print April 2019

“Art for a New Understanding: Native Perspectives, 1950s to Now”

JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH made her multimedia collage Mischief, Indian Land Series in 1992, during the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s minatory arrival in North America. Mischief is titled after a print advertisement affixed to its upper-right-hand corner in which a woman resembling Betty Boop in cartoonish Native dress stands holding a Mischief Washington apple, the company’s logo emblazoned above her. The image is typical of American pop-culture portrayals of Native peoples, and Smith juxtaposes it with images of men in elaborate headdresses and photographs of the Statue of Liberty,

print April 2019

Jordan Casteel

Two portraits placed early in Jordan Casteel’s first solo museum show, in her hometown of Denver, feature sitters in nondescript environments. Mom, 2013, employs a muted palette. The background is beige, with plum scumbling in the upper corners; the absence of background details focuses the viewer on the figure. Casteel’s mother sits in a wooden chair, her eyes closed, head resting on her folded hands. Her face is a delicate patchwork of tans, browns, and grays, the scarf or sweater in her lap a complex, gestural pattern that repeats in the jewels of her bracelet. She doesn’t acknowledge us; we

print February 2019

“After Posada: Revolution”

José Guadalupe Posada’s influence on Mexican visual culture was profound, but a comprehensive understanding of his body of work has remained elusive. Because many of his iconic images, including the calaveras (images of human skulls) for which he is famous, originally appeared in newsprint, on broadsheets, or in chapbooks, they are delicate and relatively tiny, and to display them can be difficult. In “After Posada: Revolution,” an installation of more than one hundred prints by Posada—admittedly a sliver of the approximately twenty thousand prints he produced, primarily between the 1870s and

print November 2018

SITElines.2018

For SITE Santa Fe’s third biennial dedicated to art of the Americas, curators José Luis Blondet, Candice Hopkins, and Ruba Katrib chose a subtitle adopted from a short story by Julio Cortázar published in 1946. “Casa tomada” (House Taken Over) recounts the experience of a pair of bourgeois Argentinean siblings who are forced from their ancestral home by an unnamed force, characterized only by chaotic noises emanating from sections of the house. The tale is one of displacement whose overtones of government takeover allude to the writer’s own conditions—Cortázar penned his story during the

interviews April 17, 2018

Harmony Hammond

As a cofounder of A.I.R. Gallery in New York and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics in the 1970s, Harmony Hammond was at the forefront of a feminist revolution in contemporary art. From her early sculptures that incorporate gendered notions of craft, such as her series of “Floorpieces” and hanging textile sculptures, to her book Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000), to her more recent, almost monochromatic paintings, Hammond has expanded the possibilities of what might be considered queer art, often championing the idea that abstraction has the power to signify

print March 2018

“Future Shock”

For the inaugural exhibition in SITE Santa Fe’s revamped and expanded space, director and chief curator Irene Hofmann took her inspiration from Alvin Toffler’s best-selling book Future Shock (1970), borrowing its title for her exhibition. The book casts the rapid change induced by technological development in the first world’s postindustrial age as a disease—a deadly malady with which we as humans must come to grips. As with conceptions of history, epistemological change is at the heart of any futurity; changes in knowledge supersede the invention of new devices and herald shifts in the

picks November 06, 2017

William Cordova

The handwritten words “collection of narrative bits” appear in the lower left corner of a collage from a suite of ten, titled untitled (constellations), 2017. Seemingly innocuous, this phrase suggests a through line for William Cordova’s dense installation of paintings, drawings, collages, found objects, books, photographs, sculptures, video, and sound works, all conjoined by massive spiral-shaped scaffolding built from two-by-fours. The motif of the spiral repeats in the grooves of an LP containing field recordings the artist captured in Chicago at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and the Young

picks April 24, 2017

“Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place”

The show’s thirteen artists inhabit a dual space straddling the US–Mexico border: All either split their time between the two countries or have immigrated from one side to the other. Asked to engage with the idea of home, the artists present simultaneously personal and political works; issues of identity, social justice, and history all coalesce in this multifaceted and complex exhibition.

In One-Way Mirror, 2017, Jaime Carrejo projects two videos—one of the Mexican landscape shot from El Paso, and one of El Paso as seen from Mexico—on the acutely angled walls of a cavernous passageway. Bisecting

picks September 12, 2016

Rick Bartow

One corner of Rick Bartow’s retrospective, organized just before his death earlier this year, features a suite of early drawings and prints dating back to 1979 and a later painting of a male figure with a crow twice its size resting on its torso. The crow in Hunter’s Tale Remembered, 2009, seems poised to devour the man. The painting’s rich black background and the furious marks shading the animal’s body are as ominous as the sinister situation depicted. Bartow consistently returned to this tension between human and animal—the idea that there is an animal inside all of us and that this hybridity

diary August 03, 2016

SITE Specificity

IT’S ALWAYS A DELICATE NEGOTIATION to arrive in a place and to participate without seeming an interloper, an outsider foisting ideas.

The five curators of SITE Santa Fe’s biennial, “SITElines: much wider than a line”––Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Kathleen Ash-Milby, Pip Day, Pablo León de la Barra, and Kiki Mazzucchelli—have clearly made an effort to avoid simply parachuting into a region and imposing their values onto local communities. During the two days I spent at “ SITElines’s” opening events, a particular image kept recurring to me: a central, almost monstrous figure with a strength that amounts

picks June 27, 2016

“Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and the West”

The community of artists and writers revolving around salonièrre Mabel Dodge Luhan’s compound in Taos, New Mexico, in the early twentieth century provides the fulcrum for this sprawling exhibition. Works by well-known artists, such as Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Marsden Hartley, and John Marin, occupy space alongside pieces by more obscure figures, including Rebecca “Beck” Salsbury James, Dorothy Brett, and Agnes Pelton. Many artists and writers traveled to Taos at the behest of Luhan, a prolific writer herself. Her fourth husband, Taos Pueblo Indian Antonio Lujan, opened the community to artists

picks June 27, 2016

Kiki Smith

In a talk she gave at the gallery on May 14, Kiki Smith cited the medieval French Apocalypse Tapestry and the weavings of the “hippie movement” as examples of the long tradition to which the eleven tapestries in this show belong. “Woven Tales” displays a mythical world wherein human and animal forms entwine with natural phenomena: A woman floats in the heavens among the stars; a man sinks below the earth amid tree roots, fossils, and ants. Smith made each tapestry in collaboration with Magnolia Editions, a studio that specializes in producing textiles with contemporary artists. To produce these

Chelsea Weathers