24 X 24''
CAROLE LAROCHE GALLERY 415 Canyon Road Santa Fe, nM 87501 505.982.1186 Fax 505.982.3575 www .LaRoCHe-GaLLeRy. CoM eMaIL@LaRoCHe-GaLLeRy.CoM Red WaRRioR. PAstEL bY CAROLE LAROCHE
“Brandin’”
108" x 144"
Oil
ROBERT T. RITTER New World Vaqueros Series Opening Reception Friday, May 28, 2010 s 5 to 7 pm
VENTANA FINE ART 400 Canyon Road s Santa Fe, NM 87501 s 505-983-8815 s 800-746-8815 s www.ventanafineart.com Ventana , 102 E. Water St. s Santa Fe, NM 87501 s 505-820-0447 s www.ventanaelcentro.com
june / july 2010
features
40 art SF 2010 An overview of where art in Santa Fe is headed and the artists taking it to the next level; plus, to artists who should be in a gallery near you, but aren’t –yet.
66 we’re all the same in the City Different For its size, Santa Fe has one of the country’s largest gay populations, and a reputation as one of the most open. Some of its citizens explain why.
40
departments
12 Publisher’s Note Santa Fean Michael Scott takes a trickster’s eye–view of the West. Chief Shortbread, oil on panel, 56 x 43”.
21 City Different City poet emeritus Valerie Martinez’s ode to Santa Fe. Q+As with Santa Fe Opera director Charles MacKay and primatologist Jane Goodall.
27 Q+A Author and educator Angelo Jaramillo, son of former mayor Debbie Jaramillo
courtesy palace of the Governors archives
30 Santa Fean Salutes Dog lover and advocate for the disabled Marcie Davis 34 Day in the Life Flamenco artist Juan Siddi cooks up his new season 73 Art Art Santa Fe and SOFA West, artists Clayton Porter and Margeaux, and reviews
95 Home Guest columnist Victoria Price on the wisdom of remodeling, gardening in Santa Fe 98 Desigin Talking custom – made cowboy boots with the Back at the Ranch cowgirls 105 Dining The pleasures of La Fonda, more than just water at Ojo Caliente Resort & Spa, and master mixologists spill their drinks’ recipes 116 Hot Tickets 124 History D.H. Lawrence in Taos 128 Day Trip Raton theaters
96
32 Special Taos Section
cover Against the Sky, Sarah Bienvenu, watercolor, 38 x 30” (Winterowd Fine Art)
124
D.H. Lawrence left behind quite a legacy in Taos for having spent so few years there, among other things, rarely seen paintings– and his ashes.
Santa Fean (ISSN 1094 – 1487) is published bimonthly by Bella Media, LLC, 215 W San Francisco, Ste. 202A, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501. Periodicals postage paid at Santa Fe, NM. and additional mailing offers. Postmaster: Send address changes to Santa Fean, P.O. Box 469089, Escondido, CA 92046 –9710. june/july 2010
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publisher’s note
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it’s about the art One of my greatest joys in visiting other art communities is the feeling I get when I get back to Santa Fe. No place allows for greater or easier access to a variety of incredible, nationally recognized contemporary, modern, and representational galleries, mostly all within easy walking distance of each other. And the scope of what’s available tells me that the art here is no longer entirely specific to this place. Years ago, I never could understand the success of Elaine Horwitch’s gallery and her very contemporary art when so many galleries were actively selling the very traditional, Santa Fe-specific art. She was ahead of her time and certainly ahead of me. The advent of contemporary art, aided in great part by the arrival of SITE Santa Fe, has changed and expanded the art available in our community to satisfy most anyone’s tastes. In this issue, we have attempted to introduce you to some of the choices available and some of the new directions that our art world is exploring, both representational and modern. Local or visitor, I encourage you to witness for yourself this amazing assortment.. The artistic creativity in this region knows no bounds. More and more, the world is realizing this as well. Two major national art shows in July, Art Santa Fe and SOFA West, again prove that Santa Fe is one of this country’s top art destinations, if not the top. Feed your soul, then, by purchasing a work of art this summer. It can affect your life in positive ways—ways you may not even imagine at the moment. If it makes you feel something, you need to keep it in your life. You can always find space for a beautiful piece of art, and if your walls are full, consider what my mother does. She rotates her collection in and out of the closet, allowing for an art collection that exceeds her wall space. From our last issue, which focused on fascinating Santa Feans, I feel compelled to provide a follow-up. Many of you picked up on our mistake in misidentifying Andrew Davis as “Paul.” We apologize to Andrew Davis and his wife, Sydney, and to you, our readers. Fortunately Andrew is very gracious and understanding. We so appreciate that. On a happier note, since the April/May issue went to press, feature film producer Anthony Mark won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker and Mavrick Lobe took home his own gold medal at the 2010 Panamerican Jiu-jitsu Championships.
BRUCE ADAMS
Publisher
|
C ONTRIBUTORS
MISSY WOLF
Congratulations to both of them.
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Q: Who is your favorite Santa Fe artist? “You’ve never heard of Eugene Smith, because he’s never shown in a gallery here,” says Origin of Sorrow author Robert Mayer, who interviewed Angelo Jaramillo for this issue’s Q+A (p. 27). “He arrived during the city’s 1960s cowboy-art-only period, his abstractions appreciated solely by distant collectors. In my favorite work, gold and white “waves” could be overshadowed by the threatening approach of a blue ‘storm.’ But beneath a ‘sky’ of molten gold, my eyes find an unseen gateway to a peaceful world. Another canvas is wild with white brushstrokes, which converge to yellow-green. A windblown garden, or a secret entrance to—what? Like sublime poetry or music, Smith’s abstractions evoke unexplored feelings, personal and profound.”
“There are so many talented artists in Santa Fe that it is hard to say,” says Julien McRoberts, who shot Marcie Davis for Santa Fean Salutes (p. 30) and part of the feature on being gay in Santa Fe (p. 66). “However, I’m drawn to painters who were working here during the 1930s WPA era: Georgia O’Keeffe, Gustave Baumann, Will Schuster, James Stovall Morris, and many others who created such a distinctive and clean, bold style representative of that era. I also really love some of Nacona Burgess’s work, in particular the paintings where he incorporates old iconic Native American portraits with a new comptemporary feel. He also has a very bold, clean style, yet the classic faces feel so familiar when you see them.”
“I can’t say my favorite Santa Fe artist without giving a nod to the plurals. The favorites. The artists who, through their work and by their nature, inspire me and touch my life,” says photographer Carrie McCarthy (Day Trip, back page). “Elias Rivera, David Solomon, Carol Anthony, Pat Oliphant, Norman Mauskopf, Jennifer Davidson, Carlan Tapp, Jennifer Spelman. With paint, pencil, photography, humor, outlook, and wisdom they have each impacted my view of life and my experience of Santa Fe’s artistic community. But the favorite, with a capital F? McFarlin. Patrick McFarlin. There is a jaded whimsy, a quirk, a twitch about his work that makes me chortle. Then sigh. Texture and color and shape and detail. Abstracted. Expressive. The rabbit hole.”
RANDY PIJOAN
SUSAN ROMAINE
Up Hill Road
oil
30x48
Back Roads
San Pablo Sunrise
oil
June 4 - June 30
36x48
Artists’ Reception Friday June 4 5:00-7:30 pm
JIM McVICKER
SHERRY LOEHR
Interior Spaces July 2 - July 31 Artists’ Reception Friday July 2 5:00-7:30 pm
Still Life with Pansies
oil
36x24
Plum Antique
the peterson-cody gallery, llc
Contemporary Artists Legendary
Art ©
acrylic
48x36
View the Exhibits: PetersonCodyGallery.com
130 West Palace Avenue • Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 • 505-820-0010 • 800-752-1343 PetersonCodyGallery.com • PetersonCodyGallery@yahoo.com
July 8-11, 2010 Santa Fe Opening Night Wednesday, July 7 Special Member Preview for the Museum of New Mexico Foundation P L A N T O AT T E N D
Historic Bond/Contemporary Spirit: Collecting New Southwest Native Pottery Seminar and visits to internationally recognized sites and private collections July 6-8, 2010, Santa Fe, NM Information & registration www.sofaexpo.com/spirit
Produced by The Art Fair Company, Inc.
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Diego Romero, represented by Clark+DelVecchio
Sculpture Objects & Functional Art Fair
New Moon
66”x36”
oil on canvas
C E L E B R AT I N G T E N Y E A R S
J U LY
15 -18,
2010
ART SANTA FE 2010 / AN INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR T H E S A N TA F E C O N V E N T I O N C E N T E R OPENING
NIGHT
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T H U R S D A Y,
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P. M .
JULY 16, 11- 7 PM; JULY 17, 11-6 PM; JULY 18, 11- 6 PM / TEL 505.988.8883 / WWW.ARTSANTAFE.COM
ALL TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE LENSIC BOX OFFICE 505.988.1234 PICTURED LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP ROW: Jeanette Pasin Sloan, Landfall Press, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Richard Whiteley, Bullseye Gallery, Portland, Oregon; Jimmy Ernst, Osuna Art, Bethesda, Maryland; SECOND ROW: Billy Hassell, William Campbell Contemporary Art, Fort Worth, Texas; Danae Falliers, Launchprojects, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Bruce Clarke, Bekris Gallery, San Francisco, California; THIRD ROW: Jorge Fernandez, JoAnne Artman Gallery, Laguna Beach, California; Manuel Carrillo, Verve Gallery of Photography, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Peter Weber, Galerie Renate Bender, Munich, Germany
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18 santafean.com june/july 2010
DARNELL FINE ART
CLAIRE McARDLE
Photo: Studio marble work in progrss, Carrara Itlay 2010 copyright: Moreno Maggi
“Fragments” Sculptures in Stone, Bonze & Terra Cotta Show Dates: July 20- Aug 10, 5-7 Artist Reception: Friday July 23 www.darnellfineart.com, art@darnellfineart.com
640 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501
SELF AND FAMILY... A RECENT LOOK guest curated by BOBBIE FOSHAY Monika Bravo / Ellen Harvey / Alex Katz / Hendrik Kerstens C o k e W i s d o m O ’ N e a l / S a n d r a S c o l n i k / K i k i S m i t h
JULY 9 - AUGUST 8
INAUGURAL EXHIBITION
CHARLOTTE JACKSON FINE ART
In the Railyard Art District / 554 South Guadalupe, Santa Fe, NM 87501 T e l 5 0 5 . 9 8 9 . 8 6 8 8 / w w w . c h a r l o t t e j a c k s o n . c o m
courtesy palace of the governors
the buzz around town
“Today we say Santa Fe, our Santa Fé/in the sierra madre, in the cradle between/the Pecos Mountains, Cerro Piñon,/Tano Point, Caja del Rio, Tetilla Peak.” Valerie Martinez read This Is How It All Began, a poem about Santa Fe’s history from its prehistoric times to the present, when her two-year term as the city’s poet laureate ended in March. Now that poem has been commemorated in a hand-bound, limited-edition volume from the Press at the Palace of the Governors. Letterpress printed on fine German paper, the book is itself an art object, from its marbledpaper-wrapped hard cover to its textured pages in warm terracotta tones. The book’s colors evoke the high-desert landscape of northern New Mexico, which is just how book designer Thomas Leech intended it. Says Leech, director of the Palace Press, “You design a book from the inside out, using the poet’s words as clues.” This Is How It All Began is available for $100 at the Palace Print Shop at the Palace of the Governors, 120 E Palace, palaceofthegovernors.org.— Dianna Delling BOOKS
startling reading B O O K S One of the more lively, colorful, fun, zany, funny, subversive, and graphically sophisticated books to have come out in a long time is Dennis Larkins’s Startling Art (Last Gasp, $25). Wonderfully packaged in a bright and sturdy 8 ½ x 11 hardcover, the book is presented as a sort of top-secret government-like scrapbook/file on Larkins’s life and artwork: Interspersed among the many Technicolor-y reproductions of Larkins’s acrylic/painted relief paintings are old family photos, notes, and a cornucopia of 50s-era imagery— plus photos of some of the many set designs and posters he’s made— and made his name and reputation with—for the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and other supergroups of the 60s and 70s. There are also aliens, carhops, sci-fi creatures, skeletons, clowns, and various and sundry other iconic paraphernalia. It’s pulpish, it’s noirish, and it crackles, too, with a goofy if dead-on sociopolitical undertow. As one of five children of a Colorado preacher, Larkins had a rebellious nature, one that found an outlet mostly through art—first at the Kansas City Art Institute, then in Taos, then in the Bay Area during his fortuitous relationship with rock-concert impresario Bill Graham. “The book covers the evolution of the retro-pop pieces that I do now,” says Larkins, age 67, who now lives a quieter if no less imaginative life here in Santa Fe. “The basic idea that I work with in the use of aliens, skeletons, or any other archetypes from retro-pop culture is as metaphorical players in a scenario intended to illustrate the mysteries of our common life experience, including the poignancy of death and destruction, but also principles of rebirth, wonder, absurdity, exhilaration, and creative freedom.”— Devon Jackson
courtesy last gasp
poetry, preserved
High Expectations, acrylic/painted relief, 30 x 24"
return of the prodigal pit boy Before he’d even attended his first OPERA Santa Fe Opera production—his first opera, period, which was Die Fledermaus, in 1959, the premier season of SFO’s Youth Opera program—Charles MacKay remembers one of his older sisters coming home from her apprenticeship there in 1957, SFO’s inaugural season. “She was talking about rehearsals and how she fell over Igor Stravinsky’s feet one time, and he told her, No, no, darling. It’s not a problem,” recalls MacKay. Born in Albuquerque in 1950 and raised in Santa Fe, the fifth and last child of amateur singer parents who always listened to Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the radio on Saturday afternoons, McKay is now in his first full season as SFO’s general director.—DJ You started out in the opera’s orchestra playing the French horn before taking over box-office duties and eventually becoming the company’s business manager—all while attending Santa Fe High and the University of Minnesota. I started out as the pit boy. So I’ve gone from the lowliest position you can have to the highest. Then, in 1978, you left for the Spoleto Arts Festival. I feel fortunate to have had three major mentors in my life: John Crosby, the founder of the Santa Fe Opera, who gave me my first break; Gian Carlo Menotti, the artistic director of Spoleto; and Richard Gaddes, my first colleague and associate, whom I’d succeeded as general director of the Opera of St. Louis in 1985. Then you succeeded Gaddes again here.
Why such a passion for opera?
Ken Howard
When Richard announced his retirement [in 2007], people said, Your entire career has been in preparation for this moment. But I never really expected it. I thought I’d finish up my career in St. Louis. I was in a nice comfort zone there. In a way, it’s coming full circle. Charles MacKay returns to the Santa Fe Opera 30 years after starting out there as the pit boy.
I truly believe in its transformative powers. To take us out of ourselves and give us that wonder and feel the pathos and the humor and drama. Humans are so drawn to the human voice, and part of human nature is to love music. Plus, opera is the original multimedia experience. It’s a combination of words, music, story, and add to that the setting and the act of being there, together it can be very, very powerful and rewarding. That accounts for its staying power. What distinguishes the Santa Fe Opera from other companies? Its long artistic heritage and the breathtaking physical beauty that’s as much a part of the experience as the performance itself. And it’s one of the iconic companies in the world.
brainer. And the Albert Herring bookends the Benjamin Britten as a tribute to Richard Gaddes, who introduced Britten to the Santa Fe Opera. Did growing up here affect how you view the opera and its relation to the community? Definitely. That’s an area where I’m passionately committed because of my own experience. We have to be proactive about an appreciative audience for the future. And our apprentice program can be a good feeder for other industries. The great thing about opera is that its multidisciplinary skills are transferable to dance, theater, film, rock, all types of music. And your parents, how might they have felt?
What’s your mission? The big challenge is to discover interesting repertory that hasn’t been performed before. I’m happy that The Tales of Hoffman is new to the opera. And Life Is a Dream is connected to Santa Fe, so that was a no-
That’s the one sadness about my appointment to the opera: my parents didn’t get to see this crazy kid who fell in love with it at nine come back as its general director. But I love it. Every day I just have to pause and say, I’m lucky to be here with such talented people.
Louisa Mcelwain | oil of joy
Exsultate 60” x 72” oil on canvas
06 August 5 – 8 pm | opening reception friday evening through August 30 | Preview this show at EvokeContemporary.com private view on thursday 05 August | by invitation only | RSVP through our exhibition page
chimp championer It’s been fifty years since British primatologist Jane Goodall started her groundbreaking studies of chimpanzee behavior in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, and she’s still one of the most admired scientists in the world. Now 76, she is also one of its hardest-working activists. In April, Goodall met with Santa Fe members of her Roots & Shoots program, an international effort that encourages schoolkids to improve the lives of humans, the lives of animals, and the environment. She also met with the youth advisory board at the Santa Fe Animal Shelter, where we caught up with her. —DD CAUSE
I love the skies and the mountains, but I haven’t had time to spend time in the galleries and museums. I come here to develop the Roots and Shoots program and to talk about other programs at the Jane Goodall Institute. There are very caring people in this community, but I also feel a great desire to reach into the poor communities that are so Goodall in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, sharing a moment with chimpanzee Freud. prevalent. It’s a strange feeling, but I find it many places I Do you still enjoy traveling this much? go—you’re in the “real world,” and then suddenly you’re in a sort of ThirdI never have enjoyed all the travel—but how else can I talk to the kids? How World situation. else can I raise awareness? Nothing actually takes the place of face-to-face How did you feel about what you saw at the local schools? It’s what keeps me going and traveling 300 days a year. Everywhere I go, there are groups of kids doing amazing things. And here it was another 30 groups of kids doing amazing things. That really is the hope for the future. What do you encourage kids to do? We are very much about breaking down the barriers we build between people of different cultures, religions, nations, and between us and nature. That’s why I was chosen by Kofi Annan as a UN messenger of peace. Everywhere we plant this Roots & Shoots program, the philosophy of respect for all life is shared. I’ve had several young people who have taken part in Roots and Shoots tell me it has helped them discover their passions.
meetings. I meet people now who say, “You came to my school when I was nine, and you changed my life.” What can we do to make a difference? The first step is to think about the consequences of the choices you make each day. Think about the people you meet. How do you treat them? The animals? The plants? We go around watering plants in hotel rooms that look so sad. You go into a TV studio and they have plants, but nobody waters them. When talking with children, you stress that even small things they do can add up. A little bit of change may seem like nothing. But gradually, as more and more people become aware, you start getting the big change. And people learn that doing things right makes them feel better. Self-rewarding behavior, we call it in primatology.
The Origin of Sorrow
Robert Mayer
courtesy publish america
not so startling reading On a different track from Dennis Larkins’s book come two other current releases: one BOOKS from our own frequent contributor Robert Mayer, The Origin of Sorrow (Publish America, $15), and the other being Art Corriveau’s How I Nicky Flynn Finally Get a Life (and a Dog) (Amulet, $17). Corriveau’s book, one he wrote for his nephew (who complained about the lack of non-fantasy-series books for kids his age), is a middle-grade novel about an 11-year-old Boston boy whose bond with his new dog helps him deal with his parents’ divorce. A heartfelt alternative to Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. Decidedly more mature is Mayer’s very adult read. Mayer, author of nine previous books of fiction and nonfiction (including the Edgar Award finalist The Dreams of Ada and Superfolks, a kind of forerunner to The Incredibles), combines both elements for this moving but often humorous epic. Modeled after the Rothschild’s dynasty— before it became a dynasty—this historical novel is set in the 1500s in Frankfurt’s enclosed Jewish quarter. Think Bellow or I.B. Singer.—DJ
Michael Neugebauer
This isn’t your first visit to Santa Fe, but how do you like it here?
T I M E M A G A Z I N E : O N E O F 2 O O 9 ’ S T O P T E N A RT E X H I B I T I O N S
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE: ABSTRACTION
Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Blue & Black–Pink Circle, 1929. Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in. Dallas Museum of Art. Gift of The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York.
O N E X H I B I T I O N I N S A N TA F E
M AY 2 8 – S E P T E M B E R 1 2 , 2 O 1 O
Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction was organized by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Phillips Collection. This exhibition and related programming were made possible in part by a generous grant from The Burnett Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Henr y Luce Foundation, t h e e x h i b i t i o n ’s f o u n d a t i o n s p o n s o r, t h e S a n t a F e A r t s C o m m i s s i o n a n d t h e 1 % L o d g e r s ’ Ta x , N e w M e x i c o To u r i s m D e p a r t m e n t , N e w M e x i c o A r t s ( a d i v i s i o n o f the Department of Cultural Affairs), the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum National Council and the Members of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.
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| Q + A |
Angelo Jaramillo A R e bel Finds a Cau se by Robe r t Maye r
Not long ago he was a quintessential Angry Young Man. Now this homegrown writerpoet-playwright-actor is working within the system to inspire the city’s wayward youth. You were at Capital High School in the mid-nineties when your mother, Santa Fe’s first female mayor, Debbie Jaramillo, was being battered regularly in the daily press. Did that affect your outlook on the city, and on life? Yeah, on two levels. We grew up with our father always warning us that we weren’t like other kids—my mother was the mayor and we had to be extra cautious. I was a teenager, so I wanted to rebel against that. [But my mom] was trying to push an agenda for working people and lower income people, so she was going to make great enemies. Seeing it on a daily basis, you are personally affected by it. She wasn’t the mayor to me, she was my mother. I had to watch her come home many a time crying, and I would hold her and cry with her and tell her, Stay strong, we’ll win, the family loves you. I realized many years later that this led to a lot of hate. You try to work these issues out in your own adulthood, but it doesn’t entirely go away. Your book of stories, The Darker, came out when you were 29. That was a pretty angry book.
julien mcroberts
CAPTION
I’ve never totally accepted the term anger. To me it was a lot of hurt, sorrow, things that every human being has to go through, especially when you are young. Even hate. The book is a reflection of what a lot of young Hispanic men go through in Santa Fe. But there are ways out of it, even though I don’t moralize about that in the book. There was stuff in my head, my soul, my spirit that had to get out. Now, four years later, we’re sitting in your office at the New Mexico Higher Education Department. Your arms are covered with tattoos dating to that period, you’ve got a Malcolm X poster on the wall. But your title is a bureaucratic mouthful: New Mexico GEAR UP Northern Regional Coordinator.
Life is weird. You never know what your life is going to change to. A lady I was going with had gone to St. John’s, and she urged me to go for a two-year master’s program they have there. I did okay for the first two semesters, but then one tutor gave me an F. I tried to get it changed, but I didn’t, and I couldn’t go back. I was very bitter. I had run up debt. But I found a job with the New Mexico Higher Education Department. I didn’t want to get into the business of education, but I needed a job. A three-month internship lasted nine months and then turned into a full-time position. So 13 years later I was back at Capital High School, working with students under GEAR UP. It’s a federally funded program to help low-income students stay in school and go to college. Eventually I met one student who had stopped going. He was Mexicano, undocumented. I realized he didn’t have any options; he had to go back to Capital. The other schools had waiting lists; you couldn’t get in. So I decided maybe there was something I could do. I met him twice a week, mentoring him. Before long there were two more kids; now there are twelve. I got to know them, met their families, decided to do what this program was designed to do. You follow these kids for six years, starting with the seventh grade. They’re all low income, some documented, some not. I realized that the people I wanted to help were my people. It’s not easy, but a lot of times you can have a huge impact. And you can’t save them all, but there is a lot of satisfaction. This one kid, he comes from the Valle Vista project, he’s got to go home to drugs every day, to being recruited by gangs. Now all of a sudden he’s made up most of his credits, he’s going to be a real junior next fall, he’s playing JV and varsity baseball, he’s reading books constantly—he’s a smart, smart kid. When you see that kind of transformation and know you played a little part in it, it doesn’t matter within or without the system, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Or what you need to do. What do you do with them—activities, talks? It goes from grassroots working against the system—like organizing peaceful street demonstrations—to working within the system. One day I might go to eight classes to recruit students to help me set up a college visit. So they learn about bureaucratic stuff, organiza-
courtesy angelo jaramillo
How did that happen?
Angelo Jaramillo campaigning with his father and mother, Debbie Jaramillo, the former mayor of Santa fe (1994–98)
tional skills. I also have to do consultations with students, figuring out what their needs are. We’ll do work within the arts community, anything from building sets to developing acting workshops to publicity and marketing. I use my art, whether it’s writing or acting. I tell them you don’t have to be an artist, but you can learn how to express yourself. That’s one way to try to empower them. Working with Warehouse 21, we give basic instruction in business organization, marketing, distributing. Project-based learning, they call it.
high schools. You have higher success rates with smaller schools, like Desert Academy. They can do that with Capital. It just takes the will; they can get the money. The United States throws away more money on education than any developed country in the world, but it’s not one of the top-performing countries. It’s not about money all the time, though you need it. It’s more about prioritizing. The solution is about knowing these kids, respecting them, putting in programs. Mommy taught me liberal-lefty. Education is a social justice issue.
If you were a one-man board of education, what would you do to change the schools?
One last question. Years ago you started writing a biography of your mom. How is that coming along?
I’m not for warehousing kids. There are these concepts, these policies, that have been in place since medieval times. They administer some of these schools like prisons, like gulags. It’s all based on precepts of neglect and fear. Those are the biggest problems. I think it extends into the community itself. You’re not going to solve them overnight; it takes building relationships. Your chamber of commerce, your business community, ought to get involved with these schools and start working with people to provide apprenticeships if they’re really serious about improving the economy. But that takes a lot of work, a lot of coalitions. Educationally, this town needs several more
I was making progress. It was growing. I’ve got enough of the meat, the rough drafts of certain chapters, to know that I can complete the book. I was halfway there. Then life intervened. School, relationships, full-time job, directing a theater company. I shelved it for almost two years. I know that time is against me; sources of stories are dying. I’m not going to set any more prospective dates, but I’ll get back to it, maybe this summer. At heart I’m still a word person. Angelo Jaramillo is the author of a book of stories, The Darker: Tales of a City Different, and a book of poetry, Psalms of Anarchy.
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| S A N TA F E A N S A L U T E S |
on their behalf So cial entreprene ur Ma rcie Davi s se r ve s do gs a nd t he di sabled Photo by Julien McRobe r ts
When Marcie Davis got into her first wheelchair, at six years old, her father told her what to expect: “He said, The world is not going to be accessible to you,” recalls Davis. “You have to figure it out. No one is going to do it for you.” Three years later, her father died of pancreatic cancer, leading Davis onto her lifelong path of service and advocacy. “I’ve always loved working with people in crisis,” says the Jackson, Mississippi–born Santa Fean. “It stems from seeing my mom in crisis after my died passed away and having a kid with a disability.” Paraplegic for over 35 years and partnered with a service dog for 16 (Whistle, pictured here, is her current companion), Davis, 44, was recently honored by New Mexico Business Weekly as one of its 2010 “Women of Influence.” As CEO of Davis Innovations, she brings her expertise in issues of criminal justice, public health, disability, education, and other social services to state and local government agencies and nonprofit groups. She founded Working Like Dogs, to teach people more about service dogs, and in 1997 she cowrote a book with the same name. Her other nonprofit, Soulful Presence, serves underserved populations both at home and abroad: last year, Soulful volunteers delivered wheelchairs to people with disabilities in rural Cameroon. In Taos, the organization set up the Cissy Vargas Scholarship Fund to encourage graduates of Taos High School to complete their special education degrees. “Everything we do is about, What are we going to contribute?” says Davis, who’s lately been training for a scuba-diving trip to Belize with her physicist husband. “People say, ‘Oh, Marcie. You’re so passionate.’ I say, You don’t get it. I want to be where I’m wanted. And I feel like I’m meant to be here.” Here where she’s been for almost 14 years now. “I’ve never felt discriminated against here,” she adds. “In Santa Fe, it’s such a loving and accepting society. I really just want to make the world a better place for people—and for animals.”—Devon Jackson To volunteer or find out more, go to: soulfulpresence.org or workinglikedogs.com
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june/july 2010
santa fean
33
| D AY I N T H E L I F E |
viva flamenco
getting in to t he r hyt hm wit h sa nt a f e ’s king of spa ni sh da nce by Di a nna Delli ng
Douglas Merriam
CAPTION
Juan Siddi is standing over the stove with a thick wooden spoon, quietly stirring a pot of arroz con leche. “It’s just like my family makes, in Spain,” he says. Others gathered in his Santa Fe kitchen on this sunny Saturday afternoon offer up opinions. “My mother always makes with it raisins.” “Do you ever add nuts? Delicious.” “No, just like this,” he says, still quietly, but with authority. “Lemon rind and canela. Cinnamon.” Siddi may speak softly, but he knows how to put flavors together, and how he wants things to taste—or look—in the end. The 30-year-old director and principal dancer in the Juan Siddi Flamenco Theatre Company is in the midst of planning and choreographing this year’s eightweek performance season, which begins June 25 at the Lodge at Santa Fe. He’s designing costumes, choreographing routines, and—with his partner and the company’s executive director, Justin Nadir—working on finalizing visas for several dancers who will come to Santa Fe from Spain for this year’s busy, six-nights-aweek schedule. Over lunch today, before heading out to a rehearsal session at the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet studios, he and some friends are making plans for a fund-raiser for the dance theater, to be held June 13 at Corazón. “We just found out we got the venue we wanted!” says Alicia Sena, a local businesswoman and flamenco fan who’s on Siddi’s board of directors. Several weeks ago, she explains, they’d made an offering of sorts, throwing petals into the Santa Fe River as they wished that Corazón would be available for the event, which will bring in money to cover the dance company’s operations, from costumes to phone expenses. With the venue nailed down, Nadir says he’ll need to get fliers and press releases out right away. They’ll also need a name for the event. A few names are tossed around. “Sabor Flamenco,” Siddi says, and that’s settled. Flamenco Sabor is the name of the second company he started, which will perform for the first time at the fund-raiser. He also requests
Douglas Merriam
Siddi and his class—with professional Cynthia Sanchez at left—practice their moves.
the presence of Santa Fe’s best-known flamenco guitarist. “Can we get Chuscales to play?” As Siddi serves the main course, a spicy Gypsy stew, they continue to talk about the Corazón event and the upcoming season. Seven dancers, from Spain, New York, and Albuquerque, will arrive in early June, when they will begin three weeks of intense rehearsing. Siddi and Nadir will provide them with housing, apartments in the same compound they live in. They will also provide transportation: a few used bicycles Nadir picked up, which are currently in the shop for tune-ups. The dancers will be more like family than artistic colleagues this summer, living in such close quarters and working together for hours every day. “We end up taking in the costumes over the course of the season, because the dancers get thinner,” Nadir notes. In August, after the season at the Lodge ends, the company will immediately head to Aspen for a week of performing. They’ll also dance in Raton, New Mexico, before the dancers head home. Then Siddi will start thinking about his plans for next year’s Santa Fe season. “I don’t dance flamenco,” Siddi says. “I am flamenco.” With roots in Spanish, Moorish, Gypsy, and Sephardic Jewish cultures, flamenco is a proud and passionate dance, and even when Siddi talks about it, he takes on those characteristics. Growing up in Frankfurt, Germany, with a father from Italy and a mother from Barcelona, Spain, he heard flamenco music daily. He began dancing as a child and at 18 joined a professional dance company that toured throughout Europe. He
was dancing in a production in Seville when he first met Maria Benitez. The longtime queen of American flamenco dance was in Spain to recruit talent for her Santa Fe–based company, Maria Benitez Teatro Flamenco. She brought Siddi to New Mexico as a principal dancer for the 2002 summer season. When she stopped performing at the Lodge, in 2007, she passed the torch to Siddi. “Maria was born in Taos, and she danced for 30 years in Santa Fe,” Nadir says. “Maybe Juan will be dancing here in 25 or 30 years!” Siddi looks at Nadir with raised eyebrows, feigning shock at the idea. But he doesn’t protest. “I’ve been so lucky,” he says. “I don’t like to brag about myself.” Attention turns to the package that has arrived in Siddi and Nadir’ courtyard. It’s postmarked “New York,” and Siddi guesses it contains the flamenco skirts he’s been waiting for a friend to return. The skirts will be worn by the bailaras, or female dancers, in the upcoming season. He opens the box and unfurls one of the long, tiered and ruffled skirts that were stuffed inside. Unlike most flamenco skirts, which are brightly colored and often polka-dotted, like the ones worn by dancers in southern Spain hundreds of years ago, these are all white. Cynthia Sanchez, a 27-year-old Albuquerque native who dances with Siddi’s company, smiles as she holds up one of them to inspect it. Sanchez will graduate from the University of New Mexico this spring, with a degree in elementary education. After dancing with Siddi this summer,
she’s moving to Seville, where she will immerse herself in flamenco dance and culture. Rehearsal starts at two o’clock in a woodfloored room at the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet dance studio. Siddi and Sanchez are joined by one other professional dancer, Illeana Gomez from Albuquerue, along with six intermediate-level students. It’s both a rehearsal and a lesson, with the pros and the students completing the same routine: an hour of warm-up and specific moves, followed by an hour of practicing dance sequences. Siddi is dressed in black Adidas workout pants, a black V-neck shirt, and flamenco-style boots—leather, with a two-and-a-half-inch heel, and metal plates on the heel and toe. He stands in front of the class, facing the mirrored front wall. The students face the front too and follow as Siddi silently leads them through a series of exercises. He’s a lean, diminutive guy, but here in the studio he looks six inches taller and considerably fiercer than he looked at home. He has a dead-serious stare as he says in Spanish, “Listos? Uno, dos. . . .” then slowly raises his arm and begins moving his wrists in circles, slowly and elegantly. The students follow him exactly, changing arms after several minutes, then moving on to warm up their ankles. After 20 minutes or so, they are moving their entire bodies and stomping their feet, their metal-bottomed shoes clicking loudly and in unison. After 20 more minutes, he adds music—flamenco music he’s brought along on his laptop computer, which is hooked up to the speakers in one of the room’s front corners. When Siddi calls out, “Otra vez”—again—the students repeat a sequence. When he shakes his head and says, “No; it’s like this: tacón, tacón, tacón,” demonstrating the rhythm in which the heel of his shoe hits the floor, the students watch closely and try it again. In the language of flamenco footwork, tacón means you hit the ground with your heel, planta means with the ball of your foot, and golpe means your entire foot slaps the floor. Siddi demonstrates moves and sequences, praising the students for good work but never smiling. He’s in flamenco character the entire time: proud, serious, and even in this relatively casual class atmosphere, somewhat fiery. The students are serious too, for the most part. They smile and relax only when class is over. Still sweaty, they’re chatting about the day’s workout. Siddi, who danced hardest of all, looks tired but happy. “It’s hard work,” he says. “But as we say in Spanish, Nos alimentes. It feeds us.”
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Andrew Mosedale
Merchansine, aerospace aluminum, 18 x 8 x 8"
C O N TEM PO RARY
Stilled Grace by
D ianna D elling
“Reduce it, reduce it, reduce it.” Jeff Overlie is explaining what he thinks about when he’s designing one of his sculptures. “It’s so exacting to reduce something and find a form that’s effective, that has a huge degree of strength and integrity. If I accepted something that isn’t the absolute, it would be a compromise. And the image wouldn’t shine. If that makes any sense.” It makes sense when you’re looking at one of the minimalistic pieces in Overlie’s Cellulae series, which were featured in a one-person show at Riva Yares Gallery in Santa Fe this past winter. Rendered in smooth, highly polished aluminum that reflects every light and color, the forms Overlie has created are simple but powerful: a graceful teardrop (Merchansine), three elongated eggs sitting side by side (Vesicle, triptych) a perfectly round shape that looks like a very shiny donut (Platelet). The series was inspired by single-celled organisms that Overlie, who is 41, looked at under an electron microscope. He’d watch the cells moving in a fluid, constantly changing shapes, until something he saw resonated. “All of a sudden, one would just slam me,” he says. He’d quickly sketch the shape, then spend hours playing around with it, refining it, and yes, reducing it visually until he found what he saw as a perfect form. Of the process, he says, “It’s about capturing one of those moments of stilled grace.” Most of the pieces in the Riva Yares show were less than two feet high, but Overlie hopes to recreate them on a much larger scale. Working in his studio on Santa Fe’s south side, he might make one six-feet high in white Carrara marble, for example, and another eighteen-feet high in cor-ten steel. “For me, the goal is to have pieces that are as effective in one medium as they are in another,” he says. “I’m kind of trying to find a pure sculpture form. I’m very interested in seeing what happens, not only when you change the dimension, but when you change the medium, and when you change the environment.” Overlie’s interest in cellular organisms goes way back: Growing up in Modesto, California, he hoped to become a marine biologist. The summer before he started college, however, he made what he calls “the fatal mistake” of taking a stone-carving class. That fall, he ended up spending more
Andrew Mosedale
time in the art studios at Santa Barbara Community College than he did in the science labs. Soon he was running the foundry at the college and teaching art classes there. After six years of in academica—and winning an NEA merit grant for his sculpture work—Overlie was ready to pursue his art career full-time. In 1999, he left the West Coast for New York, where he’d been working occasionally over the years. But he made another “mistake” that changed his career path: he stopped in Santa Fe along the way, planning to stay nine months to work on a stone-carving project. “I realized more and more that to be a working artist in Manhattan or Brooklyn is incredibly difficult,” he says. “Rent is through the roof. Material acquisition is difficult. It was counterproductive.” In Santa Fe he could spend less time on the administrative stuff and more time in the studio, actually creating sculpture. Coming from California, Overlie also liked the real estate prices. He built a loft here early on, and now lives on ten acres of land between Santa Fe and Cerrillos. Over the past 11 years in Santa Fe, Overlie’s work has evolved from muscular assertions of space and form to more meditative, inviting conversations about light and weight and relationships. As shiny as they are, Overlie’s objects are not at all cold, and their perfection is neither intimidating nor austere, it’s intoxicating. Because physical strength is so important for an artist who works with
Vesicles, triptych, aerospace aluminum, 36 x 20 x 7"
Andrew Mosedale
Studies for large-scale sculpture. Left: Cylinder 19 and Cylinder 20, steel, 20 x 4 x 4”; Cylinder 17, steel, 20 x 4 x 4”
Andrew Mosedale
heavy, large-scale pieces, he goes to the gym almost every day. And then there’s his family—his wife, Sadhana, and three kids, ages nine through eleven, who are among the most important things in his life. As Overlie says, hanging out with his kids and coaching their swim teams provides some balance—which is essential for a guy who is clearly intense about his work. “When you’re in the studio working, you’re so dedicated to the pursuit of an image—it takes total dedication to bring these pieces out,” he says. “You lose yourself in the work, in that mind state. Hours and hours go by, and then you just kind of come out of it.” Still, he finds time to think big-picture. He’s planning a “museum tour,” a series of exhibitions at museums in the West and Midwest, for 2011. He’s talking to filmmakers about a documentary that would follow his creative process, from concept to finished piece. Overlie teaches at Santa Fe Community College and is creating a curriculum about the business of art. “I think it’s absolutely important to give back to people in the community, to younger artists, at this point in my career,” he says. Overlie’s life is pretty sweet right now, and he is open about being both happy and grateful. “I am fully aware of where I’m at, and I’m incredibly thankful for being here,” he says. “I’m being very cautious about how I move forward, and being very present too because I want to be aware of every step in this journey right now. It’s really quite extraordinary.”
Ming Ten, aerospace aluminum, each 9 x 12 x 12"
Andrew Mosedale Andrew Mosedale
Top: Cellular Segments, stainless steel, 8 x 32 x 10"; bottom: Exogenesis, aluminum, 36 x 64 x 36"
CONTEMPORARY
J ordan W est Jordan West’s “landscapes” of abandoned gas stations, airport carousels, shopping aisles, and other large-scale, manmade minutiae of America only appear to be commentaries on our consumerism, our decay, our dilapidation. In reality, Wood’s colorfully rendered, people-free subjects are pridefully alone, almost assertively thankful at having been forgotten by “humanity.” Which seems to fit Wood’s personality. Working here in Santa Fe allows the 41-year-old to “more easily regulate the personal impact of the distracting effects of mass media, advertising, marketing, and the resulting artistic corruption and influence, which is critical to achieving a pure personal dialogue with art. A momentary reprieve from such influences can be productive.” Momentary reprieves indeed. “If my art does not fit in here,” he muses, “I would consider that a good sign of change to come. Places are always in a state of redefinition and evolution . . . what is produced and consumed or accepted is not static.”
Baggage Claim, gouache on paper, 15 x 22"
..
H elmut L ohr A self-described “visual poet” whose main subject is the art of peace and freedom, Helmut Lohr has participated in over 300 exhibitions—from Dusseldorf (in his birth country of Germany) to Berlin, Paris, New York, and Cologne—collaborated with over 100 artists, writers, poets, and architects the world over (for his International Library Project), bought a ranch on the Glorieta mesa (which has served as his main residency now for the past 13 years), and worked on three operas and several concerts the past 15 years. His decon/reconstructions of texts aren’t at all meta but are instead all about the feelings and emotions these texts—and language and letters and their shapes, all reconfigured and reimagined—conjure up when rearranged and represented through his unique filter. “I look at life as a shared experience, which is based on creativity and imagination and that requires to be open and interested in all other forms of expression and all that is,” says Lohr, 55. “Nothing left out, based on no judgment.”
Winter Solstice, collage, 13 x 13"
G unnar P l ake “Expressing the essence of landscape, for me, is a spiritual experience,” says the St. Louis-born Gunnar Plake, 68, who moved to Santa Fe six years ago after 37 years in Maryland and Washington, D.C. “For 30 years my photography has involved my adding to my images a sense of the passage of time—by moving the camera during exposure—to include more information in my images than if the camera were still. Visual compression of data is how each of us copes with the accelerating onslaught of more and more data bombarding us continually. I feel as though I have achieved spirituality when I am able to visually express nature’s flow, by emphasizing its texture, stretching its color, and bending its light—to suggest time via the fleeting moment.” Cloud Shadow, Type C print on aluminum, 48 x 59"
K atherine L ee Edward Hopper, David Lynch, and Ed Ruscha meet in the eerie-gray, gray-banal, spraypaint-and-oil universe of Katherine Lee, who spent the bulk of her early days near her Des Moines, Iowa birthplace before moving here in 2003 to attend the College of Santa Fe. Now 25, CSF drew her “away from the fertile bosom of the U.S. to what I discovered to be her scruffy, chaffed ass crack.” Loathe to describe her work, she instead offers up art as a bucket: “People (collectively) are like a well and art is the bucket drawing water. There is not time in the well, only collection—the accumulation of our understanding, infatuation ,and repulsion with the human condition. When I think of artists drawing from the well of ourselves, I think about the depth from which they choose to draw from. Some choose to merely skim the surface—to splash-splash around—while others wait until the bucket sinks deep before they labor to raise it back to the surface. And from the deeper draws come a stranger and more potent spew to pour out and gaze upon the reflection.”
Exterior 14 (New Mexico), oil and spray paint on paper, 30 x 40"
J oyce M el ander -D ay ton
#548, cotton, wool, silk, and beads on Gator board, 10 x 8"
By applying materials such as cotton, wool, silk, and beads onto linen canvases, Joyce Melander-Dayton’s abstract wall hangings conjure craft, especially that, like weaving, traditionally affiliated with women’s work. Living in Santa Fe since 1986, Melander-Dayton first painted photorealist depictions of domestic items, like shoes, toys, dishes, and cosmetics. Now, she builds multi-paneled, sewn compositions that resemble Bauhaus textiles more than representations of domestic necessities. Her vibrant textile works are sometimes influenced by music notation or her childhood experiences in Asia. “In the past couple of years I’ve liberated my colors and shapes from the confines of the rectangular canvas,” says Melander-Dayton, 51. “The resulting pieces occupy space in a way a flat painting never could.”
C atherine E aton S kinner For the last 10 years Catherine Eaton Skinner, 64, has worked in encaustic, oil, and mixed media, mostly in series, each series tending to reflect an inner place (or meditation) and to each one adding new pieces, such as ravens and dogs (guardians and speakers from other worlds). Her Shin series, for instance, (Shin means “old revered tree”), began when she had to remove two old-growth firs that had died. “The connection to my father’s passing was undeniable,” recalls Skinner, “as he was the axis mundi of my life.” Splitting her time between her native area of Seattle and Big Tesuque Canyon, which she discovered with her husband on their honeymoon 26 years ago, Skinner recently heard about one of her works used to teach and share art with schoolchildren. “My encaustic piece is a red dog standing in light that rakes across it, causing a long blue shadow. The children all spoke of color, light, dogs, and shadows, until the docent asked one silent child his thoughts. He said that the dog was not in this place, but somewhere else. The class then proceeded to discuss and draw pets and people they’d lost in their lives. Little did any of them know that when I lost a Jack Russell to a car, I spent nine months only painting dogs.”
Kobuku, mixed-media encaustic on panel, 36 x 36"
H ello K itt y
As an enigmatic group of roughly ten young adults who created Meow Wolf “to provide a space in Santa Fe for people to thrive as artists,” the goals of this wacky open collective which hosts not only gallery exhibitions but also dance parties, theater and music performances, and costume parties are relatively clear. Trying to pin down descriptions of what they make is another matter. “The environments we build are overwhelming, multimedia, maximalist worlds,” says a founding member who wishes to remain anonymous. “Themes vary, but the goal remains the same: to work together to build wild, beautiful, unexpected experiences.” These experiences include cobbled-together structures crammed with thrifted and foraged ephemera, or open exhibitions in which over 85 artists were invited to hang “whatever.” Results are disorienting color-blasts of high kitsch, which ideally intrigue viewers into several micro-viewings, rather than inundate them with mass overload. Founded two and a half years ago by two native Santa Feans and several people who landed here from New Jersey, New York, California, Texas, and Kansas, Meow Wolf has since hosted over nine massive installations and numerous solo shows in their warehouse, plus several peripatetic events per week. Aiming for accessibility, this process-oriented bunch judges an artwork’s success heavily upon one’s volunteerism and “how the piece was created,” rather than its aesthetic result. “Small town life facilitates this,” says one member, seated casually in a pink spray-painted wheelchair. “We want to welcome everyone.
The ever-changing landscape that is Meow Wolf’s courtyard
All our art has become about everything.” Unsurprisingly, Meow Wolf turns its paw up at the notion of making saleable art. “We do not fit into the typical Southwestern tradition prevalent here in Santa Fe. There is, though, a recently established tradition of Mad-Maxian/Burning Man/ DIY exuberant industriousness that we hope to expand and propel into the realm of contemporary art.” In this, their happenings look more like performance than something you’d hang on the wall.—Trinie Dalton —Meow Wolf would like to invite readers to their weekly meetings, Thursdays, 9:30 pm. See also Meow Wolf’s installation at Linda Durham Gallery, Geodecadent, on view through the summer to coincide with the SITE Santa Fe Biennial. Lastly, on June 5th, they will host their 3rd annual Monster Battle on the plaza. (Bring your own monster gear.)
PASCAL Sculptures Opening Reception
PETER HALLEY
Prints and Paintings Opening Reception Friday July 16, 5 - 7pm
Saturday June 19, 5 - 7pm
Video as Object Opening Reception Saturday June 19, 5 - 7pm
MARY SHAFFER Glass Sculptures Opening Reception Friday July 16, 5 - 7pm
FRANÇOIS MORELLET Paintings and Neon Sculptures Opening Reception Friday August 13, 5 - 7pm
STEPHEN AUGER Paintings
Opening Reception Friday August 13, 5 - 7pm
GÜNTHER FÖRG Paintings Opening Reception Friday July 16, 5 - 7pm
TONY SOULIE Mixed Media Opening Reception Friday August 13, 5 - 7pm
436 South Guadalupe Street Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-982-8111 t f 505-982-8160 zanebennett@aol.com www.zanebennettgallery.com Mon - Sat 9:30 - 5:30pm Sun 12 - 4pm or by appt.
This page: Shoot-â&#x20AC;&#x2122;em-up, oil on panel, 20 x 26"; opposite page: Letters to Annie Oakley, oil on panel, 77 x 53"
REPRESEN TATION AL
TRICKSTER MAN by
D evon J ackson
Michael Scott wasn’t always the impish artist he has been of late. Long renowned for his masterful landscapes of the Pacific Northwest and Monhegan Island, Maine, about a dozen years ago he switched gears—actually, he switched his entire mode of transportation. First he came out with two series of oils—fanciful philosophical narratives that used barnyard fowl as foils to explore the nature of art, inspiration, beauty, success, and commerce. Then, in 2006, shortly after relocating from Ohio to his newly built home and studio outside Santa Fe, he began to immerse himself in the rich, risible, irresistible West: its history, its romance, its fantasies and realities. In all three shows, he referenced—pictorially, thematically, metaphorically, and in what is now a signature vivid Technicolor palette—Old Dutch Masters and the great trompe l’oeil painters of the 1800s. Mischievous as he is, though, Scott’s impish bent is neither shtick nor newfound gimmick. Nor should it imply that just because there’s humor in them thar paintings—and puns and double entendres—his work is lesser than. The humor’s there but it never overrides his seriousness of purpose, his stunning craftsmanship and compositional acumen, or the outright beauty of his images. That’s because his humor isn’t just jokey, it’s informed, intelligent, sophisticated. It’s funny in the vein of Annie Hall, Magritte, and Daniel Defoe, a funny aimed not so much at uncovering The Truth as at posing (poking?) questions—the questions. “This show [Buffalo Bulb’s Wild West Show, June 18–July 31 at Gerald Peters] is a conversation about who we are,” explains the affable Kansas-born 58-year-old. “Not to be preachy but to ask, Who are we? What’s our place in the world?” Again, purposefully modeled after the Old Masters’ portraiture, still lifes, and tableaux paintings, and mixing that in with 19th-century European and American trompe l’oeil painting and 19th- and 20th-century western painting, Scott seems to have found the perfect narrative hook on which to hang all his Big Questions: by cross-pollinating the tulip mania craze of 17th-century Holland (a time of economic abundance followed by economic disaster) with that of Buffalo Bill Cody (icon of all things Western—hucksterism, showmanship, dreams and illusions galore), Scott synthesizes much of what he’s been building up to in much of his previous work. “This show is totally Americana,” says Scott, a 1976 alum of the Kansas City Art Institute whose stint at the Skowhegan art residency program, with Rackstraw Downes and Alex Katz, changed his life and transformed his art. “It’s operatic. It’s theater. You see the curtain pulled back in many of the paintings.” Literally and figuratively. Based on the country’s recent financial crisis and started two years ago (ahead of the crash), Buffalo Bulb is all about beauty, value, image—and the illusoriness of it all. Scott’s genius lies not only in his
prescience (seeing the fall beforehand) but in the ways he illustrates his themes. “I’m an art history addict, and I’m a storyteller,” says Scott, who idolized Thomas Hart Benton as a kid and who shares his John Gaw Meem–inspired home with his artist wife, Ellen. “The Dutch were the greatest of all painters, and the stories they told were not glorified Greek myths but about humans, which is what I try to do. Memling, Rembrandt. I’ve never been let down by the Dutch. They could take a simple act and turn it into poetry.” Bulb blossoms because of the subtlety of Scott’s references (to tulips, the Dutch masters, western artists), which play off so well against the no-less-profound playfulness and multivalent meanings (or is it baggage?) inherent in Buffalo Bill and trompe l’oeil. “Whereas Buffalo Bill brought the West to Europe, in this show he brings Europe to the West, bringing beauty to the world and selling it as snake oil,” explains Scott. “It’s the same with the trompe l’oeil—it’s a lot of trickery. The same way Ponzi or Buffalo Bill is a trick.” The whole show, like most of Scott’s work, is a reflection of art and values—and the art and values of the West—past, present, and future. “It’s an illusion of an illusion, an illusion in an illusion,” grins Scott, who has all the charm of a trickster. “It’s all smoke and mirrors.” Fittingly, Scott himself served as the model for Buffalo Bulb. “The self-portrait is viewed nowadays as vanity,” he laments. “Unfortunately, it’s not done so much anymore. It’s therapy, but it’s also very confrontational. You want to get to know yourself,” he says, gesturing at his Buffalo Bulb image, “do one of those suckers.” Ever the showman, Scott will also be hawking a line of jewelry, bottles of snake oil, and a line of prayer beads at the opening. “Just like a circus where you get tchotchkes,” he giggles. “I wanted to create a Wild West show, a circus-rodeo atmosphere. I love having my head in that place. “I’m at a phase in my life,” he winks, “where I just want to have fun.” Art. Fun. What a concept.
This page: I Want To Be a Cowgirl, oil on canvas, 74 x 62"; opposite page: The Parrot Observing the Parrot, oil on canvas, 43 x 41"
june/july 2010
santa fean
53
REPRESENTATIONAL
J eanette P asin S loan “I was married and had two kids, and even though I had degrees in art history [Chicago Marymount, University of Chicago], I didn’t know how to paint or draw, so I started looking at magazines and figured I’d take two years to teach myself—which started with everything that I had in my kitchen,” recalls Jeanette Pasin Sloan, 64, who moved to Santa Fe from Chicago five years ago. “I literally painted what I saw: highchairs, the refrigerator, the chrome toaster on my kitchen counter. The first object I moved around was the toaster, because of the reflections inside. It was interesting. And from then on it’s been my main subject: reflections. Those objects became the metaphor of my life. The paintings are very realistic, but reflections are very chaotic and become more abstract. And it becomes all about what you can control and what you can’t. What remains unknowable and what you can’t understand.” Double Take, oil on linen, 24 x 30"
C hris R ic hter Chris Richter discovered his subject matter on an early fall hike, soon after he moved to Santa Fe in 2005. “The aspens were bright yellow, and there was probably six inches of fresh snow on the mountain,” recalls Richter, 48, who spent over 20 years working as a graphic designer in Dallas. After attending a plein air workshop here several years ago— ”That week changed my life”—he relocated almost immediately and soon found his inspiration. “The trees’ eyes all of a sudden just popped right out at me. I could not stop staring, and vice versa.” These days, Richter’s work is focused on the forest; he’s interested in the relationships trees have with one another and with their environment. It makes me smile to have someone tell me that after seeing my work they looked differently at those trees. Often, they see what I see.” Sake, oil on panel, 28 x 30"
J esse W ood “What I am making is a kind of modernist folk art,” says Jesse Wood, a 37-year-old graduate of Santa Fe Prep (and Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts). Whether it’s a landscape or a still life, Wood’s strong lines and gooey textures recall Wayne Thiebaud. His slightly off perspectival points of view hint at Chagall. “I started telling people that, and they think I’m kidding, but I’m serious. I used to make up funny, eruditesounding schools and styles that I thought should exist and I’d call myself a member or student of them (neo-fauvist reconstructionism, post-Jungian cartoonism). I always wanted to be part of a great late-20th-century movement, but that was just posturing and further evidence of my ignorance about what art really is.” His own art, though? “That’s something I missed in school—self-knowledge. I’d call myself an outsider artist if I didn’t know I couldn’t be because I went to school and am not currently in a mental institution. What you see is what you get.” Bright Drum Circle, oil on canvas, 29 x 29"
S teven A. J ackson
“My work is straight photography in the sense that essentially I tone and tint a black-and-white image and then bring back only certain amounts of the original colors. This creates a more subtle and sometimes moody feeling,” says Steven A. Jackson. Born in New Jersey but here in Santa Fe almost 42 years now, Jackson, 62, follows in the tonal and compositional footsteps of Paul Strand and Edward Weston. “My photographs are not ‘classic,’ and they are not straight color landscapes, and they are not manipulated digital art. I create subtly toned photographs that evoke moods and emotions.”
The Church, Golden, digital print made with Epson HDR Ultrachrome inks on Hahnemüle photo rag, cotton rag paper, 9 x 8"
REPRESENTATIONAL
C l aire L ibin Among her many artistic influences—Matisse, Gauguin, Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Pipilotti Rist, and Rebecca Salsbury James (whose work led to her own most recent reverse-glass paintings)—what most inspires the works of Claire Libin is “what happens above and below the surface of the earth.” She came to Taos 14 years ago after many, many years in New York City. “Painting and gardening in the extreme beauty of the high desert became my passion,” says Libin, 50. “My paintings are mostly images of flowers, light, water, darkness, and sky. And the elements that create growth in a flower or leaf—light, air, water, the magic of photosynthesis—are what inspire my paintings.” Indigo Poppy, solar etching on paper, 11 x 15"
C l ark & D el V ecchio Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio joke that while most people come to town and look for a Santa Fe style home with a touch of modernism, when they moved here from New York, in 2008, they were looking for a modern house with just a touch of Santa Fe. The pair, curators and art historians known for putting contemporary ceramics on the fine-art map, found something nearly perfect in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos. After squaring off the home’s many arched doorways, they moved in. Partners in business and in life, Clark, 63, and Del Vecchio, 52, came to town after closing the Garth Clark Gallery in Manhattan. They started the gallery in Los Angeles, in 1981, but moved to New York two years later, becoming the first in the city to focus exclusively on ceramics. At the time, ceramics was seen more as craft (read: quaint and unimportant) than art. As Clark says, not immodestly, “In 1983, ceramics weren’t considered a primary, or even a secondary medium. We changed the way ceramics were seen by the New York art world.” Over the next 27 years, they established themselves as “the clay guys.” Together and independently, they organized international ceramics symposiums, curated museum shows, and published hundreds of scholarly articles and books— work they’ll continue to do as private Santa Fe art dealers. In
addition to showing again at SOFA West (see page 83), they’re organizing a new series of semi-annual contemporary ceramics auctions (the first Mark Del Vecchio and Garth Clark takes place this November). They’re also curating traveling exhibitions for two local artists they got to know while still in New York: Diego Romero and Christine McHorse. “Their work straddles both the southwestern and contemporary art worlds,” says Del Vecchio, who sees Keith Haring–like qualities in Romero’s bowls and echoes of Brancusi in McHorse’s black clay vessels. Both men have only praise for their new lives in Santa Fe—from the city’s “intellectual climate” to the impressive young artists they’ve met through their involvement with SITE Santa Fe, Warehouse 21, and Meow Wolf. “We haven’t even had a day’s regret,” says Del Vecchio. “The only thing we miss from New York are theater and friends.” “We live in a place where a ceramics tradition has been going on, with only slight changes, for more than two thousand years,” says Clark. “In how many other parts of the world can you find that?”—Dianna Delling
a new exhibition
Through October 17, 2010
107 West Palace Avenue, on the Plaza in Santa Fe 505.476.5072
NMArtMuseum.org
N EW ART & MEDIA
His Obscure Objects of Desire by
D evon J ackson
In Within the Context of No Context, George W.S. Trow’s trenchant 1981 memoiristic manifesto against TV and its role in the decline of American culture, the essay’s central theme is that the center could not, would not, will never again hold. Not in the America Trow saw, “the land of no nuance,” “the land of the very broad stroke.” The best artists, the most interesting and vital and necessary artists, though—artists such as Tim Horn (and Michael Scott and Katherine Lee and Margeaux and the others in and on these pages)—revel in nuance. They eschew the broad stroke at almost every juncture. Sadly, Trow died in 2006, before he could conjure up a third edition (his second came out in 1997); so there are no Trowisms on cable TV, iPods, Twitter, no writings about heroic artists like Horn, who can take something as mundane as an earring or a sconce and, by shifting its context just a skosh, rock our world—our assumptions, our worldviews, our contexts. “I like to recontextualize objects and images,” says Horn, 46, who was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, but now lives in Santa Fe with his partner, writer Art Corriveau. He points to some of the pieces he did for his recent Tree of Heaven series, one rich with coral, pearls, and sea fans. “This series is about desire. And I wanted to put these things I’m using into a sort of gay context.” Although there’s certainly a queer sensibility throughout his work, Horn now negotiates the uncanny and the awesome as nimbly as he has the precious and the gorgeous—and often all at once. Part of that comes from his innate creativity and talent. But it’s also due to the thoroughness with which he mines each project. If it involves pearls, Horn learns all he can about pearls; if it’s related to the carriage San Francisco sugar baroness Alma Spreckels had built for herself in the early 1900s, the one that inspired Mother-Load, the child-size sedan made almost entirely out of sugar, then Horn can give you every detail about Spreckel’s life while also rhapsodizing about the decorative-arts collection at the Legion of Honor (founded by Spreckels); and if it’s to do with marine
Opposite page: Hornâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s monumental Bitter Suite installation at San Franciscoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s de Young Museum: in front, Mother-Load, crystallized rock sugar, plywood, and steel, 9' 6" x 6' x 5' 6", behind, Diadem, crystallized rock sugar, steel, shellac, and electric light fixtures, 9 x 5'; this page: Discomedusa (detail), transparent rubber, copper tubing, lighting fixtures, 7' diameter
life, zoology, or the taxonomic 19th-century drawings of Ernst Haeckel, he can delve into any and all of it and from any angle—philosophy, design, symbology. It’s a knowledge imbued into each and every work, a knowledge viewers pick up on intuitively if not consciously. And because he invests more heart and emotion into his works than Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol (or Claes Oldenburg), it’s easier to warm up to them, engage them. “I don’t feel the need to cultivate a persona, the way Koons does, or the way Warhol did,” says Horn, who happens to be color blind but whose obvious love for texture more than offsets that genetic glitch. “I’d rather be open and revealing than concealing. Besides, Australians are very unambitious and laid back.” A gypsy since his mid-20s, Horn sandwiched in a five-year stint in Europe (teaching English, washing dishes, drawing 17th-century hair ornaments or images of the Medici pendant or Roman furniture patterns) in between two degrees in glass. In 1997, he returned to Melbourne, “a very Victorian city,” says Horn, who as a child was drawn to the patina of its architectural history, the urns and drapery applied to almost every façade, the cast-iron latticework. “It’s in the state of Victoria, and gold was discovered there, so there’s a lot of Italianate architecture.” Surrounded by his wealth of drawings—“I made a lot of stuff that I’m still working on,” he says— Horn percolated. He had a couple shows. He hit on the mutual concepts of scale and the theatricality of the baroque. Then he moved to the States—first to Boston, then to Roswell (very briefly— don’t ask), up to Chimayo (where he created Mother-Load), and finally to Santa Fe. During his only trip back to Australia so far (in 2008, for a show in Brisbane), he and Corriveau spent five days in the Great Barrier Reef, “swimming among the exotic fish and coral,” says Horn. “I’d been thinking about incorporating coral into my work for a while.” And then he did. Big-time. As fond of ornamentation in music (Bach, Handel, Purcell) as he is in his work, Horn fashions his coral out of nickel-plated bronze. “A patinated bronze would be too precious—and I’m not about that at all,” he scoffs. “It’s Rodin and romantic. I’m all about subverting things. And nickelplating the bronze is a way to subvert the bronze.” Together with the oversize pearls made of mirrored blown glass, these latest works have a fractal-like quality writ large, writ familiar yet not, where the patterns of nature—and 19th-century studies of nature—weave in and out of 17th- and 18th-century jewelry patterns. “I’m an object maker,” Horn says quietly. “I’m a male artist using the female form.”
Horn drew inspiration for this Villa Medusa exhibit from the exquisite glass replicas of jellyfish and other sea creatures wrought by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka. He discovered them at the Harvard Natural History Museum (while on scholarship at Boston’s Massachusetts College of Art in 2002), along with Ernst Haeckel’s intricate drawings of marine animals—another source of Horn’s creativity. Above: Medusa and Euryale. Medusa, silicone rubber, copper tubing, fiber optics, 9' diameter; Euryale, silicone rubber, copper tubing, fiber optics
NEW MEDIA
M ax A lmy & T eri Y arbrow
Having split time between Los Angeles and Abiquiu for the past 14 years, Max Almy and Teri Yarbrow will soon be full-time New Mexico residents. Their Santa Fe Convention Center installation Out of the Ashes, an animated, four-paneled painting that “looks light and billowy in the day and wild and fiery at night,” is indicative of their effort to “blend painting, digital imagery, and video projection.” Their wall panels, combining physical and projected images of earthy elements such as waves, wings, rust, and heavenly projected light, express a sense of poetic theater and spectacle rooted in the political radicalism they’ve formed through extensive traveling and almost 25 years of collaboration. “We’re now exclusively doing works that blend our concepts seamlessly,” says Almy. “There’s a sort of combustion that happens, and things just flow.” Ascent—Rust 1, acid wash on rusted panels with video projection, 112 x 140"
J onathan M orse Drawn to modern architecture and its free-form specialists (Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid), Jonathan Morse uses photography almost as one of these draftsman would—as a drawing tool. “I can still remember the first Rauschenberg print I saw many years ago,” says Morse, age 61, a transplanted Easterner. “I could not believe how he interlinked photography and drawing, pulling back just short of chaos, still very much in control.” A traditional printmaker utilizing late-20th-century tools, Morse builds digital images and creates original limited-edition prints. “My less-sophisticated and self-taught technical skills free me from perfection but enable my vision.” A vision wedded less to the gallery scene and more to the work. “Artists should work from within and not work to please the influences without,” believes Morse. “Satisfy yourself first, don’t let others redirect your vision.” Dots No. 7, archival pigment print, 21 x 28"
M oving
in
S tereo
Among the many works coming to the Eighth International Biennial at SITE Santa Fe this summer (26 works of art in motion, including sequences by Cindy Sherman, Hiraki Sawa, and Thomas Alva Edison, running from June 18, 2010–January 2, 2011), one of the more interesting multidisciplinary pieces will be After Ghostcatching. Being presented in a new stereoscopic installation, After reworks 1999’s Ghostcatching, itself a novel digital-art fusion of dance, drawing, and computer composition created by Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, of the OpenEnded Group, and made in collaboration with dancer-choreographer Bill T. Jones. First conceived as a way to show how the human form can be depicted in virtual space, Ghostcatching relied on motion-capture technology (Avatar technology before Avatar) to reflect the position and rotation of Jones’s body in motion—minus his mass and musculature. Thus, human movement absent the human body. Initially resistant, albeit cooperative, Jones eventually conceded that at least some part of what he does had been digitally preserved. “Even though there are limits to technology and what it promises to be able to do with dance—you really can’t capture what is my real dancing—they actually did, more or less,” admits Jones. He has yet to see the revised version but will be here for the biennial— as he always is: he has many friends in Santa Fe, has a second home in Taos, and his troupe will be performing at the Lensic June 17.
Having only scratched the surface the first time, Kaiser and Eshkar, along with newcomer Marc Downie and his artificialintelligence programming, were eager to take their Ghost to the next level. “It’s wonderful to revisit the material,” says Eshkar. “Now you can see into it deeper and deeper in stereo.” “My favorite aspect of the new work,” says Kaiser, “is the uncanny sense of presence and absence that we can conjure up with stereoscopic 3-D. After extends the possibilities of drawing into the third dimension, where the nuances of the line become fantastically subtle and expressive.” The two are looking forward to the biennial, at having the chance to show off their work to a purely artistic audience. “We don’t like to hype the technology,” says Eshkar. “We’d rather it get subsumed into the poetry of what we’re trying to do.” For Kaiser, who spent a summer in college living with a Navajo family in Chinle, Arizona, it’s also a chance to trumpet art over technology. “I prefer it when our work finds its place not because it’s digital and cutting edge,” he says, “but because it’s regarded as an artwork, pure and simple.”—DJ
EM ERGIN G ARTISTS
OFF THE GRID If an artist creates a work of art in the forest yet there’s no gallery there to represent her, does that artist exist? Can this person even call herself an artist? Of course and of course. Still, even as galleries limit their artist roster, there’s been no shortage of artists—new artists, emerging artists, reemerging artists—especially in and around Santa Fe, which continues to attract and produce artists. Gallery or no gallery, whether an artist goes a-courtin’ for a gallery or not (or vice versa), if you’re an artist, you’re an artist, and you’ll keep creating, no matter who’s there to see what new wonders you’ve been up to out there in the wilderness. As these 10 artists prove, the answer to the above questions is a resounding yes and yes. End of koan.—Devon Jackson
M ichael W ebb
Michael Webb may be the one true and truly off-the-grid artist. As he says forthrightly, unabashedly, and admirably, “I have been focusing my energy on projects other than tangible works of art—I have been teaching art/photography at the middle and high school levels now for the past 10 years. My work—both art and teaching—I see as experimental, conceptual, very much about materials, and completely dedicated to process both physically and mentally. I have no desire to be in a gallery here or anywhere else. The product is no longer the goal. This might sound a bit corny, but I truly believe that focusing on the journey allows me to contribute more intentionally to my community.” If all that sounds a bit like a manifesto from the early 1910s (say, the rantings of one of the futurists) or, even worse, like someone disgusted with capitalism and consumerism or, worse still, like a bitter failed artist—Pilgrim, put on your rethinking cap. Webb, 37, came here from Racine, Wisconsin, to attend the College of Santa Fe (graduate: 1994) with the idea of becoming a “successful working artist contributing creatively to a community.” Gallery or not, self-righteous or not, by your definition or his definition of success or not, Webb not only contributes, he contributes mightily and thoughtfully, and his inventive creations only reify his artistic-political assertions about permanence, ephemerality, authority, and the imagination. “Artists have always been the silent leaders of progression, the idea people, the ones that others should have listened to,” stresses Webb. “In these trying times, with recession, illness, and war, I find it time for the artists to lead the way, unlike the leaders before them: collaboratively, creatively, and with conviction.” 9 Cubed, polyester casting resin and steel, each cube: 4 x 4 x 4", stand:
D on R oac h
“Culturally,” asks Don Roach, 64, in his typically affable way, “starting out in Bangladesh, how could you end up anywhere but here?” Born in New Hampshire, Roach was just nine when his father, who worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, moved the family to Bangladesh, where waking up to dead bodies outside the house every morning was not uncommon. “It gave me a good artistic background for the rest of my life,” chuckles Roach, who also spent time in Palestine, Burundi, Liberia, and a Swiss boarding school—where he began to paint. After majoring in English at Harvard, he married, had three kids, and eventually ended up in northern New Mexico. Dividing his time between jaunts to Mexico and his farm outside Coyote, Roach has been painting ever since—accomplished and inviting plein air landscapes, mostly of the Chama Wilderness, that bear the lines and compositional alacrity of Maynard Dixon and the ethereality of the best of the Hudson River School painters. Once wedded to painting with a knife and emphasizing color, he’s gone back to using a brush and doing pieces that are more overtly linear rather than mass or color-oriented. A painter’s painter who enjoyed no small success in Santa Fe galleries in the 80s and 90s, Roach hasn’t lost his mojo or any fans. “I get a lot of good response from other painters,” he says proudly. “That keeps me going.” Chama River Spring, oil on canvas, 16 x 20"
D ante B rebner
It’s rare to discover a miniaturist in the land of sweeping landscapes. Dante Brebner builds intricate dioramas that require you to view his miniscule scenarios through peepholes (like a true voyeur). Originally from Colorado, Brebner, 41, focused on landscape dioramas upon arriving to Santa Fe in 2001. Decadent forests and seeping caves oddly bereft of humans conjured up what he calls “a sense of impending trouble or its aftermath.” Since then, Brebner has moved into architectural territory, constructing, with doll house–like accuracy, interiors ranging from a sewer, where children’s bouncing balls float ominously in polluted water, to a posh living room, where a violently tipped Christmas tree’s scattered ornaments sparkle on the floor like cake decorations. Even though his work is fairly conceptual, it’s accessible. “I’ve seen response from architects, young collectors of ‘cool shit,’ stoners, little kids, and senior ladies who like small stuff,” says Brebner, an artist “since I was old enough to spread frosting across a graham cracker—seriously.” He’s hoping to land somewhere large enough where he can fully explore his elaborate installations. “Santa Fe has so much gravity,” he says. “The longer I live here, the more I forget about the outside world.” Beach Balls (Tender Genocide), mixed media, interior dimensions: 3 x 6 x 9"
P amel a F rankel F iedler
As progressive as Santa Fe is in so many ways, it’s still a bit tentative when it comes to nudity. Even artistically rendered nudity. Even nudes as classically rendered and respectful as those of Pamela Frankel Fiedler. “My figurative oil paintings and pastels are unapologetically sensuous,” says Fiedler, a 50-something navy brat who did most of her growing up in San Diego before eventually moving to Santa Fe in 1993. “The work is strong and certainly invites discourse, but I still can’t fathom this prejudice against the nude here in the second-largest art market in the U.S.” Last represented by Veilleux Fine Art here in town (before that gallery closed in 2009), Fiedler recently signed on with Scottsdale’s Rive Gauche Galleries. Her nudes are not only sensuous, and erotic, and bold, they’re also about far more than either the beauty of the female form or its power to attract and beguile. Like all great nudes, Fiedler’s works elicit myriad responses—shock, entrancement, seduction, guilt. These alone are a testament to their power and to Fiedler’s intentions. “Santa Fe still seems to be tentative about the genre of the nude,” says Fiedler. “But it is making a stronger presence in our gallery scene. And if I keep persevering, mine will, too.” Love Fades, Memory Remains, oil on gold metal leaf on canvas, 36 x 30"
OFF THE GRID
P eter C hinni
Peter Chinni’s first-ever Taos exhibition this spring was a coming-out party of sorts. “It was the first time many of my friends had seen what I do!” exclaims the 82-year-old sculptor and painter, who moved from New York to Taos in 2003. Though he started out painting portraits, he’s focused on abstract sculpture since the late 50s, and his quasi-constructivist pieces can be found in major museums like the Whitney and the Hirshhorn. “I’ve been working through— struggling through—two concepts for the past 40 years,” he says. “One is the seed, the life within the seed. The other is the idea that nothing stands alone . . . my work includes a considerable amount of interlocking shapes.” In the 80s and 90s, Chinni set his art aside, for the most part, to raise two daughters as a single dad. “I certainly don’t work in the hopes of becoming rich,” he says. “I just want to earn enough money so I can continue doing what I’m doing. I’m 82, and I’m ready to go every day.” Portal, bronze, 25 x 17 x 6"
M eghan T omeo
She makes prints inspired by Bauhaus designers. She has a series of drawings of beheaded women (in the vein of graffiti artist Barry McGee). But Meghan Tomeo’s true medium is digital. “My work is pretty eclectic,” says the 27-year-old Massachusetts College of Art and Design graduate. “I can’t stay off the computer for too long.” A fan of Cindy Sherman, Miranda July, and Anthony Giocolea, Tomeo makes video projects that deal with “women and language and how we document time and how they affect our memory and experience.” Modern Ennui, for example, which incorporates films from one of her family trips to Maine—executed in Rorschach-like fashion—is based on Antonioni’s L’Avventura. Similary, her latest video features herself (sans head, natch) as various women at a dinner party. “A lot of video can be self-referential,” says Tomeo. “I’m not interested in making art about myself. I’m more interested in taking myself out—and trying to express what it means to be a woman today.”
Second Breakfast, multichannel video series, color and sound
D avid R udolph
Tunnels End, acrylic on canvas, 57 x 41 x 3"
David Rudolph hails from New York, but he started his artistic career in Los Angeles, working there from 1973 until 2005 as a sculptor (in a style he calls modern cubism). Back then, he had up to half a dozen galleries in cycle. In 2005, though, he moved to Santa Fe and switched to painting—a kind of digitalized trompe l’oeil, in which the hard-edged painted components form an almost holographic or three-dimensional image. Last year he took first place in the Canyon Road Paint Out (sponsored by the Santa Fean), and his paintings were featured in Faren Dancer’s Emerald Home last summer. “We’re getting closer to seeing a merger of modernism with the past here,” says Rudolph, whose studio will be on the Santa Fe Studio Tour this June, “and it’s a perfect fit. I believe Santa Feans will embrace modernism and its spiritual effect when they start to live with it more.”
D ebbie L ong
“One of the main inspirations in my work is light,” says Taos artist Debbie Long, 40, whose wonderfully odd sculptures and built environments in glass, cast crystal, and wax are as fun as they are orphic. “I’ve experimented with many light-interactive materials, but in 2002 my desire to harness light led me to begin casting glass in my studio.” Always interested in what’s around her, she began incorporating into her works the various dregs and dross she collected on walks into the desert near her studio: bullet casings, car hood ornaments, car side mirrors, Bic lighters. “I wanted to fuse these objects with light—to somehow remake them. Wiring a computer to an old ceramic kiln, I began teaching myself to cast glass and found a medium that could fuse objects with light. The quality of light that I captured using glass had the feeling I was looking for, and I began using glass to access light in my work.” Intent on taking her work to another level, Long’s hoping to fund a new large-scale light, glass, and solar project that she’ll install in the New Mexico desert. “Using LED lights and solar, in addition to glass in this project, will be an entirely new way for me to bring light into my work.”
Tow Package (detail), cast-glass wall piece from found car-hood ornaments (Dodge Ram, Lincoln, Chevy, Cadillac, Ford), 9'
C hristina D allorso K ortz
Satisfied, pen and ink on paper, 10 x 10"
Christina Dallorso Kortz has been practicing her art since childhood, when she lived in public housing—with three sisters, a brother, and first-generation Italian parents—on New York’s Lower East Side. “My escape, my way of finding privacy, was to draw,” says the 60-year-old Santa Fean, who works as the visitor relations manager at the O’Keeffe Museum. She’s been showing her quirky pen-and-ink portraits for the past six years. “I have always found people fascinating,” says Kortz, whose husband is painter Dirk Kortz. “Particularly in how seriously we take ourselves, and how our outer persona is often different from the way we feel inside. An image can evoke an entire story about a life.”
L uca B attaglia
Walker Evans once put together an entire book of photographs of nothing but signs—isolated words, letters, phrases. Others have followed suit since, but few have built on this concept the way Luca Battaglia has. Born in northern Italy in 1968, he developed an interest in photography, which took him to Naples and on to a career as a professional photojournalist. He traveled throughout Europe, the Middle East, India, and the U.S., establishing a reputation for the clear unaffected essences of his subjects—a reflection of his affections for the work of Sebastian Salgado. Since moving to northern New Mexico nine years ago, though, first to Abiquiu, and for the past two years in Madrid, Battaglia has not only expanded from black and white to color but has begun mixing media. “I’ve been making monotypes using old rusted car license plates as if they were etching plates,” he explains. “Instead of using strong acid to cut into the metal surface to create a design, I’ve been using the recycled metals, which have been carved by the aging due to the natural weathering.” The effect is reminiscent of the “stained-canvas” paintings of abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler. Urban Passion, mixed media, recycled metal and beeswax, each piece: 10 x 10"
Julien mcroberts
They’re Here They’re Queer...
WE’RE USED TO IT WE’RE ALL THE SAME IN THE CITY DIFFERENT
By Devon Jackson
douglas merriam
A
guy walks into a bar. A Santa Fe bar. The bar’s called the Pink Adobe (which, if this were a fictional anecdote, could be construed as Contrivance Number One—but it’s not made-up, so the name is neither foreshadowing nor ironic). The guy, it seems to the person telling this story, is from out of town. Out of state. The guy sits down. Nearby are two men seated at a table. They’re holding hands. The guy starts complaining. Loudly. To the bartender. To the room. You need to get that outta here, he bellows. That ain’t right. You gotta get ridda that. The bartender says nothing. He walks over to the register. The man telling the story, he’s getting that sick feeling in his stomach as he watches all this, thinking, He’s writing up the check for these two men. He’s gonna ask them to pay their tab and go. This is not good. The bartender then turns around and says to this guy, Here’s your check. They can stay. You can leave. That, to me, says the man telling this story, exemplifies how this city feels about gay people. And intolerance in general. Which is not to say that Santa Fe’s immune to or free of homophobia among its citizens, or that gay people here never experience a slur, a look, name-calling, or much worse. What it does illustrate is this city’s uniquely tolerant, accepting, embracing ways. Very simply, most Santa Feans don’t care if someone’s gay—or straight, bi, poly, omni, non, whatever. Why, then, write about it if it’s so not a big deal? Several reasons: one, this past March, President Obama pressured the U.S. military into a de facto relaxation of its 17-year-old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, which allows gay men and lesbians to serve in the armed forces only if they keep their sexual orientation secret. Two, in April, Obama then directed the Department of Health and Human Services to bar discrimination on hospital visits and also to respect patients’ choices on who makes life and death decisions on their care. And three, most relevant to Santa Fe and perhaps more important because, let’s be honest, hospital access and military leniency are all well and good but—the city finally has another gayfriendly nightclub. (OMG, right!?!) In the heart of downtown, no less. The Rouge Cat. Whose owner previously ran the city’s Cargo Club and Club Skirts in Las Vegas, Nevada. (And yes, Corazón is gay friendly—but it’s not gay owned; and there’s the Silver Starlight Lounge at the LGBT-owned and -operated Rainbow
Opposite page: Española Valley Humane Society executive director Bridget Lindquist, 40, and her partner, in-home fitness trainer Alana Bader, 32. Says Lindquist, “It’s so second nature to be transparent with people here, and open as a gay couple”; above: Honey Harris, host of The Big Show, every weekday morning on KBAC, says, “I’ve never felt like I was an outsider here.”
Vision retirement community, but it’s not downtown, and, well, it’s in a retirement community. Hel-lo.) Still, those are all just topical factors. Because, what’s unusual and significant about Santa Fe with respect to its gay sisters and brothers (and cousins and uncles et al), is that it’s so not a story. It’s so not an issue to be gay in this town. And that, therefore, is the story; that is what makes it interesting. And worth asking why and how it got this way. And if
there are lessons to be learned for other cities. “I don’t even think of myself as gay,” says KBAC disc jockey Honey Harris, 52, who in 1992 first came to Santa Fe from the South (born and raised in Alabama, college in Mississippi). “Here, you can assimilate and no one cares.” Well, maybe not no one, but precious few, it seems. “I quickly found out that being out wasn’t nearly as big a deal as it was back east,” says 39-year-old Alex Hanna, owner of Invisible
douglas merriam
“It’s a little sleepy here, but for a small town it’s really progressive,” says artist Maureen Burdock. “Here you can be some weird, practicing whatever.”
City Designs, who moved here from New Jersey in 1997. “I just showed up and was myself without having to think too much about it or make proclamations about my orientation. It’s not an everyday consciousness. Which, for me, is how it should be. It is only one small part of my identity. “I used to find it exhausting back east in the 90s to think about it so much,” he adds, “and at the expense of the many other facets of who I am.” Maybe it’s because the whole queer theory
activism never really took hold here the way it did elsewhere (assert your orientation first, foremost, and always; get in people’s faces with it if you have to); or maybe it’s because the gay population here had already gone through that identity stage and experienced some sort of queerness fatigue; or maybe it’s the pervasiveness of mañanaism (You’re gay? Bueno. So what. See you tomorrow). Whatever the reasons, for most people of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) persuasion who come here, there’s the impression that for
them being gay here is less stressful, less demanding, less expected of them (if that makes sense). “It’s a relief not to have to be completely on guard [about my sexuality],” says exPhiladelphian and Santa Fe Community College professor of art Gordon Fluke, 55. “We’re just a part of the fabric of the community here.” It’s a sentiment others share as well. “I came from Madison, Wisconsin,” says artist Maureen Burdock, 40, “where everyone wore a uniform.” Not so in Santa Fe, where the dearth of uniforms leads to a paucity of cliquishness that creates a sort of invisibility: Gay people don’t have the same street presence they do in San Francisco or New York; ergo, there’s no gay ghetto, no predominantly gay part of town. “Because Santa Fe is so welcoming, many of our own institutions don’t exist, like restaurants, newspapers, social clubs,” observes Fluke. “Even compared to cities of comparable size, Santa Fe doesn’t hold up. Because gay people in Santa Fe are so blended into the non-gay community, these institutions don’t exist.” This assimilation has led to an occasionally frustrating sense of apathy. “There is some degree of lethargy among the LGBT community in Santa Fe,” says political consultant J. Todd McElroy, 48, who moved here from Kansas in 1990. “We’re such a part of the fabric of this community, it’s harder to get people fired up and motivated.” County Commissioner Liz Stefanics, 59, who came here from Dayton, Ohio, in 1982, agrees. “I do believe that LGBT individuals become complacent with what we have,” she says, “until there is an incident or until the state legislature decides not to support our legislation—specifically, domestic partnerships.” “What we don’t do here is agitate—we advocate,” says ex-New Yorker Joy Silver, the straight-shooting 55-year-old president and CEO of Rainbow Vision. “And as usual, Santa Fe is a paradox—it’s progressive and conservative at the same time. We can’t get domestic partnership for the state but our mayor [David Coss] is all for it.” Despite having the second-highest per capita population of LGBTers of any county in the nation, accounting for about 20 percent of its 100,000 or so citizens—second only to California’s San Francisco County, according to the 2000 census—Santa Fe hasn’t yet succeeded in convincing the rest of the state to pass a domestic partnership bill; and only five
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had to learn to coexist with four major cultures: Natives, Hispanics, Spanish, and Anglo,” says Frost. “So they’re used to dealing with outsiders—and accepting them. But don’t forget the opera. Along with all the other arts here, that has been a feeder into the gay community, too.” “People come to Santa Fe when they’re done with the circuit,” observes Doug Nava, 35. A native Santa Fean who ran unsuccessfully for City Council this past February, he’s as proud of his Catholic and Hispanic roots as he is of his sexuality. By “the circuit,” Nava means the sowing of oats that most men, gay or straight, go through on their way to middle age. “We’ve shifted into an older culture,” says Rouge Cat DJ Oona Bender, 54, who’s worked the club scene here (or what there’s been of it) since 1981. Maybe the opening of the Cat is the sign of a new era for gay Santa Feans: younger, louder, faster, stronger. And equaler. “When you have a Catholic Hispanic mayor saying he supports domestic partnership laws,” says Silver, “it’s pretty indicative of where the country’s going. It’s a clear and open step.”
Rick Allred
states and the District of Columbia currently recognize gay unions as legal. “The public persona of Santa Fe is tolerant,” says Stefanics. “But there are pockets of discrimination and distrust.” Even the ever-positive Hanna feels it would be a mistake to think of the City Different as “some kind of gay-friendly utopia,” he cautions. Although Santa Fe’s “probably one of the most gay-friendly places in the world,” he adds, “there’s still a great deal of homophobia.” Homophobia be damned. Gay people have been here and been coming here for centuries. As have “others.” “People are used to diversity here more,” says Burdock. One of the town’s unofficial gay historians, Robert Frost, also attributes the town’s tolerance to its centuriesold mingling of cultures. Frost, 61, has been running the gay-friendly Inn of the Turquoise Bear with his anthropology professor partner Robert Bolton, 70, for the past 15 years now, on the former estate of poet Witter Bynner, “one of the most prominent gay people in town” (back when Bynner lived on the property from SFT852_PrideGuideNM(ds1si).qxp:Layout 2 3/26/10 9:41 AM Page 2 1921 to 68). “People of Santa Fe have
Drag queen Guava Chiffon celebrating at Santa Fe’s 2008 Gay Pride Parade
SEXUAL ORIENTATION APPEAL “We market very actively to the gay community,” states Keith Toler, executive director of the city’s Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. “But in case people think that’s the only group we market to, or that we market to them more than others, we also target families and outdoor groups as well.” And why sell the City Different to a people different? “They have disposable income and account for $65 billion a year of the worldwide travel segment,” says Toler, who adds that the CVB is a proud member of both the Gay and Lesbian Convention and Visitors Bureau and the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association ( who’ll be having its convention at the CVB’s Convention Center this September). “It makes sense to market to gay people. And we’ve had only two calls in three years to complain about any of that marketing. So the response has been great.” The first thing gay people want to know before they travel somewhere is: will we be accepted and will we be safe? Santa Fe scores pretty high on both. “We generally seek toler-
ance and expression, and this is a location that enables and promotes that,” says Rouge Cat DJ Oona Bender. “Santa Fe is also very open,” says Toler. “You find that level of openness especially in the hospitality community.” Aside from its history of being open-minded and welcoming to all kinds of travelers, the opening of Rainbow Vision in 2005 boosted the city’s status in the LGBT community— even if the state’s lack of domestic partnership rights has hurt it. “Rainbow Vision has put Santa Fe on the map as being the first city with a gay retirement community in the country,” says Toler. (Only Los Angeles offers a similar facility.) “And although the city has domestic partnership benefits—the state does not—we market ourselves accordingly: You can’t marry here, but you can have a great honeymoon.” Or, as another one of the city’s slogans puts it, Our streets may be narrow but our minds are not. “That appeals to people’s spiritual beliefs,” says Rainbow Vision president and CEO Joy Silver, “which is not dissimilar to accepting gay people as well.” Cha-ching!—DJ
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A UGUST 7 & 8
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Having long ago nailed down—to exquisite ends—the aesthetics and techniques of art deco married to the American grandiosity of the WPA mural artists of the 1930s, Kent Nelson has taken his iconic proclivities one step further in these latest works at Klaudia Marr Gallery (July 16–August 16, reception July 16 5–8 pm, 229 Johnson Street, Suite C, 505-9882100, klaudiamarrgallery.com). Working on as huge a scale as he did with his oil paintings (60 x 60”, 72 x 72”), the native southern Californian has here gone mosaic—using thousands of tiles as his paintbrush. The effect is not just Chuck Close in pixels but a deeper exploration of light and the possibilities of chiaroscuro on an almost quantum level.—Devon Jackson Kent Nelson, Clarissa, 27,800 Venetian glass tiles, 72 x 72"
art
PREVIEWS
James Minden, Tunnel, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48"
James Minden + Carolyn Cole: New Works The William + Joseph Gallery 727 Canyon, 505-982-9404 thewilliamandjosephgallery.com June 1–June 30, June 11, 5–7 pm The better paintings here in Minden’s new abstract series hint at a potential breakthrough into a desired-for genre he calls the “new objective realism.” It’s his colors, and the textural interplay among them, as well as the layers and the patterns above and beneath these colors and how all those interact, that’s most intriguing, and pleasing. He’s onto something here, or on the edge of it anyway.—DJ
Renate Aller: Oceanscapes—One View— Ten Years Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art, 702½ Canyon 505-992-0711, chiaroscurosantafe.com June 4–July 3, reception June 4, 5–7 pm What does a place look like? The 14 oceanscapes in Renate Aller’s solo show contain absolutely nothing but sea and sky—the same sea, the same sky. All photographed over ten years from a single vantage point in Westhampton, Long Island, the minimal compositions build on the horizon line and become meditations in blues, grays, and ecrus. Ranging from menacingly broody to full of playful spark, these aren’t landscapes so much as they’re Renate Aller, untitled, archival pigment print, 33 x 47" place-scapes: Much more than examining the passage of time, this series digs into the way location and time converge in our minds as we formulate what places signify for us. The large digital prints (2 x 3' or 4 x 6') are big and soft enough that you sort of fall in, to discover how variations in light and mood eventually collapse into composite memories rich with personal themes.—Marin Sardy Peter Sarkisian James Kelly Contemporary, 1601 Paseo de Peralta 505-989-1601, jameskelly.com June 11–July 24, reception June 11 5–7 pm In this latest video sculpture installation, Sarkisian forges ahead in his quest toward creating what he calls a “perceptual trap a viewer falls into.” One where the viewer doesn’t quite know what to make of video and object, which is which, what’s what. Why’s it so dark in here? Why’s that cube lit up on all six sides? And are those people in there, scrunched up in that lit-up box? Where’s that voice coming from and what’s it saying? Does it have to do with the people in the cube? Fascinating and beautiful and weird, it’s the rare type of experiential non-performance-art art that messes with our presumptions and preconceptions of what is and what it should be. Sarkisian, who lives and works in Galisteo, shows us what it can be.—DJ
Peter Sarkisian, Dusted (detail), video
Susan Romaine, Out There, oil on linen 24 x 30"
Susan Romaine Peterson-Cody Gallery, 130 W Palace 505-820-0010, petersoncodygallery.com June 4–June 30, reception June 4 5–7 pm Romaine’s studies of storefronts, car lots, cornices, and abandoned houses (among other objects of the urban landscape) prove how much personality a building can have. In the right artist’s hands. Sublimely forlorn and soulful, these paintings are all about geometry and shadows, and they have a love of architecture—an especially deep love for older buildings—that draws obvious comparisons to Edward Hopper while eschewing his melancholic outlook.—DJ
Vanita Smithey Karan Ruhlen, 225 Canyon 505-820-0807, karanruhlen.com July 23–August 5, reception July 23 5–7 pm There’s perhaps nothing overtly similar to either Alberto Giacometti or Georgia O’Keeffe in Smithey’s paintings of flowers. But for some reason, the frailty of humanity and the human condition, in respect to Giacometti, kept coming to mind on the one hand while the frangible beauty of nature, in respect to O’Keeffe, seemed just as powerful on the other. All this in a painting of flowers? Indeed. Neither a true representation of garden poppies or irises, nor a full-on abstraction that gets at either of the plants’ true essences, Smithey’s flowers possess an ineffable power that transcends any technical or rational explanations like, It’s her ever-so-delicate lines that touch us, or, Her felicity with shadows and shading gives her work a rare emotional depth.—DJ Vanita Smithey, Surveying Nature—The Poppy #9, charcoal/ mixed media on panel, 48 x 36"
art
PREVIEWS
Brandon Reese, R2, salt-glazed stoneware and sycamore 41 x 20 x 12"
Brandon Reese: New Sculpture Gebert Contemporary—Railyard, 550 S Guadalupe 505-983-3838, gebertcontemporary.com June 11–July 12, reception June 11, 5–7 pm Oklahoma artist Brandon Reese’s earthy-meets-mod ceramic and reclaimed-wood sculptures in his new solo exhibition are like cubist paintings growing in derelict land. The loosely organic columns, primarily constructed of stacked tree-trunk segments and thickly latticed stoneware geometries—and just tall enough to begin to loom over you—feel rooted to the ground and architecturally advanced at the same time. With most of the dozen pieces standing erect and boasting human(oid) names like Nelli and R2, the show suggests a series of portraits—not of people, necessarily, but of lifetimes. Patterned of arcs and circles, in heavily textured forms that play off natural tree and tree-ring shapes, they recall the weathering we receive as we attempt to construct our worlds within the cycles of life and the earth that grew us.—MS
Eric G. Thompson: Visual Haiku Deloney Newkirk Fine Art, 669 Canyon 505-992-2850, deloneynewkirk.com July 2–16, reception July 2 5–7 pm If it feels as though you’re being asked, compelled even, to slow down, slow wayyy down, when looking at one of Thompson’s oils (and slow down not in that lazy-bones-ish Beverly Hillbillies “take your shoes off,” kick back on the porch kind of way but in a way that’s urging you to contemplate the porch itself), then you’re more than halfway to where Thompson’s works are trying to get you. Meditative and quiet and Edward Hopperish, but not at all Hopped up or anxiety-driven Eric G. Thompson, Drifting, oil on panel, 24 x 36" or anxiety-inducing (which is why Hopper’s paintings have appealed to so many Americans over the years: we like art that stresses us out), Thompson’s latest series continues on in that Zen Buddhist vein of getting viewers to relax. Don’t just be with the painting, be in the painting.—DJ
Jeffrey Becom, Nevada Weir, Maggie Taylor Verve Gallery of Photography, 219 E Marcy, 505-982-5009 vervegalleryofphotography.com July 9–August 28, reception July 9 5–7 pm Weir and Becom, who seem to specialize in rich and richly observed and printed moments from their travels to China, Mongolia, and Africa (Weir) and India and Central America (Becom), make for complementary bookends to Taylor, the show’s wild-card photographer. Weir, a Santa Fean, once worked for the Southwest Outward Bound School, and even her more sedate shots reflect her bent for photography as a road to experiential learning. Becom’s love for architecture shows through just as clearly in how he frames his shots. But Taylor’s highly orchestrated tableaux are the 180 of the works of her fellow exhibitors: Magritte-like, Old Worldly, as enigmatic as a stranger’s dreams.—DJ Jeffrey Becom, Ancestor, archival pigment ink print, 8 x 10"
Cecil Touchon, pdp342, acrylic on birch panel, 24 x 36"
Cecil Touchon: The Art of Collage NuArt, 670 Canyon, 505-988-3888 nuartgallery.com June 18–July 4, lecture by Touchon June 18 4:30–5 pm, reception 5–7 pm A bit of a cut-and-paster (a la William Burroughs—only here it’s words rearranged artistically instead of textually), Touchon’s Fluxus-influenced abstract collage paintings bear traces, too, of the best of Russian constructivism and Matisse’s late collages. It’s their aged textural qualities, though, that give these pieces such unusual warmth.—DJ
Steven Gootgeld, Entering the Dream ceramic, 18 x 10 x 8"
Steven Gootgeld: Art and Architecture Taos Gallery, 133 Bent, Taos 575-758-3911, thetaosgallery.com June 1–30, reception June 5, 4–7 pm Combining design elements from the architectural and natural worlds, Gootgeld hand-builds bold, linear ceramic sculptures that look a little bit art deco, a little bit Zen garden. The Taos-based artist layers glazes over multiple firings to achieve a rich, highly reflective finish and hues that gleam like vivid watercolors. It’s work that’s both pretty and provocative. —Dianna Delling
art
PREVIEWS
Erin Currier: Journalistas Unembedded Park Gallery, 127 Bent, Taos 575-751-0343, parksgallery.com June 12–July 12, reception June 12 4–6 pm Seeking, in her words, to “discover humanity and to transform reality by humanizing it through art,” and “to lend voice to those who fight for human rights, social change, and who resist unjust established orders,” it may not please Currier or adhere to her excellently admirable agenda to hear this, but her multicolored multiculti assemblages—composed of recycled materials she’s gathered from all over the world—work as well as they do because, well, because they’re gorgeous. It’s almost like taking a friend to a Howard Zinn lecture or to meet Subcomandante Marcos and her reaction afterward is a dreamy, “He’s cute.” Her political goals aside, Currier has all the compositional sense, high-concentrate textures and graphics, and full-bodied colors to match those of Diego Rivera and Shepard Fairey. Vívala!—DJ
Dan Ostermiller, Boys Will Be Boys bronze, 50 x 80 x 73"
Dan Ostermiller: Return to the Familiar Nedra Matteucci Galleries 1075 Paseo de Peralta 505-982-4631, matteucci.com June 26–July 17, reception June 26, 2–4 pm Ostermiller has traveled the world, from Alaska to Africa, to view wildlife in its natural habitat. When he enters his studio to create one of his sculptures, however, he lets his imagination take over. The resulting bronze creatures, whether bears, rabbits, bison, or frogs, closely resemble their reallife counterparts, but with a touch of whimsy. His chubby rabbits are almost cuddly, while his majestic bears look like they’re laughing as they frolic.—DD
Sandra Pratt, Amsterdam Color, oil on linen, 11 x 14"
Sandra Pratt: New Paintings Selby Fleetwood Gallery, 600 Canyon, 505-992-8877, selbyfleetwoodgallery.com June 18–July 2, reception June 18, 5–7 pm You don’t have to guess at Pratt’s technique: She uses a palette knife to apply her oil paint thickly, leaving smudges and scrape marks and layers that look almost like plaster on the linen canvas. The atmospheric quality that results, however, is more mysterious. Desolate farmhouses, stark landscapes, and cityscapes void of people hint at loneliness and isolation, even when conveying a sense of peace.—DD
Erin Currier, Roxana Saberi as the Tara, mixed media on panel, 36 x 24"
Merete Larsen: Turned Vessels in Wood Patina Gallery, 131 W Palace 505-986-3432, patina-gallery.com June 18–July 11, reception July 8, 5–7 pm You’re forgiven for mistaking this bowl as being made of clay (or maybe you guessed metal?). It’s wood. Wood that’s been turned. Turned in a way few craftspeople, and probably even fewer artists, know how to do. Larsen, a Danish cabinetmaker by trade, but obviously an artist in all other respects, typically starts out with a 50-pound hunk of beech (or oak) in her workshop. Through a patient process of eliminating layer after layer, she refines it and refines it until the once-thick block of wood is wafer thin (sometimes weighing no more than 60 grams). Merete Larsen, Painted Sycamore, 15 x 35 cm She then varnishes it over and over, up to 40 layers’ worth, so that piece like this one takes on a metallic sheen. Bedazzling.—DJ Wang Nong Touching Stone Gallery, 539 Old Santa Fe Trail 505-988-8072, touchingstone.com June 4–July 7, reception June 4 5–7 pm Westerners tend to think linearly—along lines and right angles—and compartmentally—in boxes. Most western artists are no exception, even abstract ones. Their work tends to adhere to the confines of the canvas, its edges, lines, and confining limitations. Not so among most Eastern artists, especially ones like Nong, a master of sumi-e (an Asian form of ink-and-wash brush painting) and bokusai-ga (color sumi-e). Virtually free and maybe not even conscious of a horizon line (or ground or groundedness), Nong’s remembered Wang Nong, Rite of Spring, sumi-e on Chinese paper, 18 x 14" evocations of China’s Northern Vast Wilderness and other landscapes have a beauty made all the more stark and haunting without lines and edges, and with almost a refutation of dimensionality.—DJ
art
PREVIEWS Re-Presenting the Nude Evoke Contemporary 130 Lincoln, 505-995-9902, evokecontemporary.com July 2–July 30, reception July 2, 5–8 pm Lately, two forces seem to be operating on the genre of the nude: one immovable influence is Lucien Freud; the other equally inescapable crutch is mythology. (Photography seems to have had the roughest go—what with pornography’s pervasiveness nowadays and the easy availability of “fine art nudes” on the Internet.) This show at Evoke, though, manages to eke out a whiff of hope: the nude is not dead; nor is every nude either Freudian or mythological. (And Karin Rosenthal’s black-and-white nudes are compositional wonderments.)Wade Reynolds stands out, as do Will Wilson and Bernardo Torrens. Two of the more unusual artists here, however, are Daniel Barkley, whose compelling watercolors of men and young men are as unabashed as Larry Clark’s Tulsa photos, and Christyl Boger, whose conflation of classic and contemporary in her unique ceramic sculptures makes for a revelation.—DJ
Will Wilson, String Theory, oil on linen, 23 x 17"
West Coast Contemporary Turner Carroll Gallery, 725 Canyon 505-985-9800, turnercarrollgallery.com June 11– July 7, reception July 7, 5–7 pm Billed as the latest and greatest of Turner Carroll artists who live and work in southern California, this cleverly marketed show highlights about a quarter of the gallery’s stable. In addition to the more familiar names—Hung Liu, Rex Ray, Squeak Carnwath— West Coast also offers a chance to praise three of Turner Carroll’s other artists: There’s Eric Zener, whose mixed-media panels of figures suspended in mid-water in swimming pools call to mind Robert Longo’s Men in the City series; Enrique Chagoya, Hung Liu, Visage II, mixed media on panel, 50 x 72" whose politically charged works mix pre-Columbian mythology, Western religious iconography, and American popular culture in a David Salle–like mélange; and Deborah Oropallo, whose ingenious digital hybridizings of 17th- and 18th-century portrait paintings of men in women’s fashions brilliantly skewer notions of masculinity, power, sex, and desire.—DJ Woody Gwyn: Expanded Views LewAllen at the Santa Fe Railyard 1613 Paseo de Peralta, 505-988-3250, lewallencontemporary.com June 11–25, reception June 11 5:30–7:30 pm Gwyn’s panoramic landscapes often inspire disbelief, awe, dumbfoundedness, and rapture. (Not unlike the usual responses to the photographs of social documentarist Sebastiao Salgado.) He renders a scene so meticulously, so obsessively, so all-encompassingly—from a highway guardrail to a field of grass—that he seems to induce a sort of artistic vertigo. Which is not to say Gwyn’s all about intimidating the viewer into submission. Or trying to compel people to respect nature anew. Not at all. (Or not entirely—respecting nature is inherent in why and what he paints.) Although he’s firmly in that line of painters such as Gustave Courbet and Thomas Moran, and in the style of Maynard Dixon, what Gwyn’s really concerned with, and he is here again, is light and space. And—again—to glorious effect.—DJ
Sloane Bibb, Bello Cello, mixed media on wood, 52 x 24"
Sloane Bibb: Intermezzo LaKind Fine Art, 622 Canyon 505-982-3221, lakindfineart.com July 13–31, reception July 15, 5–7 pm Bibb’s highly textured, multimedia work combines paper, found objects, beeswax, and his “secret ingredient”: tar. Titled Intermezzo and timed for the start of Santa Fe Opera season, the show features new works with new perspectives on some of Bibb’s favorite motifs: nature, the female body, and the guitar.—DD
Helen Frost Way, assorted pumpkins bronze, various sizes
The Bronze Garden of Helen Frost Way Arroyo Gallery, 241 Delgado 505-988-1002, arroyosantafe.com July 1–17, reception July 1, 5–7 pm Way’s bronze sculptures capture the graceful lines and textures of produce: crispy bean pods, bumpy corncobs, and beautifully symmetrical star fruit. But her gourds are the standouts. She replaces the stems on her pumpkins with sculpted ram’s horns, antlers, and animal bones. It’s a curious concept and it takes her work from lovely-if-kitcheny to stimulating.—DD Woody Gwyn, Tourists, oil on canvas, 30 x 27"
art
PROFILE
i want candy C lay ton Por t e r ’s monst ro sit ie s of de sire
One day last summer, Clayton Porter showed up to work at Bruce Naumann’s Cerrillos studio to find maggots falling out of the ceiling. A pack rat living in the walls had died, spurring an intensive effort to solve Naumann’s ongoing mouse-and-rat problem. What’s striking is that as tall, affable Porter tells the story, he doesn’t seem disturbed or squeamish. In fact, he speaks of it with a nearly misty-eyed absorption. A glance through the 29-year-old artist’s body of work may explain why. This is the guy whose most recently shown piece (at Santa Fe’s William Shearburn Gallery, last summer) displays a mouse-headed monster devouring a small child. This is the guy who, in 2006, built a Victorian dollhouse, placed it in a gallery, and then let six mice run amok in it. “I ended up really making it pretty fancy for them, and, you know, they just destroyed everything,” says Porter, whose plain language belies a rigorous creative process. “Mice build their nests out of whatever they can get hold of—trash or Bruce’s prints that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.” But why the fascination with rodents? “We do the same thing. They’re sort of a reflection of us.” It didn’t take long for his approach (which, for all its grotesqueness, is more matter-of-fact than dark) to get the College of Santa Fe graduate noticed by local critics and a handful of devoted collectors. Porter has the ambition to match. Since his college days, he has had pieces in nearly 30 exhibitions, including one at what is now the New Mexico Museum of Art, all while scraping together a living through a dizzying range of artrelated odd jobs and even vying for a spot on the Bravo reality show Work of Art: The Next Great Artist. (He made it to the semifinals.) He’s now following his first solo show—Noxious Empire, at the Center for Contemporary Arts in 2008—with a more fully developed second exhibition, Dear Hart, Dog Dick, up this July at former CCA visual arts director Cyndi Conn’s new Palace Avenue art space, LaunchProjects. With the themes of consumption and destruction as his cornerstones, Porter works with a unique vocabulary of emotionally loaded objects such as lollipops, sex toys, digestive organs, and cancerous growths, as well as a whole pantheon of cartoonish beasts. Presenting these in a style that combines meticulously crafted graphite drawings with brilliant bursts of color and mixed-media sculptural elements, he seamlessly conflates contradictory symbols into a single visual language. And it’s this fusion that gives his work its power: It reveals the hopeless entanglement between our basest desires and purest aspirations. Porter traces his obsession with obsessions to his 20th year, when his mother died of cancer, hurling him into a period of intensive questioning of his beliefs. As an art-history minor, he found affirmation in European vanitas paintings and hunting scenes by masters like Peter Paul Rubens—work that dealt with the impermanence of all things. He also came across the work of Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, whose use of animé-based imagery inspired Porter to include the everyman element of comic-book-style drawings into his own art. By the time he emerged from grieving, Porter’s new appreciation for the creation/destruction dichotomy—and our related coping mechanisms—had spawned an entire mythology of bizarre creatures
courtesy launchprojects
by Ma ri n Sa rdy
Clayton Porter, no title (work in progress), graphic and acrylic on paper
that became the basis for everything he’s produced since. “We’re always looking for something to fill us, to satisfy us,” he says, “and often we never really find the end of that.” In Dear Hart, for instance, he takes on the human urge to hunt down what we love most. At his Cerrillos Road studio/bachelor pad, he shows me sketches of deformed man-beasts with candy-striped eyes “that shoot out of their heads and wrap around running deer.” He’s even throwing around the idea of hiding each piece behind “a shroud of balloons,” which viewers would have to pop to access the drawings. “If they desire to see the piece,” he says simply, “they have to destroy something to do that.” Clayton Porter: Dear Hart, Dog Dick, July 8–August 1, reception July 8, 6–7 pm, LaunchProjects, 355 E Palace, launchprojects.com
art
PROFILE
silence reflected Ma r ge aux’s e nt ra ncing photo g raphic s culpt ure s She knew. Despite the five shows a year, despite the visiting professorship gig at the University of Illinois at Urbana, despite 10 years in Chicago (which, at that time, from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, had a robust art scene), and, finally, despite a one-person show at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery—despite all that, Margeaux knew. And this time, at least, unlike 10 years earlier, she knew why as well. She’d already started moving out of one medium—sculpture—to the one she’s been exploring since—photography. (As for that knowing/notknowing thing? In 1985, she woke up one morning and couldn’t paint, and hasn’t painted since. “It was definitely an existential meltdown—God took the brush out of my hand,” says Margeaux.) This time, though, she did know why: Unlike that moment in ’85, this shift in ’95 didn’t catch her entirely unaware. “I was on a treadmill [in Chicago], lacking anything spiritual in my life,” says Margeaux, now 54, “which was an outward manifestation of wanting to reflect on my internal life.” Not wanting to grow old in the Windy City, she moved to Santa Fe in 1996. And immediately went silent. “I went silent one day a week,” she says. “I’d be silent for 10 days a year for the next three years. You can only hear when you’re silent. It takes time to still yourself, to hear who you are. It’s essential to making art.” Essential to her art, especially, which may be contemplative but also goes beyond all boundaries. Her aesthetically, intellectually rich tableaux—color photographs of apothecary jars, dice, and, now in her current show at Box Gallery, rivers and pools and other bodies of water in motion, all printed on large panels of glass—possess and emit a singular(ity of ) vision. It’s as if Margeaux sculpted time as well as material. If nothing else, they intrigue. Margeaux, who was born in Phoenix and grew up in southern California, earned her BFA at California State–Long Beach. “They emphasized craftsmanship, which served me well my whole life.” She spent three years working on her sculpture at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, then joined the artists’ enclave the Oakland Cannery in the Bay Area. “That’s where I started my career,” she says. Not as a sculptor but as a painter. By the time she relocated to Chicago, her artistic identity lay in canvas—until that fateful morning in 1985 when she took up sculpting again. Until 1995. “Things tend to cycle back to what you were doing in the past,” she shrugs. Aching to move back west, Margeaux moved to Santa Fe, went quiet, and opened up Zago Papers, which lasted nine years, with a friend. All that time, though, she was teaching herself how to use a camera and develop film. “I’m a solo experimenter, I work alone,” she declares. “I started to integrate photography into sculpture little by little.” Over the next 10 years, she developed photographs on glass, first the apothecary jars. The reiteration of the image of glass on a glass surface fascinated her. The pictures of the Chicago and San Antonio rivers (her current subject) allow her to go one step further: to investigate the intersection of light and water. “The idea that glass is liquid led me to water,” she says of the pictures she takes only at sunrise and sunset. “You see through glass just like we see through water. I like its reflective qualities. And I love the way the light and the water retain their own identities—but then there’s also this third thing.” Something ineffable, mysterious. Quiet.
courtesy the artist
by De von Jack s on
“My work has always contained a certain stillness, and I love quiet and it’s something I go for in my work,” she says. “But I’m not intellectually trying to make a statement about silence. My work’s minimal, and with minimal work you’re forced to stop and find a place to converse with the work and listen to something within yourself.” Top: Margeaux, Cloves, image on glass, 36 x 48; She stands back from one above: Margeaux of her photosculptures, as if searching it. “Right now, I’m in a conversation with the San Antonio River and it’s telling me a lot,” she says, not saying, though, what it is the water’s telling her. “But that’s the great thing about art: You don’t even know what the answers are.” Margeaux: Plunge, June 18–July 18, reception June 18 5–7 pm, Box Gallery, 1611 Paseo de Peralta, 505-989-4897, boxgallerysf.com
Opera ’s f rontier. The Santa Fe Opera J ULY 2 – A UGUST 28
MADAME BUTTERFLY
THE TALES OF HOFFMANN
THE MAGIC FLUTE
PUCCINI
OFFENBACH
MOZART
ALBERT HERRING
LIFE IS A DREAM
BRITTEN
World Premiere
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123 Galisteo St. • 575-642-4981 • www. drfa-sf.com
San Francisco, New York and Santa Fe New Paintings by Lori Snable
Broadway at 46th Cable Car at Union Square
Pastel, 20”x24”
Evening near the Plaza
Pastel, 24”x30”
Pastel, 21”x18”
GREENBERG FINE ART
FEATURING THE FINEST IN REPRESENTATIONAL ART
Opening Night Fri. July 2nd. Reception with the Artist. 2 0 5 C A N Y O N R O A D , S A N TA F E , N M 8 7 5 0 1 PHONE 505.955.1500 • EMAIL info@greenbergfineart.com w w w. g r e e n b e r g f i n e a r t . c o m
june/july 2010
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FESTIVAL
fair thee well Ar t Sa nt a Fe t ur ns 10 by De von Jack s on
Art fairs are the new black. Granted, some, such as Art Basel (about to host its 41st fair this June in Europe), have been around for decades. But in the past 10 years or so, the fair has become the hot new thing in the art world. And for Art Santa Fe, which will be celebrating its 10th fair July 15–18 at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, the timing couldn’t be better. “If you don’t reinvent yourself, you’re out of business,” says Charlotte Jackson, Art Santa Fe’s director and owner of Charlotte Jackson Fine Art. “If you wait for business to walk in through the front door, you’re done. That’s why art fairs have become so popular and why we’re doing it every year.” The first Art Santa Fe was held in 1995 at the La Fonda Hotel, in tandem with the first SITE Santa Fe. There were two artists that year: Colette Hosmer and Lutz Bascher. “It was more a happening than an art show,” recalls Jackson, “but it was very exciting.” It would take a few more years before it settled into its current annual incarnation, in 2007, and a few more venues before settling at the newly built Convention Center. It was originally timed to take place during SITE’s biennial show, but vendors began to get jittery over the lag time between fairs. “The exhibitors,” explains Jackson, “told us it threw them off to do it every other year.” Out of sight meant out of mind—which meant a potential loss of momentum, a potential loss in new dealers, new collectors, new connections. Plus, by 2005 or so, the art world had started to get hip to what the art fairs had created: a new way to draw attention to galleries and art, a new way to draw in customers. Art LA, for instance, launched in 2005—three years after Art Basel opened its sister event in Miami. In her book Seven Days in the Art World, author Sarah Thornton describes Art Basel as “an event that has contributed to the internationalization of the art world.” Ironically, Art Basel Miami Beach has all but eclipsed Art Basel in size and popularity, if not also in influence. For Jackson and her compatriots at Art Santa Fe (which is owned by London International LLC), the fair’s unique size and scale keep bringing people back year after year. “At the larger fairs, there’s the sense of being overwhelmed,” says David Rosen, who, over the years with his partner Chris Rocca, has acquired art from Jackson, Durham, Evo, and LewAllen galleries. “Whereas at Art Santa Fe you can take it all in. You can talk to the dealers and spend time with them. And they very specifically know who their artists are.” After taking it international in 1999, Jackson has remained as loyal and attentive to her foreign compatriots as she has to locals. In addition to the Santa Fe and U.S. galleries, Art Santa Fe will again feature exhibitors from China, Toronto, and Dusseldorf, among others. Then there’s the show itself: dozens of dealers, a guest lecturer (last year people thronged to hear New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman), the Art in America soiree, the How Things Are Made demos (Landfall Press doing etchings; Bullseye Studio on cold-press glassmaking). There will also be—finally— an on-site restaurant, run by Walter Burke Catering, complete with champagne and a wine bar.
Patrons at last year’s Art Santa Fe
courtesy charlotte jackson fine art
Jackson believes that while Art Santa Fe, with its artistic contemporaneity, is a huge draw on its own, two other July extravaganzas— the SOFA West show and the International Folk Art Market—drum up crossover crowds. “These are the hot things that bring contemporary collectors to New Mexico,” says Jackson. “And don’t forget: it all starts with the opera. Opera kicks off everything. And July is art month in New Mexico.” Aside from her excitement and anticipation over the fair, though, what has Jackson stoked is the way it dovetails so nicely into the direction of Santa Fe’s art scene. That vision way back when? Of SITE Santa Fe serving as the anchor for a new, robust art ’hood? It’s here. In July, in fact, Jackson is moving her own gallery from its longtime location, across from the Convention Center, to a new home in the city’s up-and-coming hot spot for contemporary art, the Railyard District. “The shift toward contemporary art here has been tremendous,” she says. “And the Railyard’s an exciting environment. It’s very cool and hip. And what we’re allowed to do over there architecturally. . . . The Railyard will become very much a destination—in addition to Canyon Road and downtown—it’ll be an arts destination like SoHo or Chelsea in New York. We’ve moving in that direction. Fast.” Nevertheless, Jackson welcomes all of it. “Santa Fe’s never going to be all one thing,” she says. “It’s a mixed bag. It’s tri-artistic, in the same way that it’s tricultural. And that’s why people like coming here. There’s western, there’s Native, there’s contemporary.”
art
FESTIVAL
function follows form B ac k for its s econd ye a r, SOFA cele brat e s f ine de corat ive a r t s by Di a nna Delli ng
courtesy SOFA
courtesy sofa
The line between fine art and design was blurring long before Michael Graves designed his first toaster for Target. It was smudged even before the first International Sculpture Objects and Functional Art Fair—aka SOFA—took place at Navy Pier in Chicago in 1994. But the success of both SOFA and the big-box retailer proves that they were onto something: Fine artists and academics may argue the difference between “fine art” and “design”—or, dare we say it, “craft”—but there’s room all of it in the average living room. SOFA shows in Chicago, New York, and, as of 2009, Santa Fe feature work that has traditionally been ignored by fine-art museums and shows, including pieces in contemporary glass, ceramics, and metal, along with furniture, textiles, and other “interior design” items. Most are functional objects, so beautifully made or unique in design that you’re happy just to look at them, let alone sit in them, drink from them, or put flowers in them—but their creators won’t mind if you do. Masters from every craft medium are represented (works by Lino Tagliapietra and Dale Chihuly from the glass world, for example), as are up-and-coming artists with the potential to become bigger names. For dealers like Jane Sauer, whose Jane Sauer Gallery in Santa Fe specializes in medium-based fine art, the SOFA fairs are the most important shows on the calendar. That’s in part because they’re the only ones that focus exclusively on decorative objects, and they are juried fairs that keep the bar high for exhibitors. “I think SOFA opens eyes,” she says. “People come, and they see the tactile and visceral components of this kind of work, and the expression of this kind of work, and they like it. That helps bridge the sort of bias that has developed around terminology. It becomes about the actual art or product, not about what’s it’s called.” After four successful years in Chicago, SOFA expanded to New York in 1994, and last year, SOFA West premiered in Santa Fe. With 35 galleries and art dealer exhibitors participating, the fair drew more than 10,000 people to the Santa Fe Community Convention Center in early June—a strong debut, but not surprising given Santa Fe’s ability to attract art lovers as a collecting and vacation destination. It was strong enough that SOFA West is returning again, taking over the Convention Center this year July 8–11, coinciding with the popular International Folk Art Market at Museum Hill. Some SOFA events will be familiar to last year’s fair-goers. Members of the Museum of New Mexico Foundation will again be invited to preview the show on the evening of Wednesday, July 7, and curators, artists, and collectors will be giving lectures (open to all SOFA ticket holders) throughout the weekend. But this year organizers have made an effort to bring more of New Mexico’s contemporary decorative art—specifically, Native contemporary art—into the mix. SOFA is sponsoring Historic Bond/Contemporary Spirit: Collecting New Southwest Native Pottery, for example, a three-day, pre-fair symposium featuring ceramic scholar Garth Clark, Southwestern Association for Indian Arts executive director Bruce Bernstein, and former Museum of Fine Arts director Ellen Bradbury. “Santa Fe is the center of the study and collection of Pueblo pottery, so it seemed important to bring that sensibility to the fair—to give it a unique and specific attachment to the region,” says Mark Lyman, SOFA’s founding director.
Top: Some of the artworks at last year’s SOFA West at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center; above: more works at last year’s SOFA West show
Native artists will be well represented at the fair itself. Bernstein will show works by contemporary Native metalworkers from New Mexico at a SWAIA booth, and Clark, as a fine ceramics dealer and co-owner of Clark + Del Vecchio, will showcase contemporary Native pottery. “We have the opportunity to create a fair that’s different than the ones in New York and Chicago,” says Clark, who’s been showing ceramic artists at SOFA since the first Chicago event. While the Native artists he represents create using traditional mediums and traditional techniques, he explains, their work also moves in new directions. “These works are not without Native resonance. It’s just abstracted.” Like Charlotte Jackson, who heads up Art Santa Fe (see previous page), SOFA’s creators believe Santa Fe’s strong summer arts lineup is good for the city—and that the city is good for the art fairs. “We are certainly impressed with the fact that there are so many fine galleries here,” says Lyman. “Let’s hope this fair and all the other activities over the summer can help encourage new buyers and new collectors to come into town and avail themselves of all Santa Fe’s treasures.”
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Art Space 17 on Bisbee Jonathan Awn, How Do You Know, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 60"
One of the many new art spaces popping up on the south edge of Santa Fe along the Turquoise Trail. Artist reception Thursday July 8, 5–8 pm. Open Studios July 9, 10, 11, 16, and 17, 12–5 pm. Sunday, July 18, closing reception, 12–4 pm. 17 Bisbee Court, 505-920-1387
the
gallery
Art Exchange Gallery Brad Price, Iglesia Vieja, oil on canvas, 10 x 8"
Brad Price is not only a prolific plein air painter, he is also an author. Brad will be the featured artist through August. An August 6 reception to meet the artist from 4–6 pm will include a book signing as well as a show of his exceptional landscape paintings. The painting above is an oil painting of historic San Miguel Mission Church. 618 Canyon, 505-982-6329, aegallery.com
ART SHOWCASE
Giacobbe Fritz Fine Art Wendy Chidester, oil on canvas, 28 x 60"
Wendy Chidester loves to wander through antique shops and junkyards looking for old, worn objects to inspire her to paint. Her paintings of typewriters, cameras, and unlikely subjects such as vacuum cleaners evoke memories of days past. Her style is contemporary, her surfaces as rich and interesting as the objects themselves. 702 Canyon, 505-986-1156 giacobbefritz.com 84 santafean.com june/july 2010
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Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian From May 15, 2010, through April 17, 2011, the Wheelwright Museum presents Nizhoni Shima’: Master Weavers of the Toadlena/Two Grey Hills Region. This exhibition features iconic textiles dating from 1910 to the present. Included are masterworks by Daisy Taugelchee, Bessie Manygoats, and Clara Sherman. Open Monday–Saturday 10–5, Sunday 1–5. Free admission. Donations encouraged. 704 Camino Lejo, Museum Hill, 505-982-4636, wheelwright.org
Artistas de Santa Fe Lily Schlien, Raven and Corn I, woodcut, 32 x 24"
Warm and welcoming gallery featuring compelling contemporary art by established and emerging local artists. Frequently changing exhibits feature exciting oil, encaustic, acrylic paintings; woodcut, linocut, and monoprints; mixed-media assemblages; book art, calligraphy, and photography. Featured artist openings throughout the year. 228B Old Santa Fe Trail at Alameda 505-982-1320, artistasdesantafe.com
Jennie Cooley Gallery Now What
Many of Jennie’s most popular images now available in 12 x 12", 12 x 14" giclée on canvas, ready to hang. Jennie’s gallery features her monotypes, paintings, dolls, and assemblages in her own visual narrative style, somewhere between Henry Darger and Gary Larson. 826 Canyon, 505-983-2630 jenniecooley.com
GF Contemporary Tim Jag’s work is a marriage of pop imagery and color, with a hard-edged expressionistic handling of paint. His works are about the application of paint: generously layered, heartily textured, and brightly colored. Jag will unveil his “colorwheels” series at SLANT: Art of a Different Inclination, opening July 9, 2010, at GF Contemporary. 707 Canyon, 505-983-3707, gfcontemporary.com june/july 2010
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Hunter Kirkland Contemporary Hal Larsen, Red Passage V, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 60"
Now residing in Ecuador, artist Hal Larsen continues to be influenced by his physical environment. Even at his most abstract, he gives us unmistakable glimpses of gorgeous light and air, vast expanses of color, and the sensuous curves and angularities of the landscape. The result is artwork of remarkable richness and depth. 200B Canyon, 505-984-2111
Brandon Michael Fine Art Timothy Horn, The Promised Land, oil on canvas, 18 x 18"
Brandon Michael Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition In The Dust by Timothy Horn, June 25–July 9, 2010, with an artist’s reception scheduled for June 25, 5–7 pm. Timothy Horn is known for his high-chroma depictions of everyday American scenes. Whether painting dilapidated cars or weathered barns, he bathes the subject in clean western sunlight, finding the luminous in the ordinary. One-man show, In The Dust, opens Friday, June 25, 5–7 pm 202 Canyon, 505-795-7427
Chalk Farm Gallery
Frank Howell Gallery Atira’s Dream, giclée, 46 x 32"
Chalk Farm Gallery is the world’s leading gallery for visionary/surrealist art. The most sought-after artists in the world show here, including Michael Parkes, Vladimir Kush, Daniel Merriam, Michael Cheval, and many others. The 3,000-square-foot space is as beautiful as the art itself, filled with plants and flooded with light from a glass-domed roof. To tour the gallery and see some of the artists, visit our website at chalkfarmgallery.com.
Located on the northwest corner of the Plaza, the Frank Howell Gallery has operated for over 20 years, showcasing worldrenowned artists, including Frank Howell, Bill Worrell, Ray Tracey, and Pedro Jimenez III. We are always interested in purchasing Frank Howell originals.
729 Canyon, Santa Fe NM 87501, 505-983-7125
103 Washington, 505-984-1074, frankhowellgallery.com
86 santafean.com june/july 2010
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Hahn Ross Gallery
Jeanette Williams Fine Art
Chris Richter, Night Stands, oil on panel, 40 x 48"
Bold and haunting oil paintings of aspen trees by Santa Fe artist Chris Richter will be displayed alongside works from artists currently living in Cuba. Shared Visions will open Friday July 9 from 5â&#x20AC;&#x201C;7:30 pm and will run until July 22. 409 Canyon, 505-984-8434, hahnross.com
David Fowler, High Desert Mountain Enchantment, oil on canvas, 40 x 44"
High Desert Mountain Enchantment, by David Fowler, is a highly textural piece from his colorful new exhibit, now showing through September 2010. This earthy series focuses on the natural charm of the northern New Mexico landscape. We invite you to stop in the gallery to view more of this magnetic series. 717D Canyon, jeanettewilliamsfineart.com
POP Gallery Daniel Martin Diaz, Enlightenment, oil on wood with hand-forged steel frame, 15 x 36"
POP Gallery presents three prolific emerging artists for Spanish Market 2010. Memento Mori features original and limited-edition work from internationally acclaimed Daniel Martin Diaz, Brandon Maldonado, and Marie Sena. Opens July 16; runs to August 31, with artist reception and art raffle to benefit Bienvenidos Outreach Saturday July 24, 6â&#x20AC;&#x201C;8 pm. 133 W Water, 505-820-0788 popsantafe.com
Sunti World Art Gallery Sunti Pichetchaiyakul, Tatanka Iyotanka/ Chief Sitting Bull, bronze, 43 x 19 x 11"
Capturing the historical authenticity and spiritual essence of the American Continent, international master of realistic sculpture, Sunti Pichetchaiyakul, revives the stories of celebrated figures in his life-size bronze collection, Legends of the Americas. Commissions offered to professional interior designers. 459 Electric Avenue, Bigfork, MT 406-837-9998, suntiworldart.com
SPECIAL ADVERTSING SECTION
Heidi Loewen Porcelain Gallery 0ut of This World, Smoke Fired & Carved Porcelain Platter D. 30"
View Heidi’s large smoke fired porcelain vessels. Watch her throw & carve in front of your eyes. She even creates work specific to your request. Select size, shape & smokey tones for your platter or sculpture. Add 22 karat gold leaf for a great glow. Heidi also teaches privately to any age, any time. Opening: July 9, 5-8pm; July 10, 5-8pm. Concurrently exhibiting at SOFA Santa Fe July 8-11. 315 Johnson St. 505-988-2225 HeidiLoewen.com
GVG Contemporary Joella Jean Mahoney is known for dramatic, large-scale landscapes, which contain all the elements of her huge originality: the spontaneous brush strokes, the inventive shapes, lambent color, and monumental scale of work and vision. This exhibition includes both new and archival paintings. A true American original, she will be present at the reception, July 23, 5–8 PM. 238 Delgado, 505-982-1494, gvgcontemporary.com
Deloney Newkirk Galleries Eric G. Thompson, Rising (detail), oil on panel, 29 x 24"
Eric G. Thompson’s contemporary realist paintings explore the forgotten beauty inherent in everyday scenes. His refined compositions of interiors, landscapes, and figurative works reveal a world captured in moments of quiet revelation. 634 + 669 Canyon, 505-992-2850, deloneynewkirk.com
Sage Creek Gallery Dennis Farris, West Temple–Steamboat Mountain, oil, 30 x 24"
Zion showcases new atmospheric paintings rendered with exhilarating, soaring compositions and crystalline light inspired by Texas artist Dennis Farris’s experience as artist-in-residence for the Utah National Park. “A dream come true,” says the award-winning painter. Exhibition runs August 6–15. Opening reception August 6. 200 Old Santa Fe Trail, 505-988-3444, sagecreekgallery.com 88 santafean.com june/july 2010
A free and family-friendly summer concert series at St. John’s College
June
9
Your own picnic and adult beverages are welcome. Food and drinks will be available for purchase. Catering by Walter Burke. No pets.
Michael Herndon JAZZ AND R&B VOCALIST
16
Tommy Gearhart
JAZZ CROONER
23
Enjoy great music
Frank Leto
in the open air.
CARIBBEAN REGGAE
Wednesday evenings
July
6 - 8 p.m. on the athletic field.
14
John Rangel JAZZ PIANIST AND GROUP
21
Joan Kessler VOCALIST, JAZZ STANDARDS
28
Nacha Mendez QUARTET
St. John’s College would like to welcome the Santa Fean Magazine as a first year sponsor of Music on the Hill™. www.stjohnscollege.edu
june/july 2010
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enchanted treasures SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
Packard’s on the Plaza Sassy and sophisticated stones, beads, pearls, and gems in every color of the spectrum. Drape, string, coil, or snake on one of Pam Springall’s necklaces in your favorite hue to wear to lunch or to the opera. Only at Packard’s on the Plaza. Graduated melon-carved turquoise beads with handmade signature sterling clasp Packard’s on the Plaza, 61 Old Santa Fe Trail 800-648-7358 or 505-983-9241
Charlotte Santa Fe
Norma Sharon Enchanting hand-molded cowhide purses in the shape of a human face are surefire conversation starters. Wearable art that evokes the artist within will have your friends and family asking, “Where did you get that bag?” Plaza Mercado, 137 W Water, 505-984-3005 normasharon.com
Interchangeable jewelry. This white hightech ceramic ring from Germany can be interchanged by the customer to make it fit her mood and budget. The centerpieces can be worn in a ring, or on a bracelet or pendant with matching earrings. On the Plaza 66 E San Francisco 505-660-8614 charlotteshop.com
Packard’s on the Plaza Exquisite serving-ware in silver, hammered copper, and porcelain, in the Mexican tradition from Taxco. Emilia Castillo’s designs with animals, birds, butterflies, and fleur-de-lis bring Old World elegance to any occasion. Madrigal verdigris patina vase with silver fleurs. Packard’s on the Plaza, 61 Old Santa Fe Trail 800-648-7358 or 505-983-9241 90 santafean.com june/july 2010
Desert Son of Santa Fe Fabulous handbags, footwear, and belts from around the globe. From belts made on site to handmade western boots by Stallion and Tres Outlaws and representing Henry Beguelin. Travel the world of style without leaving this shop on Canyon Road. 725 Canyon, 505-982-9499
KatieO Jewelry A feast for the eyes, this unique necklace is from the KatieO Jewelry Tapestry Collection. It features three strands of lush turquoise in a variety of textures, patterns, and hues. Also woven into the design are antique Hebron beads from Africa and sterling-silver beads. 954-638-9118, katieojewelry.com
The Golden Eye Since 1971, the Golden Eye has specialized in fine, handcrafted jewelry in high-karat gold, paired with exotic gemstones and pearls. One of the first to use the ancient rose-cut diamond in contemporary jewelry. Design your own unique earrings from our collection of â&#x20AC;&#x153;ear-rangements,â&#x20AC;? handcrafted here in Santa Fe of 18-karat gold. One or many, mix and match. 115 Don Gaspar, 505-984-0040, 800-784-0038, goldeneyesantafe.com
Nathalie For your collection, the most extravagant buckle ever, and maybe the biggest! The most-known icon, created by Edward H. Bohlin, and used on saddles, bookends, bracelets, and rings. This classic original is sterling silver and five inches high. 503 Canyon, 505-982-1021, nathaliesantafe.com
SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
Boots and Boogie Santa Fe’s premier gallery of fine handcrafted boots. Elegant while still being comfortable. Owner Roy Flynn will personally and expertly size you in the finest and most beautiful hand-tooled boots available, emblazoned with your initials. Whether it’s the classic black kangaroo, soft-and-supple leather bottom with hand-tooled upper Tyler Beard design, shown here, or any of the hundreds of other designs available, Boots and Boogie outfits you with style. Boots and Boogie, 227 Don Gaspar, #5, 505-983-0777 santafebootsandboogie.com
Santa Fe Photographic Workshops Picture Yourself Here Join us for a photographic adventure in Santa Fe. Capture the vibrant energy of summer on the Plaza, the glow of adobe bathed in afternoon light, the sweeping vistas of O’Keeffe country. The top photographers at Santa Fe Photographic Workshops take you there. Picture it. 505-983-1400, santafeworkshops.com
Teca Tu—A Pawsworthy Emporium and Deli Santa Fe’s unique shop for pets and their people. We have been serving Santa Fe and the world’s humans and their pets since 1995! Incredible neckware, stunning pet apparel, comfy beds, joyous toys, travel accessories, yummy fresh-baked treats. Sanbusco Market Center, 500 Montezuma, 505-982-9374, tecatu.com
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Douglas Magnus Santa Fe 400 Collection The Money Clip: A handmade commemorative in sterling silver or sterling with 14-karat gold overlays. This handsome and functional collectors’ item makes a great men’s gift. See more of the collection at Packard’s on the Plaza, the New Mexico History Museum Shop, or at douglasmagnus.com. 505 983-6777, douglasmagnus.com
SEASON PRESENTING SPONSOR
ASPEN SANTA FE BALLET P
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S
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N
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2010 Summer Dance Paul Taylor Dance Company
July 28th, 8pm
The Lensic, Santa Fe’s Performing Arts Center “The American spirit soars whenever Taylor’s dancers dance.” – San Francisco Chronicle
Aspen Santa Fe Ballet
featuring stars from the New York City Ballet
August 6th & 7th, 8pm The Lensic, Santa Fe’s Performing Arts Center
PHOTO: LOIS GREENFIELD
“One of the hottest tickets in ballet…” –Pittsburgh City Paper
TICKETS ON SALE JUNE 1st!! TICKETS: 505-988-1234
www.aspensantafeballet.com
CORPORATE SPONSORS
OFFICIAL AND EXCLUSIVE AIRLINE OF ASPEN SANTA FE BALLET
GOVERNMENT / FOUNDATIONS
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Partially funded by the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers Tax, and made possible in part by the New Mexico Arts, a Division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
94 santafean.com june/july 2010
Currently on the market for a mere $12.9 million, Rancho Alegre sits on 175 ranchland acres just south of Santa Fe, with views of the Ortiz and Sangre de Cristo mountains. This foyer, big enough to drive a golf cart through if not an actual midsize sedan, typifies the attention to detail, soignĂŠe design, and enormity of this 20,000-square-foot all-adobe ranch (where the adobes are an old-school two to four feet thick). Designed by William F. Tull of Scottsdale (who also architected George Straitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s home in San Antonio and the clubhouse at Las Campanas) and finished in 1996 for media entrepreneur R. Michael Kammerer, Alegre lacks not a thing: there are illuminated nichos, an infinity-edge pool and hot tub, a basketball court, a wine cellar, a nine-bedroom main residence, a full-on ranch (with 12 horse stalls, plus other appurtenant equestrian amenities), and a central courtyard plaza. As the Freemasons like to mantra: As above, so below, as attested to by this amazingly vaulted brick bovida ceiling and the Mexican paver stone laid down European style. Stunning. Rather.â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Devon Jackson
ROBERT RECK
architecture | design | people
COLUMN
remodeling your future Sa n t a Fe a n s have a t radit ion of u sing what t he y alre ady have by Victori a Price
IN 1949 MY MOTHER MARRIED my father and moved into his little Beverly Hills home. One day she thought, “The house would flow better if I just moved the front door over two feet.” So she did—much to my dad’s surprise when he came home! And my mom, then a successful costume designer, launched her career in architectural design. She was always ahead of her time. It was the bane of my existence: I just wanted to look like other kids—not fashion forward, interestingly retro, or color-coded. In the 1950s, when everyone owned ranch-style homes, she bought a 1920s Spanish mansion and remodeled it herself. Featured in magazines and on TV, it became a landmark California home. She worked with Sears in the 1960s to create a line of antique and architectural reproductions long before Restoration Hardware. In the 1970s, she created her own solar heating system. And in the 1980s, she helped transform a rundown neighborhood in Boston’s South End into a revitalized urban gem. Although I respected her, I was rebellious. So even when I apprenticed with her, I was much more interested in almost anything else. The thought of becoming a designer myself was laughable. Twenty years later, not a day goes by when I don’t think of her. Everything she did seems so relevant. Today the housing industry is at a crossroads. Although the profligate building of spec houses and McMansions is (mercifully) over, the slow recovery of the construction industry is hurting everyone. But if we’re not going to revert back to unbridled building, what are we going to do? Why not remodel? Particularly here in Santa Fe, it couldn’t be more appropriate. Beyond the fabricated Santa Fe Style that became famous in the 1980s, our real design history has been formed by three factors—our tricultural heritage, climate and geography, and economy. The rich 400-year exchange of ideas among Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo cultures has cross-pollinated into a globally unique architecture melding the best elements from each. But during the housing boom, we witnessed the construction of communities that despite stringent zoning laws were nothing more than generic suburbia writ mud-colored. Living in our gorgeous high-desert climate is so appealing. But it offers up a unique set of challenges. Sooner or later, every culture has had to learn to build in ways that respect instead of ignore our limited natural resources, arid climate, high altitude, and wide temperature variations. Recently, however, through an unfortunate combination of modern technology and wishful thinking, we disregarded much of what our predecessors learned, and built what we wanted to see, not what works best. Northern New Mexico’s immense wealth and consistent poverty, perennial cycle of boom and bust, and influxes and exoduses of newcomers are nothing new. People have come here with lofty ambitions only to find that this is not like other places. (Thank goodness!) Probably more people have left than stayed, but everyone has made a contribution—from the artists who introduced new styles to the indigenous cultures who maintained their traditions. True Santa Fe Style finds its roots in these three factors. Our thick adobe walls resist climate fluctuations. Different roof styles evolved to
withstand mountain snows or reflect our Pueblo heritage. “New” influences—from Victorian architecture in the 1890s to global ethnographica in the 1990s—were seamlessly adapted and incorporated. And New Mexicans have been “green” for centuries. Scarcity of water prevents any real large-scale manufacturing, so we treasure what we have—our trees, rivers, even furnishings handed down and repurposed over generations. When my mother remodeled, whether it was looking past a century of decay in a tenement or seeing the potential in something with good Top: In this remodel, Price updated a 1950s Santa bones built on the cheap, she preFe home by introducing modern finishes, fixtures, served the best and improved the and furniture, while still retaining many elements rest. In updating a classic adobe or that reflect its classic charm; above: Mary Grant Price and Vincent Price in their Holmby Hills home upgrading a spec home, remodeling in Santa Fe is a wonderful opportunity to return to the tried-and-true architectural and design values of northern New Mexico. Santa Fe is home to so many superb architects, designers, and craftspeople, all talented people eager and willing to help anyone bring out the best in their home. What a wonderful way to kick-start the sluggish construction industry while both preserving and advancing our architectural and design heritage. Victoria Price somehow ended up following in her mother’s footsteps. As the owner of Victoria Price Art & Design, one of her greatest pleasures is remodeling with clients— finding the perfect blend between classic and contemporary.
city in bloom
GARDENS
GROWING SEASON IS HERE—and there’s a lot blooming in the local gardening community. The Santa Fe Botanical Garden (SFBG) launches a major project this summer when workers break ground at the Botanical Garden at Museum Hill. Located on Camino Lejo across from the main entrance to the Museum Hill complex, the 12-acre desert oasis will eventually include restored arroyo landscape, hiking and walking trails, and three-acres of planted gardens designed to demonstrate Santa Fe’s botanical diversity. Phase I, to be finished next summer, will feature low-water-use perennials, shrub roses, and an orchard of heirloom fruit trees. Need more immediate gratification? Sneak a peak at some of the area’s prettiest backyards on SFBG’s annual Santa Fe Garden Tours, June 6 and 13. This year, homes in the Railyard and Acequia Madre neighborhoods open their gates to the public. For tickets, visit santafebotanicalgarden.org. The Railyard Park gardens are open for viewing 24/7— but instead of just looking, consider getting your hands dirty. You can volunteer to weed, water, and trim in the Bird and Butterfly Garden and tend other drought-resisSunflowers reach for the skies in Railyard Park. tant plantings there on Tuesdays and Thursdays throughout the growing season. For information, visit railyardpark.org. If veggiess are your thing, join the Santa Fe Community bring people of all ages together and help restore the connection Gardens (www.santafecommunitygardens.org) team. The two-yearbetween people and their food,” says Eliza Kretzmann, executive old, city-sponsored program funds and coordinates organic vegetable director of Railyard Stewards and the Railyard Community Gardens. gardens in almost every part of town, including Frenchy’s Field and Plots are offered for lease in the spring. Participants prepare soil, the Railyard Park, plus Eldorado and Tesuque. “Community gardens plant vegetables, and care for the garden all summer long.
backyard magic WITH AN ARID CLIMATE, a short growing season, and cement-like caliche lurking just below the topsoil, Santa Fe isn’t exactly a grower’s paradise. But the colorful high-desert oases featured in Gardens of Santa Fe (Gibbs Smith, $30) prove that a little backyard persistence can pay off. The newest book from local writer Anne Hillerman and photographer Don Strel spotlights 30 inspiring private gardens—in courtyards, in backyards, and on patios—with details about how each was put together. “I purposely focused on those created by hands-on gardeners, people who liked the nitty gritty of working with soil, rocks, water, compost, and plants,” says Hillerman. “Behind each garden is a gardener with real passion.” The book features insights from these green-thumbed Santa Feans, and Hillerman took what she learned to start growing a few things more herself. “My favorite tip is ‘Plants aren’t children,’” she says. “If you don’t like them you can throw them out, and you don’t have to feel guilty about it either. Let go. Move on!” The Roland Garden, featured in Anne Hillerman’s Gardens of Santa Fe.
| DESIGN |
they live with their boots on cowboy bo ot s, cu stom made by De von Jack s on HANGING OUT AT THE RANCH—Back at the Ranch, to be more specific—can feel a little like having a front-row seat at a David Mamet play. Only in this case, it’s an all-female cast—owner Wendy Lane Henry and associates Laura Metzger and Susan LaPointe—and the banter’s not about winning steak knives and meeting quotas but cowboy boots, and they’re all talking over each other and fast, and you can’t rightly figure out just who’s saying what: “Cowboy boots never go out of style. Women can never have enough of them. It’s an addiction.” “Definitely. Women buy more than men. They want the whole color scheme. They buy boots to match their outfits.” “It’s not uncommon for somebody to come in and buy five or six different pairs of boots. This is not about need.” “People fly in from all over the world to buy our boots.” “Why boots? They’re euphoric. They give you an attitude. They make you stand tall. It’s an American icon.” “It’s a tattoo you can take off.” “People feel so different when they put on a pair of cowboy boots.” “They’re pieces of art.” “We’re pretty much a destination spot,” says Henry, who has fitted and sold boots to Jane Fonda (“longtime customer”), Randy and Elizabeth Travis (customers for about 12 years), Sarah Jessica Parker (“She came in when she was here shooting Did You Hear about the Morgans? and bought a pair for the film”), Governor Bill Richardson (“He came in on election day and bought boots for a bunch of other people—he’s been a great supporter of the store”), Reba McEntire (“She bought several pairs of the Wendy boot, one of them was an ostrich ankle-zipper boot”), and Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates (“He bought a pair on his way from Los Angeles to Chicago. He called up on his way in and said, Can you stay a little later? He wears our boots on TV and for his concerts”). The list goes on and on. But the one anecdote that sums up what the Ranch is all about, what separates it from the other cowboy-boot stores here in town, is this one: When martial arts action star Steven Seagal was in town a few years ago filming one of his latest dramas, Henry was asked to go over to Seagal’s onset trailer, fit him for a pair of boots, and then have the pair ready for him in four days. “And we did it,” says Henry. “We’re very careful fitting them. And we can make a boot to fit anybody’s foot. We guarantee everything 100 percent.” Back at the Ranch offers more than 700 boot styles. As purveyor of the largest collection of handmade custom cowboy boots in the United States, they’ll happily custom make anything you can dream up, whether it’s based on an old Polaroid of your favorite horse, cat, or salamander or it’s inspired by nail-polish colors and perfume bottles. (Henry used hues that match OPI and Sally Hansen nail colors on her Wendy ankle boot, and one of the Clinique fragrances led her to create her Monet style.) “You can put anything on them that you can fancy: a logo, a
brand, a photo of your dog,” says Henry. A Miami native, Henry claims she’s been wearing cowboy boots since her teens. After finishing college (roll tide, roll), Henry left for New York City, where she ran a women’s contemporary clothing store—a gig that first brought her to Santa Fe in 1988. Two years later she founded the Ranch, which started out as more of a western kitsch store but soon evolved into the store it is today. Now, with the Ranch firmly ensconced in a historical adobe Top: Some of the many boots you might find at Back on East Marcy, where it’s been at the Ranch; above: an example of the finely crafted for 11 years, Henry and her felboots available at Boots & Boogie. low Ranchettes appear to be living the life—and products—they’re selling. And while they’ve developed a rep for catering to—or is it bending over backward for?—celebrities, they’ll create cowboy-inspired footwear for anyone who requests it. Just ask. There are two other premier boot makers in town: Roy Flynn’s Boots and Boogie (which offers a large selection of Stallion boots, and, unlike the Ranch, divvies out the manufacturing of its boots to various craftspeople, whereas Henry owns her own factory); and Desert Son of Santa Fe, who’ll also custom design and make a pair for you.
AllBright&LockWood Tile+ Lighting +Hardware +BathAccessories +Fans
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Located in the heart of historic downtown Santa Fe, Constellation Home Electronics offers a wide selection of the finest brands of electronics with a commitment to uncompromising service. Open Monday—Saturday 10 AM—6 PM
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ChIRS CORRIE
North x Northwest 3012 Monte Sereno Drive Coleen Dearing coldwell banker trails West realty, ltd 2000 old pecos trail 505-930-9102 505-988-7285, ext. 334 coleen@coleenDearing.com
Luxury Living. Virtually one level, combining privacy with entertaining convenience. Marble floors, granite counters, glass tile accents, decadent master suite, 2 additional bedrooms + den/media, and 4 baths. Magnificent Sangre de Cristo view. All on 1.43 tree covered air conditioning. Four interconnecting patios complete this lovely home.
2590 Tano Compound Drive Kristin Anderson prudential santa Fe 314 s Guadalupe 505-379-6858 (c) 505-988-3700 (o) kranders5@yahoo.com
Designer Seth Anderson’s dramatic 4100-square-foot residence is perched on 2.42 acres overlooking the Tesuque Valley. In a gated community five minutes from the plaza, this home is a perfect mix of Santa Fe style, traditional and contemporary. Visit: lifdom.com for more photos. List $1,795,000 100 santafean.com june/july 2010
As populAr As it hAs become in recent yeArs, Santa Fe’s Northside is one of the city’s more open areas. It’s not so much a single neighborhood or even a single luxury development as it is an inviting blend of privacy and accessibility. Private enough for those who prefer to enjoy northern New Mexico’s natural beauty, accessible enough to the city and the many wonderful cultural activities it’s famous for. Located in the piñon- and juniper-laden hills between the historic Plaza downtown and the spectacular landscape surrounding the Santa Fe Opera, the Northside includes the communities of Monte Sereno, Santa Fe Estates, and Zocalo (whose distinctively festive, can’t-missthem colors are the work of renowned Mexican architect Ricardo Legoretto). Some of the city’s first luxury subdivisions can also be found here: Tano Road, La Tierra, and La Tierra Nueva (and further north and west, Las Campanas). The homes here range from traditional adobe (like those found on Mansion Ridge Road and Governor Dempsey Drive) to the very contemporary. Yet from above and afar, and even in the neighborhoods themselves, no matter what the style, everything manmade blends seamlessly into the landscape. There are breathtaking views of the majestic Sangre de Cristo mountain range, which rises in the east, while the Jemez Mountains loom in the west. There’s easy access to walking trails, biking trails, and horse trails. The Santa Fe Ski Basin is also just a short drive away—and offers not only great skiing, snowboarding, and snowshoeing during the winter but in the warmer months it’s a lovely getaway for hiking, biking, picnics, and camping. There are ridges and valleys, sky and more sky, and in many areas, enough acreage for each homeowner to live as secludedly or as communally as he or she desires. In the Northside, there’s something for everyone.
313 Pawprint Trail Susan Munroe & Terry Smith Associate brokers, santa Fe realty partners 505-577-5630 (c) 505-982-6207 (o) susanmunroe@sfrp.com 417 e palace
Gorgeous Monte Sereno lot on cul-de-sac with 270-degree views of the Sangre and Jemez Mountains east and west and the badlands to the north. Paved, city-maintained streets; city water and sewer; all utilities on lot. Easy access to downtown Santa Fe, Opera, Tesuque Village, and Ski Santa Fe. $325,000
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R E S I D E N T I A L A N D C O M M E R C I A L I N T E R I O R S AND IN OUR SHOWROOM ANTIQUES • FURNITURE • ACCESSORIES TEL 505 984-8544 1 5 0 S O U T H S T. F R A N C I S D R I V E , S A N T A F E , N M 8 7 5 0 1 W W W. W G D I N T E R I O R S . C O M
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A River Runs through It
DOUGLAS MERRIAM
Halfway between Taos and Santa Fe, and located right on the banks of the Rio Grande, the historic, idyllic Embudo Station offers the summer’s perfect oasis. Revamped last January by visionary new owner Alana Banner, this casual roadside café has become a culinary destination (thanks, too, to chef John Cox). Small and big plates boast fashionable and Norteño ingredients—whether gourmet, local, or organic—that may be as simple as killer deviled eggs or as original as Tierra Amarilla lamb tacos with pico de gallo and habanero mango salsa or a mix of both, like the cedar-roasted rainbow trout with green chile, bacon, shrimp, cilantro, and asadero (pictured). Ahhh. Cool off with local beers and wines while soaking your feet in the big river. Lunch or dinner in the New Mexico mountains, it doesn’t get mas bueno than this—John Vollertsen Embudo Station Restaurant and Brew Pub, 1101 Highway 68, Embudo, 505-852-4707, Thu–Mon, 11 am–8 pm
REVIEW
high on dining by John Vollertsen
Imagine awakening to the soft toll of cathedral bells while tucked in a luxurious suite high atop a beautiful historic hotel, sleeping soundly after a luscious dinner in a candlelit restaurant. The spires of the towering cathedral are right outside your window. A personal concierge is on hand to accommodate your every wish, your every other need tended to by a friendly, professional staff. You are virtually steps from the center of town, with most of what there is to do and see in Santa Fe right at your fingertips. No, this is not a dream I am remembering but a magical night in a deluxe room on the terrace level of the fabulous La Fonda Hotel. It seems fitting that this grand dame of a hotel sits on a site at the end of the Santa Fe Trail that has been some sort of accommodation or inn for 400 years—practice makes perfect. The current structure was built in 1922, when the sprawling lobby was filled with cowboys and travelers, much as it is today. Famed hospitality icon Fred Harvey took over the business in 1925, and it remained a renowned Harvey House Hotel until 1968, when it was purchased by local businessman Sam Ballen. Still owned by the Ballen family to this day (Sam passed away in 2007), the hotel added a swanky top-level aerie that houses 14 exclusive rooms in 1998, bringing the total number of rooms for travelers to 167. My guest and I are immediately struck by the artwork and motifs that give the terrace floor its character. The entire hotel is a living museum of New Mexican artists and craftsmen: Gerald Cassidy, Paul Lantz, and Vladan Stiha. Concierge Nancy Eigenfeld-Helman awaits our arrival and waxes lyrical on the wonders of La Fonda. Nancy is knowledgeable and versed on our hotel and the town. (She’s also a good comrade-in-gossip for catching up on the latest in hospitality dirt!) A row of ascending wrought-iron jackalopes supports the railing of the sweeping stairway and lures us up from the private lobby to our special abode, room 703. The Spanish colonial touches throughout the floor and in our large airy suite alert us that this is a special place: floor-to-window lacy curtains only slightly obscure the looming St. Francis Cathedral Basilica, hand-painted tiles adorn the bathroom, and tinwork mirrors and a big adobe fireplace welcome us. Ready for dinner, how lovely that my companion and I need negotiate but a mere seven easy floors to the charming, recently renovated La Plazuela restaurant, where the vaulted ceiling with skylights and the towering greenery make this one of the prettiest dining rooms in town. Chef Lane Warner’s eclectic menu offers both northern New Mexico specialties as well as modern, big-city dishes that he’s given a southwestern spin. We start with the tableside guacamole, letting guac-meister Lupe custom make it with just the right amount of garlic and green chile. He’s an expert and has been working at La Fonda for 30 years. Stormy, one of the nearby waitresses, has been here 24 years. How nice that the sense of history extends to the staff. A Caesar salad gets a tasty La Fonda makeover with a zippy dressing and cotija cheese standing in for parmesan. The camarones rellenos, two jumbo shrimp stuffed with Mexican cheese and wrapped in smoked bacon, just had to be sampled after we observed the dramatic presentation as it whizzed past us on its way to another table—it tasted as good as it looked. A fork-tender filet mignon with ancho chile glaze, and a plump osso
bucco veal shank with sherry sauce were world-class, and both were served with decadent smoky cheddar-roasted garlic mashed potatoes. We licked the plates clean of it. Had we invited vegetarians to dine with us (we didn’t), there was a nice selection of non-meat items to choose from, including a luscioussounding grilled red pepper polenta cake topped with sautéed spinach and shittake mushrooms. A yummy tres leches cake for dessert managed to be both rich and light at the Top: The recently renovated La Plazuela restaurant same time, while a flourless inside the La Fonda Hotel; above: chocolate tres leches, anyone? Mexican chocolate torte made with abuelita Mexican chocolate had an almost spicy kick of cinnamon. After a great night’s sleep in the big, unbelievably comfortable bed, a breakfast basket full of juices, muffins, and fruit (waiting for us outside our door) fueled us for the day ahead. With the elegant La Terraza Ballroom just one floor below the terrace suites, it’s the perfect destination for a lucky bride to celebrate the big day in plush surroundings. Or for anyone who needs to feel coddled and spoiled in these turbulent times. I highly recommend it!—JV La Fonda Hotel, 100 E San Francisco Street, 505-982-5511, lafondasantafe.com
getting into the mixology
RECIPE
No longer just an amiable guy (or gal) behind the bar dispensing classic cocktails and maybe telling a few jokes, today’s bartenders are a clever creative bunch who design their own tasty libations to woo the palate and quench the thirst of locals and visitors alike, many of whom flock to them for amusement if not rehydration. This summer, two downtown mixologists will be cooling off their customers with concoctions that not only tackle the thirst but take the concept of fresh and local to luscious new heights. Chris Milligan, barkeep extraordinaire at the cozy and newly opened Secreto Bar, which is tucked off the lobby of the revamped Hotel St. Francis, looks for inspiration at the Santa Fe Farmers Market for the flavors he uses to create his house specialties. Milligan’s garnish tray is testimony to this: along with the usual maraschino cherries, lemons, limes, and olives, tall sprigs of fresh tarragon, bunches of grapes, and bright green New Mexico chiles sit in repose, waiting to be boozed. My favorite spin on the ubiquitous margarita is Milligan’s Agave Way, a tequila-soused, green-chile-infused combination of agave nectar, muddled grapes, and tart lime juice. Equal parts hot, sweet, and sour, the first sip implores you to continue. At the swanky Coyote Café, just around the corner, co-owner and mix-meister Quinn Stephenson likes to create drinks that are a study in taste and design. Without sacrificing flavor for gimmick, Stephenson loves for customers to belly up to the bar and explore his cocktail list while experimenting with new takes on familiar potions. His mixologist tasting flight is a four-shot affair with sipable samples from a quartet of flavored vodka drinks: a cucumber cooler, a pomegranate martini with a hint of cinnamon, a raspberry lemon drop with pop-rock candy on the rim, and “The City Different”—a cranberry-infused cosmopolitan. The presentation is worthy of chef Eric DiStefano’s trend-setting cuisine. Pull up to the bar and visit with the masters or create one, or two or three, at home. Bottoms up in true Santa Fe style. Secreto Bar, Hotel St. Francis, 210 Don Gaspar Avenue, 505-983-5700 Coyote Café, 132 W Water Street, 505-983-1615
Agave Way: Secreto Bar ½ oz. fresh squeezed lime juice
5 seedless grapes, preferably red
⁄3 oz. agave nectar
2 oz. Reposado Tequila (try Chamuscos)
1
½ inch cross-slice New Mexico green chile or other hot chile
Muddle lime juice, agave nectar, chile, and grapes in a cocktail glass. Add tequila and a small scoop of ice. Cover and shake for 10 seconds. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with additional grapes and chile slices.
DOUGLAS MERRIAM
by John Vollertsen
Top: Secreto Bar mix-meister Chris Milligan calibrates his cocktails; above: Coyote Café’s vodka varietals come in a range of colors and flavors
Cucumber Cooler: Coyote Café For the cucumber-infused vodka: Peel and finely chop six English cucumbers and place in a large glass container. Pour two bottles of your favorite premium vodka over the cucumbers and allow to marinate for one week in the refrigerator. Do not add any sugar! Strain mixture. For the cooler: Shake three ounces of cucumber vodka with one ounce of sweet-n-sour mix over ice. Strain and serve on a saltrimmed glass. Vodka should be stored in the refrigerator unless used relatively quickly.
REVIEW
restoration destination by John Vollertsen
I’ve started walking again. Partially for exercise but also because as my writing assignments pile up, I need to get out of that chair and clear my head. The streets of our fair city are walker friendly, and as I circumvent the downtown area, I am reminded of all the outdoor dining options we can enjoy; a must in a state that boasts approximately 300 days of sunshine a year. This summer there are a few new venues that offer dining alfresco, as well as a plethora of longtime favorites. Martin Rios at Restaurant Martin personally moved the rocks to create the garden-like patio of his fashionable new restaurant. Louie’s Corner Café is Plaza-centric and already famous for its voluptuous theme-named salads and sandwiches, with a new beer and wine list in place and dinner on offer now too. The courtyard at Santacafé remains an ever-popular setting to enjoy the timeless Santa Fe classic cuisine—27 years in the making. For the younger set, the swinging Coyote Cantina provides a cruise-y vibe, with abundant cocktails and casual chow created by Eric DiStefano, one of our culinary leaders.
Grilled sugar-spiced salmon with orange lentils and Chinese mustard
The osso buco was a tender knuckle of meat served with red-chile-infused corn posole and grilled polenta—another winner. A hefty chile three-daycured ribeye had a fabulous beefy flavor, but with a kick, and creamy garlic mashed potatoes. Not only carnivores will be pleased with the offerings; there are roasted vegetable chile rellenos with goat cheese, grilled portobello mushrooms with mole butter, enchiladas, and a hearty veggie paella to boot. The mostly California wine list offers popular and recognizable varietals that make ordering a breeze, with a smattering of Argentina and a dabble of New Mexico thrown in. Domestic and imported beers—including two on tap—round out the beverage list, which also includes sake drinks, housemade sangria, and agave wine margaritas. Delights of a dessert-like nature include the coconut mango tres leches cake and the nifty, decadent chocolate “cigar”—a phyllo-pastry-wrapped roll of rich ganache served resting on an actual (unused) ashtray and labeled “may be habit forming.” And it is! Ah . . . restored, rejuvenated, and well supped, I am ready to take on the world. If I want to drive out of town, Encantado Resort still has one of the best views (and menus) for watching the mountain sunset— along with the Plaza-view Bell Tower at the La Fonda Hotel. And in nearby Pojoaque, restaurant veteran and chef Steve Lemon, formally of Pranzo and Albuquerque’s Scalo Restaurant, has reworked the O Eating House and transformed it into a sunny trattoria with a covered terrace offering amazing Italian cooking that makes the 15-minute drive absolutely worth it. (Try the grilled zucchini with house-made burrata mozzarella.) Wherever you choose to dine during these dogs days and nights, relax and know that our restaurateurs love extending their hospitality, sunlight or moonshine, 12 months a year.—JV
NATALIE BACA
In days of yore, hot springs were mostly undeveloped rural settings, reachable only by an off-road trek, protected perhaps by a cluster of trees and bushes, where the meal one might enjoy after dipping was prepared over a campfire—the beverages being a six-pack of beer, cold if you were lucky. At the beautiful Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs Resort & Spa, rustic has gone remarkable, country culinary. The historic landmark, a mere 50 miles north of Santa Fe, has been operating as a health spa for over 140 years, her bubbling springs first discovered in the 1500s. Newly renovated, it’s a must-visit for anyone who yearns to unwind in a unique northern New Mexico locale. After a recent lingering afternoon soaking in the lithia, iron, soda, and arsenic pools, followed by a tension-liberating massage, I had somehow managed to work up a powerful appetite. Happily the restaurant is just steps away from the changing room of the spa and pool area. What used to be the original hotel lobby has been transformed into a stylish lounge for imbibing before dinner. A quick drink in this classy wine (and beer) bar, which seemed more Soho New York than vintage Norteño, made me forget that an hour earlier I was covered in mud, baking like a clay pot in the afternoon sun. Since the mud had detoxified me, I was ready for a glass of a crisp Sterling sauvignon blanc, an absolutely healthy concoction, being that it was organic. The overstuffed chairs done in a 1930s style give the room an almost deco cruise ship feel, though in casual clothing you almost consider dressing up. The dining room, just off the bar, is tidily laid out with comfortable wooden tables and chairs that hail from another time, completing the historic décor. Service, however, is anything but Old World. I recognized our waiter from the Santa Fe restaurant circuit, and the quality of the food and whole dining experience make this a worthy stop for serious city folk foodies. Chef Neil Stuart, a Culinary Institute of America grad, has created a menu that touches on local southwestern dishes (enchiladas, fajitas, quesadillas), but with contemporary offerings like pork osso buco and peppered rare tuna. Our server recommended we start with the green chile “fries”—potatocrusted strips of zippy poblano chiles, crisp fried and served with a hot and sweet vinegar sauce. OMG—so delicious! Simple grilled baby artichokes with roasted garlic and lemon aioli dip were just that: simple, perfect, and summery.
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taste of the town
northern new mexico’s finest dining experiences
featured listing Coyote Cafe 132 w water 505-983-1615 coyotecafe.com
Coyote Cafe continues to be Santa Fe’s most famous and celebrated restaurant, feted by critics and return visitors alike. Executive chef/owner is world-renowned chef Eric DiStefano, who brings with him his contemporary global style of cooking that has French-Asian influences accompanied with Coyote Cafe’s known southwestern style.
The Bull Ring 150 washington, 505-983-3328 Serving Santa Fe since 1971, the legendary Bull Ring is “the prime” steakhouse in Santa Fe. Voted “Best of Santa Fe” year after year, it also offers fresh seafood, chicken, chops, an extensive wine list, a saloon menu, and patio dining. If there’s one thing New Mexico’s politicians can agree on, it’s where to eat in Santa Fe. Conveniently located one block north of the Plaza in the courtyard of the New Mexico Bank and Trust building. For a quick bite after a stroll at the nearby Plaza—or for a late-night snack— the lounge’s bar menu is sure to satisfy. Lunch 11:30 am–2:30 pm, Monday–Friday; dinner nightly starting at 5 pm. Underground parking available on Washington Street.
Chocolate Maven Bakery 821 w san mateo, suite c, 505-982-4400, chocolatemaven.com A long-standing local favorite, Chocolate Maven does it all: breakfast, lunch, dinner, high tea, brunch, and every type of pastry, cookie, and cake imaginable! Award-winning chef Peter Zimmer creates delicious, eclectic menus using local, organic produce, meats, and cheeses, which help to support local farmers while bringing you the freshest, most flavorful food possible. Don’t miss this hidden gem on your next visit to Santa Fe. Open 7 days a week. Dinner Tuesday–Saturday 5–8:30 pm ; breakfast and lunch Monday–Friday 7 am –3 pm ; high tea Monday–Saturday 3–5 pm ; brunch Saturday and Sunday 9–3 pm .
Celebrations Village West 1620 st. michael’s, 505-989-8904 celebrationssantafe.com After two decades on Canyon Road, Celebrations has moved to 1620 St. Michael’s Drive. Now Celebrations Village West, the renowned eatery features floorto-ceiling windows, mountain views, a walled patio, and parking galore. Eclectic menus feature upscale new American, contemporary Creole Cajun, and northern New Mexican dishes. Local favorites include house-made breads, fresh salads, soups, and, of course, signature house-made vanilla ice cream (more flavors this spring). A delightful wine bar appetizer menu is served on days the restaurant is open for dinner. 8 am –2:30 pm breakfast and lunch, 7 days a week. Spring and summer hours: 7:30 am –3:30 pm breakfast and lunch, 7 days a week. 5–9 pm dinner, Tuesday through Saturday.
The Compound Restaurant 653 canyon, 505-982-4353 compoundrestaurant.com Recognized by Gourmet magazine’s Guide to America’s Best Restaurants and the New York Times as a destination not to be missed. The James Beard Foundation’s “Best Chef of the Southwest,” chef/owner Mark Kiffin pairs seasonal contemporary American cuisine with professional service in a timeless, elegant adobe building designed by famed architect Alexander Girard. Extensive wine list, full bar, picturesque garden patios, a variety of beautiful settings for wedding receptions, social affairs, or corporate events for 12 to 250 guests. Private parking. Seasonal specialty: tuna tartare topped with Osetra caviar and preserved lemon. Lunch 12–2 pm, Monday–Saturday; bar nightly 5 pm–close; dinner nightly from 6 pm; full lunch and dinner menu available in the bar.
Doc Martin’s at the Historic Taos Inn 125 paseo del pueblo norte, taos 575-758-1977, taosinn.com Doc Martin’s restaurant is an acclaimed finedining establishment located in a registered historic landmark. Doc’s is a true Taos tradition, earning multiple awards. Executive chef Zippy White specializes in organic foods, with chile rellenos being his signature dish. With over 400 wine selections, our world-class wine list has earned Wine Spectator’s “Best Of” award of excellence for 21 consecutive years. The Adobe Bar features complimentary live entertainment nightly. Patio dining as weather permits. Featured dessert: the chocolate-lover’s pie—a rich, silky chocolate mousse, whipped cream, sweet cookie crust. Breakfast is served daily 7:30–11 pm; lunch 11:30 am–2:30 pm; dinner 5:30–9 pm; Saturday and Sunday brunch 7:30 am–2:30 pm. El Mesón 213 washington, 505-983-6756 elmeson-santafe.com A native of Madrid, Spain, chef/owner David Huertas has been delighting customers since 1997 with family recipes and specialties of his homeland. The paella is classic and legendary—served straight from the flame to your table in black iron pans; the saffroninfused rice is perfectly cooked and heaped with chicken, chorizo, seafood, and more. The house-made sangria is from a generations-old recipe with a splash of brandy. The ¡Chispa! tapas bar offers a fine array of tapas. The full bar includes a distinguished Spanish wine list and special sherries and liqueurs imported from a country full of passion and tradition. Occasional musical entertainment and dancing. Dinner is served 5–11 pm, Tuesday–Saturday. Flying Star Café 500 market, #110, 505-216-3939 flyingstarcafe.com Fine cuisine in a friendly scene. We’re your locally owned neighborhood café featuring made-from-scratch food, handmade desserts, and pastries. We open early and stay open late for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and everything in between. Free Wi-Fi, diverse magazines, locally roasted coffee, fine beer and wine, and a bakery in the heart of our café. Deliciousness awaits. Monday–Thursday 6 am–10 pm; Friday and Saturday 6 am–midnight. Galisteo Bistro 227 galisteo 505-982-3700, galisteobistro.com Chef-owned and “made by hand,” featuring eclectic, innovative international cuisine known for its open kitchen, quality menu offerings, and attentive service in a casual, comfortable downtown setting. Just a short
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walk to the historic Santa Fe Plaza, the Lensic Performing Arts Center, hotels, and museums. “I admire a restaurateur who says, Hey, I want to cook the foods I love, like a musician who says, I want to play the music I enjoy. He would have made a great conductor; his orchestra of a staff is playing lovely food in perfect harmony. If music be the food of love—long may the Galisteo Bistro play on.”—John Vollertsen, Santa Fean. Wednesday–Sunday 5–9 PM . Geronimo 724 Canyon, 505-982-1500 geronimorestaurant.com Señor Geronimo Lopes would be very pleased if he knew how famous his 250-year-old hacienda on Canyon Road has become. The landmark adobe is now home to a cutting-edge restaurant—elegant, contemporary—serving the highest-quality, creative food. Awardwinning chef Eric DiStefano serves up a creative mix of French sauces and technique with culinary influences of Asia, the Southwest, and his own roots in Italy, blended to bring taste to new levels. Geronimo is New Mexico’s only restaurant to hold both Mobil 4 Star and AAA 4 Diamond awards. Dinner seven days a week, beginning at 5:45 PM. Il Piatto 95 W Marcy, 505-984-1091 Locally owned Italian trattoria located one block north of the Plaza. Nationally acclaimed and affordable, il Piatto features local organic produce and house-made pastas. Prix fixe three-course lunch, $14.95. Dinner, three courses $29.50, or four courses $37.50 (anything on the menu, including specials). No restrictions. Lunch, Monday–Friday 11:30 AM–2 PM; dinner seven nights a week at 5 PM. “Everything is right at il Piatto, including the price.”—Albuquerque Journal India Palace 227 Don Gaspar Ave, 505-986-5859 indiapalace.com Voted “Best Ethnic Restaurant” in Santa Fe. Located in downtown Santa Fe, just one block from the plaza, India Palace specializes in the dynamic, complex cuisine of northern India and uses ayurvedic (the science of longevity) cooking principles. Homemade cheese, yogurt, ghee, and kulfi (pistachio ice cream), and tandoori-fired traditional breads complement the extensive menu, which includes chicken, lamb, seafood, and vegetarian dishes. Entrees may be ordered mild, medium, or hot. No artificial flavors or MSG. Vegan and gluten-free meals also available. Open seven days a week. Lunch 11:30 AM–2:30 PM; dinner 5–10 PM. Josh’s Barbecue 3486 Zafarano, 505-474-6466 joshsbbq.com Voted “Best New Restaurant” of 2008! Savor
the flavor of classic American barbecue created with a special New Mexican twist. Chef/ owner Josh Baum, with his manager Rodney Estrada, dish up a huge fresh daily selection of slow-smoked, mouth-watering meat choices, including tender brisket and succulent natural ribs, served with a choice of sides, sauces, and desserts, all house-made. Special regional dishes, like smoked chicken tacquitos and green-chile brisket burritos, have made this eatery a local favorite, with additional chef’s specials offered daily. Also available: beer and wine, dine in or take out, catering for all occasions, and a small private dining room for special events. Located next to Lowe’s and Regal 14 cinemas, off Cerrillos at Zafarano. Open for lunch and dinner. Summer hours: 11:30 AM–9 PM Tuesday–Saturday; 11:30 AM–8 PM Sunday; closed Mondays. La Casa Sena 125 E Palace, 505-988-9232 lacasasena.com La Casa Sena is located in the heart of old Santa Fe, in the historic Sena Plaza. Featuring innovative American-southwestern cuisine, an extensive wine list, and a spectacular outdoor patio, La Casa Sena is one of Santa Fe’s most popular restaurants. Recipient of the Award of Excellence from Wine Spectator. For a more casual dining experience, visit La Cantina and be entertained by a waitstaff performing jazz and Broadway musical reviews nightly. Lunch is served 11:30 AM–3 PM Monday–Saturday; dinner 5:30–10 PM nightly. Sunday brunch in a beautiful patio setting 11 AM–3 PM. Our popular wine shop adjacent to the restaurant features a large selection of fine wines and is open 11 AM–8 PM Monday–Saturday; noon–6 PM Sunday. La Plazuela at La Fonda On the Plaza 100 E San Francisco, 505-995-2334 lafondasantafe.com La Fonda de Recuerdos—a place of many memories—is an apt description for our legendary hotel and signature restaurant, La Plazuela. This sophisticated dining room is filled with natural light, hand-carved furnishings, and our much-loved, hand-painted windows. Our wine list is award-winning and the menu weaves old favorites with New World twists, showcasing authentic New Mexican cuisine. Our La Fiesta Lounge offers a fabulous all-you-can-eat New Mexican lunch buffet. La Plazuela hours: breakfast 7–11:30 AM daily. Lunch 11:30 AM–2 PM Monday–Friday; 11:45 AM–3 PM Saturday and Sunday. Dinner 5:30–10 PM daily. Luminaria Restaurant and Patio 211 Old Santa Fe Trail, 505-984-7915 Innatloretto.com Located at the Inn and Spa at Loretto. Executive Chef Brian Cooper has just introduced his new spring menu, with items such www.santafean.com
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as open-face steak, egg-and-green-chile torta, aged fontina cheese-and-artichoke flameado, spring-pea soup with fresh cheese gnocchi, and pork-adovada flautas with black-bean puree. The patio is the best outdoor dining in all of Santa Fe. Dine outdoors on a patio adjacent to the hotel’s garden and Loretto Chapel. Dine al fresco under the stars in a romantic veranda lit by hanging lanterns. Don’t forget about informal dining and libations in the Living Room, featuring happy hour and late night specials with weekend entertainment. Proud to feature a Wine Spectator awardwinning wine list and organic wine, beer, and spirits. Luminaria: breakfast, lunch, dinner seven days. Weekly Sunday brunch. The Living Room: 2–11 PM daily. mangiamo pronto! 228 Old Santa Fe Trail, 505-989-1904 mangiamopronto.com A little slice of Tuscany in Santa Fe. This warm and chic café Italiano recently relocated from the Railyard area, where it established a loyal local following, to a more visible location on Old Santa Fe Trail, across from the Inn at Loretto. In the vein of traditional Italian espresso bars, pronto offers fine coffee, pastries, frittata, panini, pizza, zuppa, insalata, dolci, vino, birra, and gelato. You may truly feel you’re in Italy. Serving breakfast and lunch Monday– Saturday 8 AM–4:30 PM, Sunday 9 AM–2 PM. Maria’s New Mexican Kitchen 555 W Cordova, 505-983-7929 marias-santafe.com We wrote the book on margaritas! The Great Margarita Book, published by Random House. Maria’s features over 160 margaritas, chosen “Best Margarita” in Santa Fe 14 years in a row. Each is hand poured and hand shaken, using only premium tequila, triple-sec, and pure fresh-squeezed lemon juice (no mixes; no sugar). A Santa Fe tradition since 1950, specializing in old Santa Fe home-style cooking, with steaks, burgers, and fajitas. You can even watch tortillas being made by hand! Lunch and dinner 11 AM–10 PM Monday–Friday; noon–10 PM Saturday and Sunday. Reservations are suggested. Rancho de Chimayó Santa Fe County Rd 98 on the scenic “High Road to Taos” ranchodechimayo.com 505.984.2100 The restaurante is now open! Serving worldrenowned traditional and contemporary native New Mexican cuisine in an exceptional setting since 1965. Enjoy outdoor dining or soak up the culture and ambience indoors at this century-old adobe home. Try the Rancho de Chimayó’s specialty: carne adovada—marinated pork simmered in a spicy, red-chile-caribe sauce. Come cherish the memories and make new ones. Rancho de Chimayó is a treasured part of New Mexico’s history and heritage. A
5th Annual
cherokee A R T
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Saturday & Sunday, October 9 & 10, 2010 Sequoyah Grand Ballroom, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa Artists & Collectors! Save the date for “Oklahoma’s Finest Native American Art Show”
Bill Williams Prairie Dog Creek
I-44 Exit 240A, Tulsa, OK | (918) 384-6990 | CherokeeArtMarket.com | HARDROCKCASINOTULSA.COM
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Photo by David O. Marlow®
Many people know us for our incredible antique furnishings or Italian leather sofas and chairs. Others seek our unique lamps and accessories. Some appreciate the largest selection of Votivo products in New Mexico and exquisite gift items. What will you find? Selection. Quality. Value.
Antique Furniture, Art and Accessories
asian adobe
1 block west of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum 310 Johnson Street Santa Fe 505-992-6846 Monday - Saturday 10 am to 5 pm www.asianadobe.com
300 Years of Romance, Intrigue & History. Your stay becomes extraordinary at the Hilton Santa Fe Historic Plaza. Originally the hacienda of the influential Ortiz Family who settled in Santa Fe in 1694, we offer luxury guestrooms, private casitas and thoughtful touches for the leisure and business traveler alike. For the start of the day, lunch, or a lite dinner El Cañon offers fabulous fare morning, noon & night. Just steps from Santa Fe’s Historic Plaza with fine art galleries, museums and shopping—a unique experience in a unique destination.
open nightly for lite dining and spirits
100 Sandoval St., Santa Fe, NM 87501 | 800-336-3676 | HiltonOfSantaFe.com 112 santafean.com june/july 2010
timeless tradition. Open seven days a week, May to October 11:30 am–9 pm. Online store is open now! Santacafé 231 Washington, 505-984-1788 santacafe.com Centrally located in Santa Fe’s distinguished downtown district, this charming southwestern bistro, situated in the historic Padre Gallegos House, offers your guests the classic Santa Fe backdrop. Step into the pristine experience Santacafé has been consistently providing for more than 25 years. New American cuisine is tweaked in a southwestern context, and the food is simply and elegantly presented. Frequented by the famous and infamous, the Santacafé patio offers some of the best people-watching in Santa Fe! During high season, our courtyard, protected by a sun canopy, becomes one of the most coveted locales in Santa Fe. Open daily for lunch and dinner. Tabla de Los Santos 210 Don Gaspar 505-992-6354, hotelstfrancis.com Tabla de Los Santos, located inside the Hotel St. Francis, is Santa Fe’s new dining treasure, featuring exquisite cuisine made from fresh, organic, local, and seasonal ingredients. Experience delectable food based on the right traditions of New Mexico as chef Estevan Garcia redefines New Mexico cuisine with a fresh, simplified, and uncomplicated approach. Enjoy a relaxing dining experience in the restaurant or on the lovely outdoor patio. Open for breakfast 7:30–10:30 am, lunch 11:30 am–2 pm, dinner 5–9 pm. Three Forks Restaurant Rancho de San Juan Country Inn 34020 US Hwy 285, 505-753-6818 ranchodesanjuan.com Exquisite world-class, award-winning restaurant. Sixteen years strong and aging like a fine wine. Enjoy comfortable dining in an elegant but casual atmosphere. Savor innovative continental cuisine with a southwestern flair. Check our website for special events, wine dinners, Passport Dining Adventures, plus Easter, Mother’s Day, and Saturday lunches. Enjoy our award-winning staff and attentive service. Relax on our patio with an afternoon cocktail and check our outstanding wine list with reasonable prices to compliment your dining experience. Zagat Survey winner number one in New Mexico. Condé Nast Traveler number 23 on the Top 100 in the USA list. Come celebrate that special occasion. Reservations required. Two seatings only, 6:30 and 8 pm Tuesday–Saturday. Table is yours for the evening. Saturday lunch, 11:30 am and 12:30 pm seatings. Closed on Sunday and Monday.
William Hook
a one person exhibition friday, july
9th, 2010
TRES BLADES, ACRYLIC, 18”X36”
225 Canyon road santa fe, neW MexiCo 87501 WWW.MeyerGalleries.CoM MeyersfnM@aol.CoM 800.779.7387 505.983.1434
meyer Gallery
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santafeancalendar.com Art • Music • Community • Festivals • Food Historical • Kids Stuff • Readings • Theater FEATURING TEXT MESSAGE & EMAIL EVENT REMINDERS
THE BEST CALENDAR IN SANTA FE june/july 2010
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paradise found
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Joseph Henry Sharp (1859-1953) American, Crucita – Taos Indian Girl in Old Hopi Wedding Dress and Dry Flowers, oil on canvas, 40.25” x 48.50”
OPEN TUES. - SUN. ■ 10 A.M. - 5 P.M. ■ (918) 596-2700 ■ GILCREASE.UTULSA.EDU 1400 N. GILCREASE MUSEUM RD. ■ TULSA, OKLAHOMA 114 santafean.com june/july 2010
santa fe wine festival
at El Rancho de las Golondrinas
“Blessings from the Vine” by S.J. Shaffer
www.shafferthegallery.com
July 3 and 4, 2010 • Noon – 6:00 pm
New Mexico Wines • Great Food • Arts & Crafts • Live Entertainment
Taste the fine wines and meet the vintners from around the state, all in the historic setting of a Spanish colonial ranch and living history museum. Fun for the whole family!
$13 Adult (includes souvenir wine glass) • $5 Youth 13-21 (under 13 free) I-25 Exit 276; follow signs • 505-471-2261 • santafewinefestival.com • No Pets Please! Support provided by Santa Fean Magazine, New Mexico Tourism Department and the Santa Fe Arts Commission
A R T Go around the world in a day—or come close, anyway—at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market, July 9–11. Now in its seventh year, the market brings more than 170 artists from 52 countries to Milner Plaza at Museum Hill (where they exhibit and sell basketry, jewelry, textile arts, and more). More than 90 percent of the money from art sales goes home with the artists. Tickets: Saturday, $10–$15; early-bird market Saturday, $50; Sunday, $5. folkartmarket.org
Julia Mutale, of Zambia, exhibits baskets at the 2008 Inernatioal Folk Art Market
courtesy santa fe alliance
courtesy michael franti and spearhead
get fresh
Michael Franti
let the sunshine in M U S I C The Taos Solar Music Festival is back after a one-year hiatus, and this year’s lineup is worth waiting for. Michael Franti and Spearhead, Jakob Dylan, and Los Lonely Boys, among other musicians, will hit the stage June 26 and 27 at Kit Carson Memorial Park in Taos. Check out the cool sun-power demonstrations at the New Mexico Solar Energy Association’s Solar Village when you’re not dancing. Tickets: two-day pass, $85; one-day pass, $45; solarmusicfest.com
COMMUNITY You shop at the Farmer’s Market for the freshest produce, dairy products, and cheese around, and so, it turns out, do plenty of prestigious area chefs. Watch them whip up signature dishes using fresh, local ingredients at Cook with the Chef demonstrations, every Thursday evening this summer at the Santa Fe Farmers Market. The series kicks off Thursday, June 24, at 5:30 pm , with chef Michael Giese from Flying Star Café at the stove. For the complete summer schedule—and details about which local restaurants include which local foods on their menus—visit the Santa Fe Alliance website, santafealliance.com
Chef Roland Richter of Joe’s Restaurant
bud ellison
world party
plata perfection Taxco, a mountain town in south-central Mexico, is known for its glittering riches, both below ground and above. Silver Seduction: The Art of Mexican Modernist Antonio Pineda, opening June 6 at the Museum of International Folk Art (706 Camino Lejo), shines a spotlight on one of Taxco’s (and the world’s) most innovative 20thcentury silversmiths. More than 200 pieces of Pineda’s work are displayed, illustrating how from the 1930s through the 1970s he merged pre-Columbian and Mexican colonial aesthetics with modernism to create bold designs known for their innovative use of amethyst, pearls, onyx, and other gemstones. The exhibit runs through January 2, 2011. Tickets: museum admission $6–$9, free to New Mexico residents on Sunday, internationalfolkart.org
Robert reck
courtesy international folk art museum
METAL WORK
spread your wings MUSIC Watching a pre-performance sunset at the Santa Fe Opera—and then, of course, watching the performance itself—is one of the best ways to celebrate summer. The season opens on July 2 with Puccini’s spectacular Madame Butterfly, part of a four-day Gala Opening Celebration that includes festivities around town and meet-and-greets with opera performers. Opera performances continue through August 28, with Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman, Spratian’s Life is a Dream (a world premiere), and Britten’s Albert Herring. Tickets: Gala tickets, $325–$3,000; regular performance tickets, $27–$194, santafeopera.org
Opening Weekend Events
FRIDAY, JUNE 18 – SUNDAY, JUNE 20
SITE SANTA FE EIGHTH INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL JUNE 20, 2010 – JANUARY 2, 2011 SARAH LEWIS and DANIEL BELASCO, Curators
www.thedissolve.net
1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501 | 505.989.1199 | www.sitesantafe.org The exhibition is made possible in part through generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Burnett Foundation, Jeanne & Michael L. Klein, Agnes Gund, Toby Devan Lewis, and Marlene Nathan Meyerson. This announcement made possible in part by the Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers Tax.
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events For the most complete, up-to-date calendar of events in Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico, visit santafean.com
JUNE
Through September 12 Georgia O’Keeffe:Abstraction. The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Phillips Collection, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum are jointly organizing O’Keeffe: Abstraction, the first exhibition to focus comprehensively on Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstractions over the course of her career. $10, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson, okeeffemuseum.org June 1 Robert Cray Band. Considered one of the most expressive vocalists and impressive guitarists on the contemporary rhythm-and-blues scene, Robert Cray draws R&B, rock, pop, and jazz with equal insight and authority. 7:30 pm, $29–$48, The Lensic, 211 W San Francisco, ticketssantafe.org June 4 Native Modern Series Opening: Paper and Glass. Featuring Larry McNeil, Robert Marcus Spooner, Ira Lujan, Lillian Pitt, Da-Ka-Xeen, and Will Wilson. This exhibit series is a new collaborative project between Legends Santa Fe and Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA). Exhibits are scheduled to open on the first Friday of every month, April to October 2010. Reception 5–7 pm, Legends Santa Fe, 143 Lincoln Ave, swaia.org June 4 Robert Rich at Santa Fe Complex. Ambient music pioneer Robert Rich is touring North America to support his new album, Ylang. Drawing from decades of recorded work, his concerts blend composition and improvisation in a fluid continuum, creating a hypnotic atmosphere. Rich’s performances will include live electronics with analog-modular synthesizer, keyboards, and computer, along with his signature handmade
Spanish Marketing A R T Now in its 59th year, Spanish Market celebrates one of the best things about Santa Fe—its traditional Spanish arts and culture. This year, on July 24 and 25, more than 200 local artists will exhibit their work in the Plaza and on surrounding streets, from lovingly carved santos and exquisite tinwork to traditional textiles, basketry, and furniture. Sponsored by the Spanish Colonial Museum, it’s the largest and oldest exhibition and sale of Spanish Colonial art in the United States. Tickets: Free, Saturday 8 am–5 pm, Sunday 9 am–5 pm, spanishcolonial.org
flutes and steel guitar. 8–10 pm, Santa Fe Complex, 624 Agua Fria, sfcomplex.org June 4–5 Art in the Garden Opening. Renowned Santa Fe artist Hillary Riggs has created a living gallery. Blooming perennials and ornamental grasses complement Riggs’s artwork in steel, wood, and stone. Santa Fe Greenhouses, 2904 Rufina, santafegreenhouses.com June 5 Guided Bird Walks at the Randall Davey Audubon Center. Every Saturday morning an experienced birder will lead an easy walk on the grounds of the 135-acre wildlife sanctuary that is the Randall Davey Audubon Center & Sanctuary. Bring your binoculars or borrow some. 8:30–9:30 am, Randall Davey Audubon Center, 1800 Upper Canyon, nm.audubon.org June 5 Flamenco Dinner Show at El Farol. Dinner entrees or tapas, take your pick, and enjoy flamenco dance. 5–8 pm, $25, El Farol, 808 Canyon, elfarolsf.com June 5 Santa Fe Watershed Association’s Annual River Festival and Fishing Derby. Fishing derby 6 am–2 pm. Performance Art by Bobbe Besold and Dominique Mazeaud at noon. Poetry reading by Valerie Martinez at the Community Gallery, 201 W Marcy in the Santa Fe Community Convention Center,1 pm. santafewatershed.org June 6 Reopening of the Historic Painted Kiva. After three years of major surgery and a mud-plaster facelift, Painted Kiva is again accessible to visitors. Coronado State Monument, Albuquerque, 800-419-3738 June 7–10 Acrylic Painting with New Digital Imagery Workshop with Nancy Reyner. Print images onto unusual papers, foils, and actual layers of acrylic paint (called paint skins), then collage and over-paint, to transform, seal, and combine into unique paintings. New acrylic painting techniques, surfacing, paints and products will also be explored. All levels are welcome. 10 am–4 pm, free, Santa Fe Art Institute, 1600 St Michael’s, 505-424-5050, sfai.org June 10 Mierle Ukeles. Public artist Ukeles’s work reminds us that when we need our spaces cleared of snow, garbage, or other inconveniences, we don’t just will it all to be gone—other people take care of it for us. Ukeles reconceptualizes this first-world perk into an active learning process that brings discussions of politics, environment, and society to the forefront. 6 pm, $10, Santa Fe Art Institute, 1500 St. Michael’s, 505-424-5050, sfai.org June 11 Yoga of the Feet. Strengthen your feet through yoga exercises for better walking, standing, and balance. Pre-registration required. 5:30–8:30 pm, $40, Santa Fe Community Yoga Center, 826 Camino de Monte Rey, santafecommunityyoga.org June 11–13 Santa Fe Writers Conference: Write, Publish, and Thrive in the Digital Age. Authors’ talks include author/poet Sally Bingham, journalist Tom Johnson, First Amendment attorney Barbara Petersen, screen-
play writer Kirk Ellis, and literary agent and former CEO of W.W. Norton, Donald Lamm. Friday 7 pm–Sunday 6 pm, $250 for entire conference, 505-982-9301, email literarycenter@recursos.org June 12 The Journey Concert. Mystic Measures performs and records music for creating a harmonious environment. 7–10 pm, $10, The Harmony Center, 27 Two Trails, santafeharmonycenter.com June 14 Northern Visions, Before Tomorrow: Native Cinema Showcase. Directors Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu offer a stunning meditation on life, death, and cultural transition in this film, which won Best Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival and the American Indian Film Festival. 7:30 pm, $8–$9.50, Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, ccasantafe.org June 16 Adrienne Rich with Carolyn Forché. Adrienne Rich received the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951 (from judge W. H. Auden), at the age of 21, and with strength and conviction has not stopped writing since in her distinct voice. $6, 7 pm, The Lensic, 211 W San Francisco, 505-988-1234, lannan.org June 17 Opening Party for Habitats Group Installation at Meow Wolf. Come see this vivid display in a local artists’ collective. Opens June 17, then every Friday and Saturday from 5–9 pm through July. Free, Meow Wolf, 1800 Second, 505204-4651, meowwolf.com June 17, 21, 24: What’s So Musical about Abstraction? Artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, who worked with abstraction in the early 20th century, described their work as “visual music.” Was there a comparable “abstract” period in music? This three-part series explores both the abstract and the tangible in the music of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Reservations suggested. 6–7:30 pm, $60 for the series, $15–$25 for individual evenings, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Education Annex, 123 Grant, okeeffemuseum.org June 18–20 SITE Santa Fe Eighth Biennial: The Dissolve. Opening weekend events for the Biennial, which runs through January 2, 2011, include a special performance by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at the Lensic. SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, sitesantafe.org June 20–26: The Color of Light with Arthur Meyerson. This renowned workshop is designed for both amateur and professional photographers who wish to strengthen their ability to see and work in color. Through daily shooting assignments, critiques, and discussions, participants acquire techniques to become more sensitive to light and its effects on color, composition, texture, pattern, and design. $1,375. Register by calling 505-983-1400. Santa Fe Photographic Workshops, santafeworkshops.com June 23-26 Rodeo de Santa Fe. It’s a Santa Fe tradition, now in its 61st year. 6:30 pm, $7, Santa Fe Rodeo Grounds, 3237 Rodeo, rodeodesantafe.org June 23 Jamie Figueroa and Santee Frazier. The Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA)
and Collected Works bookstore present a collaborative reading series featuring award-winning Native writers. 6–8 pm, free, Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo, collectedworksbookstore.com or swaia.org June 25 Juan Siddi Flamenco Theatre Company. The summer season opens June 25, with performances Tuesdays through Sundays at 8:30 pm through August 22. $25–55, Maria Benitez Theatre at The Lodge at Santa Fe, 750 N St. Francis, juansiddiflamenco.com June 25 The Venerable Khandro Rinpoche Santa Fe Study Group Join this group for a lecture/workshop. 6 pm, Santa Fe Center for Spiritual Living, 505 Camino De Los Marquez, santafecsl.org June 25–27 Seventh Annual Lavender in the Village Festival. The sweet-smelling festival includes cooking classes, shopping, art, a growers’ market, and a barn dance Friday night from 6-10 pm. Festival hours 8 am–4 pm Saturday and Sunday, $3, Los Poblanos Inn & Cultural Center, 4803 Rio Grande N.W., Albuquerque, 505-344-9297 June 27 Santa Fe Society of Artists Outdoor Art Show. A variety of artworks are offered for sale. 9 am –6 pm , First National Bank parking Lot across from the Museum of Fine Art, santafesocietyofartists.com June 29 Open Bluegrass Jam at Backroads Pizza. Bring your instrument and join in or just come and enjoy the fabulous live bluegrass music—and try a slice of some of the best pizza in New Mexico. 7 pm, Backroads Pizza, Second Street, backroadspizza.com
JULY
July 2 Francis Livingston: Patterns in Paint. A new selection of Livingston’s oil paintings are featured. Opening reception 5–7 pm; exhibit runs through August 1. Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, 602A Canyon, medicinemangallery.com July 4 Empowering Women: Artisan Cooperatives That Transform Communities. This exhibit is the first in the Museum of International Folk Art’s new “Gallery of Conscience,” a space dedicated to exploring contemporary issues affecting folk art production and consumption. Reception 1–4 pm, panel discussion with artist co-op representatives, 2 pm, Museum of International Folk Art, Museum Hill, 505476-1200, internationalfolkart.org July 5 Chile Rellenos at the Santa Fe School of Cooking. Learn to make four different types of chile rellenos; New Mexican tempura rellenos, ancho chile rellenos, cream-cheese-stuffed jalapeños en escabeche, and chiles en nogada. 10 am –1 pm , $98, Santa Fe School of Cooking and Market, 116 W San Francisco, santafeschoolofcooking.com July 7 An Evening with Nicholas Kristof. Presented by the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market, World Women Work, and the Museum of International Folk Art. Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist and human rights advocate. 7:30 pm, $15–$125, The Lensic, 211 W San Francisco, 505-988-1234, ticketssantafe.com
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riCK StevenS BetweeN CONNeCtiONS JUne 25 – JUly 12, 2010 Opening Reception: Friday JUne 25, 5 – 7pm
For the most complete, up-todate calendar of events in Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico, visit santafean.com July 8 Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys. Indisputably the elder statesman of old-time mountain music, Ralph Stanley plays live at The Lensic. 7:30 pm, $28–$69, The Lensic, 211 W San Francisco, 505-988-1234, ticketssantafe.com July 8-11 SOFA West. SOFA West Santa Fe returns to the Santa Fe Convention Community Center, bringing the world’s leading works in contemporary decorative arts and design, represented by prominent international galleries and art dealers. Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 W Marcy, sofaexpo.com July 9 Modest Mouse. The indie-rock band performs at an all-ages show. 8 pm, $28, Paolo Soleri Ampitheater, 1501 Cerrillos, ticketmaster.com July 14 Mind Bugs: The Science of Ordinary Bias. Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, speaks at this Santa Fe Institute public lecture. 7:30 pm, James A. Little Theater, santafe.edu July 14 Pirinop: My First Contact. Part of the Native Cinema Showcase, this provocative film features elders from the Ikpeng tribe as they reenact their first encounter with white people, in 1964, and tell of the war, relocation, and attempts to reclaim their lands that followed. 7:30 pm ,
With enchanting homes and exceptional service, Aquí redefines the standards of Santa Fe vacation rentals. Western Spaces, 2010, Oil on canvas, 50 × 44 inches
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary 200 – B Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 phone 505.984.2111 fax 505.984.8111 www.hunterkirklandcontemporary.com
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events $8–$9.50, Center for Contemporary Arts, ccasantafe.org July 15 Etran Finitawa. Nomad’s blues from Niger. 7 pm, Santa Fe Brewing Company, 35 Fire Place, thepubandgrill.com
T H E
July 16: Annual Historic Works and Paintings by Dennis Esquivel. A special museum store exhibit that celebrates historic Native American artwork. Plus, new paintings by artist Dennis Esquivel. Institute of American Indian Arts Museum Store and Lloyd Kiva New Gallery, 108 Cathedral Place, iaia.edu
A collaborative project of The Outpost Performance Space, The Lensic and the Santa Fe Jazz Foundation
July 13–25, 2010
July 16 Donna Howell-Sickles. In Howell-Sickles’s work, the cowgirl achieves the status of a heroine. Opening reception 5–7 pm. McLarry Fine Art, 225 Canyon, mclarryfineart.com
Albuquerque and Santa Fe
July 20 and July 27 Behind Adobe Walls Home and Garden Tours. The Santa Fe Garden Club presents its signature Behind Adobe Walls Home and Garden Tours on July 20 and 27. Four different private residences and gardens are seen each week on the bus-hosted tour. For reservations or information, call 505-984-0022 or 800-283-0122
FEATURED ARTISTS INCLUDE:
July 21 Erika T. Wurth and Marianne Aweagon Broyles. The Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) and Collected Works Bookstore are proud to present a collaborative reading series featuring award-winning Native writers. 6 pm, free, Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo, collectedworksbookstore.com or swaia.org July 22 Bill Hearne Trio. Honky-tonk country. 7:30–11 pm, free, La Fonda Hotel, 100 E San Francisco, lafondasantafe.com
July 25 Restaurant Walking Tour with Santa Fe School of Cooking Start at the School of Cooking School then Galisteo Bistro, 315 Restaurant and Wine Bar, La Boca, and Inn of the Anasazi—with a private tasting and meetings with the chefs and owners at each. 2–5 pm, $115, Santa Fe School of Cooking and Market, 116 W San Francisco, santafeschoolofcooking.com
Call Tickets Santa Fe at 505-988-1234 or visit www.TicketsSantaFe.org SERVICE CHARGES APPLY AT ALL POINTS OF PURCHASE
July 25 Enchanted Pathways. This small-format tapestry exhibit includes 179 tapestries submitted by artists living in 12 countries and 28 U.S. states. Reception 5–7 pm, The William & Joseph Gallery, 727 Canyon, thewilliamandjosephgallery.com July 30 Delta Spirit. This San Diego band delivers an amplified, rocking version of ’60s protest folk. 7:30 pm, $13–$15, Santa Fe Brewing Company, 35 Fire Place, thepubandgrill.com
A N N U A L
NEW MEXICO J A Z Z F E S T I VA L
July 15-18 ART Santa Fe. ART Santa Fe includes world-class galleries, installations, and emerging artists and dealers. Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 W Marcy, artsantafe.com
July 23 Aaron Karp: Selections, 1980-2010. Karp’s brilliant abstractions are about concealing and revealing and the fracturing of color and space. Reception 5–7 pm, New Concept Gallery, 610 Canyon, newconceptgallery.com
5 T H
NEA Jazz Master Toshiko Akiyoshi with Lew Tabackin & the Albuquerque Jazz Orchestra led by Bobby Shew Miguel Zenon Quartet Los Pleneros de la 21 Doug Lawrence Quartet with Jimmy Cobb Bitches Brew Revisited featuring Cindy Blackman, James Blood Ulmer, DJ Logic, Marco Benevento & Graham Haynes Simone, daughter of the legendary Nina Simone Stepology’s Santa Fe Rhythm Exchange For the complete festival lineup please visit:
211 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe
www.lensic.org
www.NewMexicoJazzFestival.org www.TicketsSantaFe.org
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| h i s to r y |
something wild and untamed D.H. Lawre nce ’s idio syncrat ic Tao s le g acy
This may or may not have happened: Sometime between 1922 and 1925, a young writer whose friends called him Lorenzo took too much peyote at the Taos home of his friend Mabel Dodge Luhan. Believing he was a coyote, Lorenzo—otherwise known as D.H. Lawrence—tore off all his clothes. His friends responded by chaining him to a storehouse in the courtyard, where he purportedly howled until the drug’s effects wore off. Unsubstantiated, the story is nevertheless representative of nearly everything that remains of Lawrence’s time in Taos. Colorful, dramatic, and based on questionable accounts, it reveals the writer’s relationship with this region to be as complex and conflicted as the characters of his celebrated novels. Lawrence came to America, and Taos specifically, at the behest of Mabel Dodge Sterne (she took the last name Luhan in 1923, when she married Taos Pueblo Indian Tony Lujan)—after a 1921 invitation to come see “the dawn of the world.” An heiress and salon hostess who had abandoned the East Coast for New Mexico, Luhan brought some of her century’s greatest artists and thinkers (Ansel Adams, Carl Jung, Martha Graham) to Taos to experience the place and, she hoped, be inspired. Her goals were specific: Believing Western culture was on the verge of destroying itself, Luhan sought salvation in traditional Native American lifestyles, and in following the “eternal feminine” as an alternate path for civilization. Lawrence expressed similar ideas in his work, and therefore was, according to historian Lois Rudnick, “the one 20th-century writer who could best ‘speak’ Taos for her and thereby locate it as the center for the redemption of the western world.” He arrived with an inchoate plan to create a revolutionary novel about Luhan, but very quickly their interests diverged. “She very much wants me to write about [Taos],” he wrote in a 1922 letter to Else Jaffe-Richtofen. “I don’t know if I ever shall. Because though it is so open, so big, free, empty, and even aboriginal—still it has a sort of shutting-out quality, obstinate.” Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, were soon engaged with Luhan in an ongoing three-way power struggle that quickly found its way into Lawrence’s Taos-inspired writings, most of which reveal a deep ambivalence and even antipathy toward Luhan’s goals. By the last of his Taos sojourns, which totaled about 11 months over three years, he had used a Luhanbased heroine in at least two novels (St. Mawr and The Plumed Serpent), two short stories, and one play (satirizing, among other things, Luhan’s “Indian-loving”). These works’ plotlines typically rewarded the heroine who surrendered to natural forces but punished egotistical behavior with death or rape. “In the modernist gender wars,” notes Rudnick, “Luhan and Lawrence were rival generals.” By 1924 the Lawrences were no longer living under Luhan’s oversight. Instead, they’d established themselves at Kiowa Ranch, in the mountains about 20 miles north of Taos, with the “simple” but hardworking Lady Dorothy Brett, a painter who adored Lawrence and came to Taos as the sole new member of his would-be utopian colony, Rananim. The ranch was a gift from Luhan. “I said: ‘This is the loveliest place I have ever seen,’”
courtesy Palace of the Governors Archives
by Ma ri n Sa rdy
“The place heaves with ghosts,” D.H. Lawrence wrote of Taos in 1927. “It is the ghosts one misses most, the ghosts there, of the Rocky Mountains . . . I know them, they know me: we go well together.”
Frieda explained in her 1934 memoir. “And she told me: ‘I give it you.’” Lawrence, however, hated the implied obligations and compensated with a present of his own to Luhan: the recently completed Sons and Lovers manuscript, despite its being worth many times more than the ranch. For the peripatetic Lawrence—who spent almost his entire adult life in hotels and at friends’ homes and never purchased a single piece of property—the 160-acre Kiowa Ranch became the closest thing he ever had to a home. He, Frieda, and Brett threw themselves into refurbishing the place,
courtesy la fonda of taos
A collage of D.H. Lawrence’s paintings, hanging in the La Fonda. They exhibit what literary critic Harry T. Moore called “a wonder in them: they blazed.”
purchasing a cow and four horses, making furniture, churning butter, and baking bread. Lawrence set up a desk beneath a large pine tree and wrote, among other things, a series of travel essays that continue to help define this region’s spirit of place. “But here,” he wrote in a quintessential passage in a 1924 letter to his mother-in-law, “where one is alone with trees and mountains and chipmunks and desert, one gets something out of the air, something wild and untamed, cruel and proud.” Yet it was also a frightening time. Earlier that year, in Mexico, Lawrence was diagnosed with tuberculosis “in the third degree” and given two years to live. In the clear, dry air at Kiowa, he dramatically improved. Then, feeling restless, he returned to Europe in 1925, but there his health foundered once more. He limped along for another five years. He never set foot in Taos again, finally succumbing to TB-related complications in Vence, France, in 1930, at the age of 44. He did, however, leave behind two things that would permanently come to rest in Taos: a series of paintings and his earthly remains. Lawrence was strictly an amateur painter, but his paintings were as dynamic and sexual as his literature. Painted in Florence between 1926 and 1928, about 20 scenes—mostly of nude women and men—went on display in 1929 at the Warren Gallery in London, until British authorities shut the show down on grounds of obscenity. Coming on the heels of the banning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (which wasn’t legally publishable in England until a landmark 1960 court case), which had built up Lawrence’s notoriety, the event drew huge crowds. By the time the show was closed to the public eye, some 12,000 people had seen it. To save the 13 seized paintings from destruction, Lawrence struck a deal: They would be spared as long as he promptly removed them from British soil. He showed them in Italy and France, where they provoked
no such controversy, until his death, when they became Frieda’s property. She returned to Taos in 1934, bringing nine of them with her, and lived in the area with her new husband, an Italian named Angelo Ravagli, until her death in 1956. Then Ravagli, somewhat bereft in Taos without her, sold them to the Hotel La Fonda de Taos and returned to Italy. For years the artworks hung just behind the hotel’s front desk, and they now reside in a private gallery just off the main lobby, where visitors can view them in $3 guided showings (108 S Plaza, 575-758-2211, lafondataos.com). But what most concerned Frieda on returning to New Mexico was the construction of a memorial to Lawrence. She ordered his body to be exhumed and cremated, and in 1935 she brought the remains to Taos. She planned to shelve the urn in a tiny, chapel-like building. Luhan and Brett wanted to scatter his ashes over the ranch. According to the University of New Mexico (the property’s owner since Frieda’s death), “Frieda dumped the ashes into a wheelbarrow containing wet cement and exclaimed, ‘Now let’s see them steal this!’” That cement, the story goes, became the altar— making the structure that now stands not a memorial to Lawrence so much as a concrete presence that is Lawrence. In the years since Frieda’s death, the place now known as the D.H. Lawrence Ranch has been virtually abandoned to the elements: the cabins are shut up and decaying and only the memorial remains in good condition. Over the years, UNM administrators have publicly discussed the idea of restoring the buildings and considered establishing an artists’ residency center there, but nothing has come of these efforts. In the meantime, the place molders, leaving Lawrence’s stories as his primary legacy to Taos— not the literary sort, but a tantalizing lore that refuses to fade away. The Taos Summer Writers’ Conference takes place July 11–18 (unm.edu/~taosconf), in part to raise awareness about the DHL Ranch.
SFAF FEATURING THE SANTA FE FILM FESTIVAL SANTA FE IS BEAUTIFUL IN THE AUTUMN! Plan on attending the first annual Santa Fe Arts Festival
OCTOBER 15-31 Enjoy a broad selection of beautiful art, film, music and culture all during this colorful time of year.
CURRENT PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE:
CANYON ROAD FESTIVAL AND PAINT OUT SANTA FE CONCERT ASSOCIATION SANTA FE SYMPHONY SANTA FE JAZZ GALISTEO STUDIO TOUR THE SANTA FE GALLERY ASSOCIATION -MORE TO COMEVIEW LINKS AND INFORMATION AT SANTAFEARTSFESTIVAL.COM SPONSORED BY
magazine
CICADA COLLECTION
ELODIE HOLMES
Liquid Light Glass
glass blowing demos • 926 baca street #3 santa fe, nm 87505 • 505-820-2222 www.liquidlightglass.com
Model wears Lilith dress and footwear
open to public mon-fri 10am -5pm saturday 10am -4pm
Photo by Wendy McEahern
contemporary glass studio & gallery
221 Galisteo Street • Santa Fe • 505.982.6250
Garden Pathways
McCumber
FINE GARDENS
LANDSCAPE DESIGN | INSTALLATION | MAINTENANCE
505.660.9599 www.mccumberfinegardens.com june/july 2010
santa fean
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raton
photo by Ca r ri e McCa r t h y
Location: Downtown Raton Distance from Santa Fe: 175 miles Hours: 3 Details: The El Raton, pictured here, first opened in 1930 (back when Raton, because of its eastern-style architecture, prided itself as the “Pittsburgh of New Mexico”), and although it won’t reopen till September, cinephiles can go mucho retro at the 85 Drive-In. Nearby, though, there’s the Shuler Theater, built in 1915 as an opera house. Its rococo style, near-perfect acoustics, and WPA murals (done by Manville Chapman) have been faithfully preserved, and this summer season’s lineup includes God’s Man in Texas and Neil Simon’s Fools. While you’re there: Check out the Marchiondo Building and the Raton Museum (created by the Raton Historical Society in 1939, the museum features regional artifacts associated with ranching, coal mining, railroads, and pioneer life, plus original works by New Mexico artists); in the evenings, there’s music outdoors at Ripley Park; or just bask in the wide-openness—really really wide-openness—of the grasslands that surround Raton; or go shoot your guns at the nearby expanses of the 33,000-acre NRA Whittington Center, the largest hunting and shooting complex in the U.S. Info: El Raton, 115 N Second Street, 575-445-7008; Shuler, 131 North Second Street, 575-445-4746