THE magazine november 2014

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Santa Fe’s Monthly

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of and for the Arts • November 2014

The Virgins Galactic


Photo Credit: Wendy McEahern Photography

53 Old Santa Fe Trail | Upstairs on the Plaza | Santa Fe, NM | 505.982.8478 | shiprocksantafe.com


C O N T E N T S The fascinating story of Christine McHorse’s 03 letters development—from Institute of American Indian Arts jewelry student to Navajo potter to contemporary clay sculptor—is told by Garth Clark and Mark

10 universe of: filmmaker Gay Dillingham 14 art forum: Dream 28 by Grete Stern 17 studio visits: Christina Sporrong and Christian Ristow and Zoe Zimmerman 21 one bottle: The 2009 Domaine des Comtes Lafon Meursault by Joshua Baer 23 dining guide: sThe Compound and Fire & Hops

Del Vecchio, pioneering dealers and collectors of

25 art openings 26 out & about

ceramics, in the volume Dark Light: The Ceramics of Christine Nofchissey McHorse (Fresco Fine Art Publications, $45). The artist grew up away from

32 previews: Art Collision & Repair Shop at the Center for Contemporary Arts and Get Set! at Santa Fe Clay 33 national spotlight: Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC 35 feature: Henry Darger and the Virgins Galactic by Diane Armitage 41 critical reflections: Beatrice Mandelman at 203 Fine Art (Taos); Beautiful Disintegrating Obstinate Horror

Drawing and Other Recent Acquisitions and Selections at the UNM Art Museum; Between Two Worlds at her reservation and enrolled in IAIA at age fourteen.

the International Folk Art Museum; Black Maps at the UNM Art Museum; Dirk de Bruycker at LewAllen Galleries; Dirk Kortz at Wheelhouse Art; Evolving Intentions in Public Art at the Center for Contemporary

She later learned traditional pottery techniques from

Arts; Sam Scott at the Center for Contemporary Arts; and Xavier Mascaro at Gebert Contemporary 51 green planet: Paco F. Parado: Mathematician, Artist, Traveler, photograph by Jennifer Esperanza

her Taos pueblo mother-in-law and embraced the coil method, creating vessels that resembled Diné “mud pots.” Yet, McHorse was driven to innovate through experimentation with micaceous clay and black smoke-fired forms that moved her far beyond the confines of traditional Native pottery. Her refined technique coupled with her creative originality has resulted in uniquely elegant and sophisticated forms that cross boundaries into sculptural abstraction. The Dark Light series, begun in 1997, continues to evolve today. The thin walls of the blackened forms demonstrate McHorse’s developed sense of craft alongside the desire to explore territory beyond Native market traditions. The imagery in the book illuminates her process by including sketches and formal drawings of the pieces. The finished works are presented alongside details that highlight the lush micaceous surfaces of the blackened clay vessels. The excellent printing of Addison Doty’s poetic photographs adds to the richness of this art book and exhibition catalogue.

53 architectural details: Abandoned Business, Española, photograph by Guy Cross 54 writings: “Inviting the Elephant into the Room” by Joan Logghe


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LETTERS

magazine VOLUME XXII NUMBER V WINNER 1994 Best Consumer Tabloid

SELECTED 1997 Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids SELECTED 2005 and 2006 Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids PUBLIHSER / CREATIVE DIRECTOR Guy Cross PUBLISHER / FOOD EDITOR Judith Cross ART DIRECTOR Chris Myers COP Y EDITOR Edgar Scully PROOFREADER Kenji Barrett STAFF PHOTOGRAPHERS Dana Waldon Anne Staveley CALENDAR EDITOR B Milder WEB MASTER

Jason Rodriguez SOCIAL MEDIA Laura Shields

Contributors Diane Armitage, Joshua Baer, Davis K. Brimberg, Jon Carver, Kathryn M Davis, Audrey Derell, Jennifer Esperanza, James Hart, Hannah Hoel, Marina La Palma, Joan Logghe, Beth Stephens, Grete Stern, Richard Tobin, Lauren Tresp, and Susan Wider Detail: At Sunbeam Creek... by Henry Darger Courtesy: Prestel See page 35. ADVERTISING SALES

THE magazine: 505-424-7641 Lindy Madley: 505-577-6310

See how artist James Koskinas’s inner world fights its way into the light of day. Koskinas’s film The Twilight Angel will have its first Santa Fe screening on Saturday, November 15 at 3 pm at the Jean Cocteau Cinema, 418 Montezuma Avenue, Santa Fe. Paintings and artwork from the film are on view in the Jean Cocteau Gallery on ]œFriday and Saturday, November 14 and 15.

TO THE EDITOR: I wanted to compliment you for Diane Armitage’s fine piece on my film Dorothea Lange: Grab A Hunk of Lightning in your October 2014 issue. Her intelligent and well-written review ranks far and above the writing of many of the other national reviews and blogs which covered my film—it was insightful and thorough. —Dyanna Taylor, via email TO THE EDITOR: I have been thumbing through the September issue and it is a stunningly beautiful issue. The high school students did an amazing job with Art Forum. What a great idea to invite them. I really enjoy the Studio Visits page—much like I enjoy Art Forum. It is lovely to include your readers and your audience in the creative processes of THE magazine. I’m dying for a bottle of La Garenne, but then Joshua Baer makes me want to buy and drink every wine he features. —Jeane George Weigel, Truchas, via email TO THE EDITOR: Anyone who has not bumped into David Stafford’s brain ought to check out his postcards and posters at Radicle—a studio/community think tank. David’s hand has caught up with his mind, much to the relief of his cadre of local fans and merrymakers. His first show was worth the wait. Smart, funny, and muy au courant. —Kay Slattery, Santa Fe, via email

DISTRIBUTION

Jimmy Montoya: 470-0258 (mobile) THE magazine is published 10x a year by THE magazine Inc., 320 Aztec St., Santa Fe, NM 87501. Corporate address: 44 Bishop Lamy Road Lamy, NM 87540. Phone number: (505)-424-7641. Email address: themagazinesf@gmail.com. Web address: themagazineonline.com. All materials copyright 2014 by THE magazine. All rights reserved by THE magazine. Reproduction of contents is prohibited without written permission from THE magazine. THE magazine is not responsible for the loss of any unsolicited material, liable, for any misspellings, incorrect information in its captions, calendar, or other listings. Opinions expressed do not necessarily represent the views or policies of THE magazine, its owners, or any of its employees, members, interns, volunteers, agents, or distribution venues. Bylined articles represent the views of their authors. Letters to the editor are welcome. Letters may be edited for style and libel. All letters are subject to condensation. THE magazine accepts advertisements from advertisers believed to be of good reputation, but cannot guarantee the authenticity of objects and/or services advertised. THE magazine is not responsible for any claims made by its advertisers for copyright infringement by its advertisers and is not responsible or liable for errors in any advertisement. november

2014

TO THE EDITOR: Mr. Baron, I commend you for your return visit to SITE, despite disappointment upon your first visit,. However, contrary to your statement, I have seen that viewers have been stirred into action. As a past employee of SITE, I have been on the ground welcoming visitors, asking meaningful questions upon exit. Ms. Davis, what I hear from folks is that they are wowed. Maybe even humbled. Some are angry. At the very least, engaged. In response to Mr. Baron’s likening of SITE’s to the more elitist proclivities of the academy, the great leveler of gilded pedagogy is inquiry—asking difficult questions in an effort to promote dialogue across and throughout communities. Nuclear proliferation, infectious disease, availability of energy, global genocide, population overload, and poverty —we are in the midst of an environmental and humanitarian crisis. In New Mexico, 46% of the adult population cannot read at the fifth grade level. Knowledge is power and power must be shared. Abuses of power must be communicated. Curators Lucía

Sandromán, Irene Hofmann, Janet Dees, Candice Hopkins, and artists have placed these questions at the fore of the canon. Historically urgent. Inclusive by necessity and design. If the protocol for the curating for what remains of SITELines biennials does not insure reciprocity, perhaps the expanding geography of participating artists will, augmenting the word (understanding of which, as previously stated, is grossly below national standard) with image. In the case of SITE and Hofmann’s leadership, coupled with the extraordinary efforts Joanne Lefrak, Director of Education and Outreach, Amanda Lee, Education Coordinator and brilliant SITEguides trained in socratic methodology, SITE’s pedagogy is solid and includes SITEcenter lectures, SITElab residencies, the SITE Scholar Program. SITE’s Education partners include UNM, Santa Fe University of Art and Design, St. Johns College, Santa Fe Community College. IAIA, and the institution also hosts Title One Elementary schools in collaboration with the Farmers Market and Railyard Park. In addition, there is dialogue with local middle schools and high schools. Thanks, Mr. Baron— but, SITE is no isolated “pod.” In this exhibition, SITE and Hofmann provide a safe haven for important minds and voices of our times. Could it be possible that the paradigm of over-promising and over-delivering via Koons is no longer necessary? That humanity asks for something new of art? SITE’s Unsettled Landscapes has given us a new lexicon to consider, extending a gracious invitation to the best of what the academy has to offer: rigorous dialogue available to anyone invested in the experience, embodying the origin of the term academy—in essence—learning outside of the classroom. The content of Unsettled Landscapes is ironclad. Irene Hofmann is an elegant and gracious hostess. SITE and Santa Fe are lucky to have her. SITE Santa Fe nurtures innovation, discovery and inspiration through the art of today. —Leslie Holland, via email TO THE EDITOR: As a visitor to Santa Fe in August, I found the coverage of the SITE Santa Fe biennial to be quite thoughtful and thought provoking, as it is rare to see more than one point of view about an exhibition in any art magazine. Both reviews were informative, but I did not fully agree with either. Although the letter from Richard Baron was a letter, not a review, it added yet another layer to my thoughts about the biennial and about SITE itself. I will be in Santa Fe again soon, and with THE magazine in hand I shall revisit the show with an open mind. I will probably send you another letter at that time with my thoughts. —Bethenny Choate, via email

THE magazine | 5


Tracy rocca

New paiNTiNgs November 7-december 7. 2014 artist reception: Friday, November 7, 5:00-7:00pm

In Pursuit of Cultural Freedom

A lecture series on political, economic, environmental, and human rights issues featuring social justice activists, writers, journalists, and scholars discussing critical topics of our day.

Plunge, 2014, oil on polyester over panel, 60" x 60"

LewAllenGalleries Railyard Arts District 1613 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 87505 (505) 988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com info@lewallengalleries.com

ANN JONES with ANDREW

BACEVICH

WEDNESDAY 12 NOVEMBER AT 7PM LENSIC PERFORMING ARTS CENTER This book…is not about war itself, nor even about soldiers as they are trained to see themselves and we, in turn, are taught to see and support them. It is about the damage done to soldiers, their families, their communities, and the rest of us, who for another half-century at least will pay for their care, their artificial limbs, their medications, their benefits, their funerals, and the havoc they dutifully wrought under orders around the world.

— From They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars — The Untold Story © 2013

Ann Jones is a journalist, photographer and the author of numerous works of nonfiction, including Women Who Kill, Kabul in Winter, and War Is Not Over When It’s Over. She has worked intermittently as a humanitarian volunteer in conflict and post-conflict countries in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central and South Asia and has reported from Afghanistan and the Middle East on the impact of war on soldiers and civilians. Jones also writes for The Nation, The Guardian, and TomDispatch.com.

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Saara Ekström • Careless Water October 31 - December 19, 2014 Artist Reception: Friday, November 7, 6 - 8 pm Gallery Closed: November 27 - December 9 Richard Levy Gallery • Albuquerque • www.levygallery.com • 505.766.9888

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DYING TO KNOW: RAM DASS & TIMOTHY LEARY,

HOW IT BEGAN In 1995, on the day Leary publicly announced that he was dying, I wondered, “What can we do?” My husband-to-be, Andrew, came up with the idea of bringing Ram Dass and Leary together in conversation, which we would film. I had read Ram Dass’s Be Here Now and seen Leary on his college lecture tour in the eighties. I was not that impressed with Leary at that time as I saw him as more the showman than the man. Leary was a rebel, a visionary, and a trickster who paid the price for his convictions, spending almost

A FILM BY GAY DILLINGHAM AND NARRATED BY ROBERT REDFORD, CELEBRATES THE

four years in prison. Making this film was about trying to reconcile the complex and

LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP AND SPIRITUAL

on PBS. In the early nineties, I made an educational program for children called My Body

CONNECTION BETWEEN THESE TWO

produced the first two PBS shows for Dr. Andrew Weil, which helped launch his career.

DIVERSE MEN. THE FILM LOOKS AT EIGHTY YEARS OF SHARED HISTORY, PERSONAL PHOTOGRAPHS, FILMS, AND PREVIOUSLY UNSEEN INTERVIEWS BETWEEN RAM DASS AND LEARY. THE PROJECT BEGAN IN LEARY’S LOS ANGELES HOME IN 1995 AT THE TIME HE LEARNED HE

charismatic man I met on his deathbed with the caricature portrayed through the media.

BACKGROUND IN FILM The first documentary I produced and directed was with Penelope Place in 1989, called The WIPP Trail, about our nations first and only underground nuclear repository for military waste. Robert Redford was generous enough to narrate the film, which aired Belongs to Me that helped protect them from sexual abuse. As well, my husband and I

CHALLENGES The greatest difficulty was finding the time and maintaining the necessary focus to finish the film. Another was that the film spans eighty years. It begins in 1931 with 16mm film footage and concludes with high-definition digital video. The post-production supervisor did a yeoman’s job in making this huge jigsaw puzzle measure up to the highest technical standards. The real task was talking about a subject most people would rather not discuss—death, with drugs being a close second.

ROBERT REDFORD AS NARRATOR I went to Bylle Redford’s art opening of her unique multimedia work. At the opening, I had a brief discussion with Robert Redford—who knew Ram Dass and Leary—and asked him if he would be willing to take a look at the rough cut of the film. He watched the rough cut and called the next day telling me that he loved it. I spontaneously asked if he would narrate and he said he would be honored. He talked about the story and its structure, giving me refined feedback that took some digesting on my part. I am eternally grateful to this master storyteller for helping me make a better film.

WAS DYING OF CANCER. THE TWO FRIENDS MET TO TALK OF THE PROCESS OF MOVING ON. DILLINGHAM CAPTURES THEIR HISTORY, STRUGGLES, SUCCESSES, AND FAILURES AS SHE DEVELOPS THE CONVERSATION AROUND

DYING TO KNOW I came across the phrase “dying to know” in my handwritten notes, and realized that would be the title of the film. Some are put off by the word dying, but I liked the multiple layers of meaning in the phrase. As far as I can tell, we all have to “die to know.”

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT MYSELF How Ram Dass and Leary lived their lives influenced me as an inspiration and as a cautionary tale. Leary was a thinker and scientist who, no matter how many psychedelic trips he took, thought that when you’re dead, you’re dead. This led him to consider cryonics—freezing the brain. However, he gave up the cryonics

THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SCIENCE OF THE MIND AND THE HEART. AT 7 PM ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 20, THE UPAYA ZEN CENTER PRESENTS DYING TO KNOW AT THE LENSIC PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, 211 WEST SAN

weeks before he died. This film is an archetypal conversation between the heart (Ram Dass) and the mind (Leary), which is often the conversation going on inside me, and I imagine, others.

THE MOMENT OF PASSING Being a missionary to the end, Leary was championing a cause to change our cultural attitude toward dying—to think and act for one’s self. Don’t hand it over to the doctors and priests; take charge of it yourself, and make the process of dying a celebration of a life lived. I believe Leary took Marshall McLuhan’s advice to his grave, keeping his fears about death pretty private. But I sensed it was all there for him—fear and acceptance. Ram Dass contributes a unique lens to see Leary and reveal himself. The film is about today and

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UNIVERSE OF

photograph by

Jennifer Esperanza

november

2014

THE magazine | 11


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IN


ART FORUM

the magazine asked a clinical psychologist and two people

who love art for their take on this 1951 collage, Dream 28, by Grete Stern (from Women Photographers, Prestel). They were shown only the image and were given no other information.

surprised at how the turtle man looks, but maybe after she gets to know the turtle man better, things may turn out well, even happily ever after. I’ve been thinking about Erika Wanemacher and her use of the word “incorporate,” which refers to our existence in physical bodies. In reference to the princess and the

I am instantly reminded of what neuroscientists call the

This campy image rips off Cindy Sherman and many

turtle, there are the elements of man, woman, and

“Reptilian Brain.” This term refers to the oldest region

before her. It is about perceptions of male and

animal, which led me to wonder what the offspring

in the human brain, which controls vital functions such

female—men are turtles and women are princesses.

of their union would be. This is great, because all

as breathing and heart rate. The “Reptilian Brain,”

And if he were a toad, would a kiss save her? Or save

good art is about sex, which seems to be the thing

along with our limbic system or emotional center, is

him? Look closely. Is she really looking at the turtle

that makes the world go round, and I am happy

believed to play a critical role in addiction. And what

man? Or is she looking over his shoulder at a real man,

about that.

is our reptile-hybrid man holding here? A cigarette,

or her mother, or her father? The princess seems so

—James Hart, Santa Fe

arguably the world’s most addictive substance. We see a message about the dangers of smoking. “Pick this up, Lady,” the beast warns, “and you’ll end up looking like me! Plus, it could kill you.” Another interpretation is that the artist is making a statement about evolution. In this instance, he warns her, “Evolve or you’ll get stuck in the primordial soup, like I did.” Psychologically, her vintage attire is significant. It symbolizes her refusal to “evolve” and her resistance against current society. Lastly, a very different interpretation is that this smoking-reptile-man is “hitting” on her. This beast represents the primitive desires in all of us. —Davis K. Brimberg, Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, Santa Fe This image seems 1960-62ish. These two people have just left the courthouse after marrying quickly. This well-brought-up lady just realized that her new husband is not all she thought she was getting—it’s that sudden realization that she made a huge mistake and needs to get out of it, now. I hope she annuls the marriage right away. Now the turtle groom: He just thought it would be a good time to let her know who he really is. His lower hand is turning into a turtle fin. He’s smoking his last cigarette before the transformation overtakes him. The technical part: This is a matter of cut-and-paste from the early days of print adaptations. It appears that the turtle’s head was Xeroxed and not so well arranged in its placement on the husband’s head. I’ll bet that his original head wore a suave-looking expression. The young lady is expressing semi-disbelief at what they might have just said or seen. I wouldn’t put this image on my A-list of art pieces, but it’s fun and probably worth a million dollars. I am not sure about the hand—it creeps me out and does not appear to be pasted on. Yes, it’s definitely a fin on a real guy. —Beth Stephens, Sotheby’s International Realty, Santa Fe

14 | THE magazine

november

2014



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STUDIO VISITS

WALT WHITMAN WROTE, “THE ART OF ART, THE GLORY OF EXPRESSION AND THE SUNSHINE OF THE LIGHT OF LETTERS, IS SIMPLICITY.” THREE ARTISTS RESPOND. As an artist who builds mechanical interactive sculptures, which are often quite sophisticated in their fabrication and execution, there is certainly an indispensable element of my work which really defies the idea of simplicity. But the truth is that the very best ideas, the ones that end up speaking to people and inspiring audiences, are the ones that are fundamentally simple. Any time that the core idea for a sculpture needs a lot of explaining to get across, I know I’m on the wrong track. Conversely, when the idea is straightforward and grabs people’s attention right away, I know I’m onto something. From that point forward, the manifestation of the piece can be as simple or complicated as it needs to be, as long as the simple core idea that inspires is still the guiding force, and still the center of the human experience of the piece when it’s done.

—Christian Ristow In 2014, Ristow’s work was shown at the Glastonbury Festival, Burning Man, Albuquerque Maker Faire, and the AHA Festival. He will be showing more work this year at Art Outside in Austin and the Voodoo Festival in New Orleans. christianristow.com Just like anything in its entirety, all objects, nature and our environment as seen through the filter of the human eye can be understood if even for a moment just for what it is—without judgment and without context. The simple act of expression is a pure and human reaction to our surroundings, and when translated through a creative medium becomes tangible. I make work based on my perception and my emotional dissection of my environment. It is in that original moment between perception and action where the magic happens—all that is simply is.

—Christina Sporrong During 2014, Sporrong has shown Caged Pulse Jets at Glastonbury, in the United Kingdom, and at The Paseo, in Taos. A new sculpture, TaranTula, will be on view in November at the Voodoo Art & Music Festival, in New Orleans.

Art is the glory of expression. The simplicity is in the constant process of elimination; constant editing. I weary of the talk of creativity with a capital C. We are all makers of things. We make lunch and make plans and make a home and make love and make due. Artists are fortunate to recognize all of this making as self-expression—as a specific mode of communication with a less than simple world.

—Zoe Zimmerman During 2014, Zimmerman participated in the following exhibitions: Small Prints and Photo Objects at photo-eye, Santa Fe; Selections from the Gus Foster Collection at the Harwood Museum,Taos; Fact and Fantasy at Kiernan Gallery, Lexington, Virginia; Handmade at the Vermont Center for Photography, Brattleboro, Vermont; Dreams, Fantasies, and Illusions at Photoplace Gallery, Middlebury, Vermont; and Altered Views at the Lightbox Gallery, Astoria, Oregon, among others. In March 2015, she will have a solo show at the Taos Center for the Arts.

photographs by november

2014

Anne Staveley THE magazine | 17


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Voodoo Vintners and Complete Wine Selector: How to Choose the Right

Coche-Dury say Lafon’s wines are too understated. To fully appreciate

Wine Every Time. Her web site is katherinecole.com. To read the whole

a white Burgundy, you need more bravado, more panache, more je ne

interview, go to wine-searcher.com.

sais quoi. Fans of Domaine Ramonet say, “Okay, maybe Lafon is Le Roi du

If you love wine, sooner or later you have to make decisions about how, when, and where to drink great wines. For many of us, money is the determining factor. If your heart’s desire is to drink a great wine—not just to taste it, but to experience a bottle over dinner in the company of someone you love—and that bottle

Chardonnay, but Ramonet combines expectation and surprise in such a way that allows you to enjoy the best of both worlds.” Personally, I think the debate over who makes the best white Burgundy is nonsense. If you’re lucky enough to drink white Burgundy at this level, why split hairs? You get to drink Coche-Dury,

costs $100, or more, chances are, your mind will overrule

Lafon, Leflaive, Ramonet, and Sauzet’s wines—all during the

your heart by making you feel guilty about spending too

course of one lifetime. They’re all great wines. Why does

much money. Between the middle and the end of the bottle,

one have to be superior to the others? But here’s the thing.

an inner voice will say, “Sure, it tastes good. What did you

If I could only drink one—if you put a gun to my head

expect for a hundred bucks? You could have bought four

and said, “Pick one, or else” my choice would be Lafon.

halfway decent bottles for the price of what you’re

Which brings us to the 2009 Domaine des Comtes Lafon

drinking. One hundred dollars a bottle? Really? Where

Meursault.

I come from, that’s not happiness. That’s self-indulgence.”

Lafon’s Meursault is his least expensive wine.

One way to resolve the dilemma of whether or not

His 2009 Meursault “Clos de la Barre” is $140. His 2009

drinking a great wine is worth the money is to take two

“Meursault-Perrières” is $450. His 2009 “Le Montrachet”

weeks off—not from work, but from wine. If you drink

is $1,295. So, if you take off those two weeks, make

wine three or four nights a week, go two weeks without

a roast chicken, pull the cork, pour, swirl, inhale, and drink,

wine, take the money you saved, buy one great bottle, and

you may decide that Lafon’s 2009 Meursault, at $100 a

drink it. Great wines are great teachers. When you drink a

bottle, is a bargain. The weird thing is, if you reach that

bottle of great wine, that wine extends the limits of your

decision, you’ll be telling yourself the truth.

taste. While you’re drinking the great wine, ask yourself

In the glass, Lafon’s 2009 Meursault manages to

if extending the limits of your taste was worth going two

hold the light and release it. The bouquet is simultaneously

weeks without wine. Be honest with yourself, because

promiscuous and chaste. On the palate, there is a moment

the future of your taste depends on your answer. If your

when you surrender to the wine’s beauty. It may take

answer is no, go back to drinking affordable wines three

a few seconds, a few minutes, or the better part of your

or four nights a week. If your answer is yes, go another

last sip, but the moment will come when you will wave

two weeks without wine. Then buy another great wine.

the white flag. The finish is a season in heaven. Terms

“I was born in Chalon-sur-Saône, which is near

like “life-changing” and “mind-blowing” come to mind,

Meursault, but until I was seven years old we lived

but what’s really going on with the finish is authenticity.

in Paris, where my father worked as an engineer.

As the Meursault’s flavors disappear, their disappearance

He would work all week and every weekend he would

reminds you of your life.

go to Burgundy to take care of the domaine. After my studies, I found a job working with Becky Wasserman exporting wine and barrels to the U.S. from 1982 november

2014

One Bottle is dedicated to the appreciation of good wines and good times, one bottle at a time. All content is ©2014 by onebottle.com. You can write to Joshua Baer at jb@onebottle.com.

THE magazine | 21



DINING GUIDE

Organic Scottish Salmon with Clams

THE COMPOUND 653 Canyon Road, Santa Fe Reservations: 982-4353

$ K E Y

INEXPENSIVE

photograph by

$

up to $14

MODERATE

$$

$15—$23

EXPENSIVE

$$$

VERY EXPENSIVE

$24—$33

$$$$

Prices are for one dinner entrée. If a restaurant serves only lunch, then a lunch entrée price is reflected. Alcoholic beverages, appetizers, and desserts are not included in these price keys. Call restaurants for hours.

$34 plus

EAT OUT OFTEN

K itty L eakin

...a guide to the very best restaurants in santa fe, albuquerque, taos, and surrounding areas... 315 Restaurant & Wine Bar 315 Old Santa Fe Trail. 986-9190. Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: French. Atmosphere: An inn in the French countryside. House specialties: Steak Frites, Seared Pork Tenderloin, and the Black Mussels are perfect. Comments: Generous martinis, a terrific wine list, and a “can’t miss” bar menu. Winner of Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence. Watch for special wine pairings. Andiamo 322 Garfield St. 995-9595. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Start with the Steamed Mussels or the Roasted Beet Salad. For your main, choose the delicious Chicken Marsala or the Pork Tenderloin. Comments: Great pizza. Anasazi Restaurant Inn of the Anasazi 113 Washington Ave. 988-3236 . Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner. Full bar. Valet parking. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Contemporary American. Atmosphere: A classy room. House specialties : For dinner, start with the Heirloom Beet Salad. Follow with the flavorful Achiote Grilled Atlantic Salmon. Dessert: Try the Chef’s Selection of Artisanal Cheeses. Comments: Attentive service. Bouche 451 W. Alameda Street 982-6297 Dinner Wine/Beer Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: French Bistro fare. Atmosphere: Intimate with an open kitchen. House specialties: Start with the Charcuterie Plank. The Bistro Steak and the organic Roast Chicken are winners. Comments: Chef Charles Dale is a pro. Cafe Cafe Italian Grill 500 Sandoval St. 466-1391. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: For lunch, the classic Caesar salad or the tasty specialty pizzas, or the grilled Eggplant sandwich. Dinner: the grilled Swordfish. Comments: Friendly. Café Fina 624 Old Las Vegas Hiway. 466-3886. Breakfast/Lunch. Patio Cash/major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Call it contemporary comfort food. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: For breakfast, both the Huevos Motulenos and the Eldorado Omlet are winners. For lunch, we

love the One for David Fried Fish Sandwich, and the perfect Green Chile Cheeseburger. Comments: Annamaria The baked goods are really special. Café Pasqual’s 121 Don Gaspar Ave. 983-9340. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Multi-ethnic. Atmosphere: Adorned with Mexican streamers and Indian posters. House specialties: Hotcakes got a nod from Gourmet The Huevos Motuleños is a Yucatán breakfast—one you’ll never forget. Chopstix 238 N. Guadalupe St.  982-4353. Lunch/Dinner. Take-out. Patio. Major credit cards. $ Atmosphere: Casual. Cuisine: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. House specialties: Lemon Chicken, Korean barbequed beef, and Kung Pau Chicken. Comments: Friendly owners. Counter Culture 930 Baca St. 995-1105. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Cash. $$ Cuisine: All-American. Atmosphere: Informal. House specialties: Burritos Frittata, Sandwiches, Salads, and Grilled Salmon. Comments: Good selection of beers and wine. Cowgirl Hall of Fame 319 S. Guadalupe St. 982-2565. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Good old American. fare. Atmosphere: Patio shaded by big cottonwoods. Great bar. House specialties: The smoked brisket and ribs are the best. Super buffalo burgers. Comments: Huge selection of beers. Coyote Café 132 W. Water St. 983-1615. Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Southwestern with French and Asian influences. Atmosphere Bustling. House specialties: Main the grilled Maine Lobster Tails or the 24-ounce “Cowboy Cut” steak. Comments: Great bar and good wines. Dr. Field Goods Kitchen 2860 Cerrillos Rd. 471-0043. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: New Mexican Fusion. Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Starters: Charred Caesar Salad, Carne Adovada Egg Roll, and Fish Tostada. Mains: El Cubano Sandwich, and Steak Frite, . Comments: You leave feeling good. Real good. Downtown Subscription 376 Garcia St. 983-3085.

Breakfast/Lunch No alcohol. Patio. Cash/ Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Standard coffee-house fare. Atmosphere: A large room where you can sit, read periodicals, and schmooze.. House specialties: Espresso, cappuccino, and lattes. El Faról 808 Canyon Rd. 983-9912. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Spanish Atmosphere: Wood plank floors, thick adobe walls, and a small dance floor for cheek-to-cheek dancing. House specialties: Tapas. Comments: Murals by Alfred Morang. El Mesón 213 Washington Ave. 983-6756. Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Spanish. Atmosphere: Spain could be just around the corner. Music nightly. House specialties: Tapas reign supreme, with classics like Manchego Cheese marinated olive oil. Hillside 86-B Old Las Vegas Highway. 982-9944 Lunch: 11-2:30. Closed Wednesday. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Inspired New World cuisine. Atmosphere: Spacious and bright. H ouse specialties : Botanas: meat and seafood that you cook at your table on hot rocks. They are accompanied by corn tortillas, moles, and oils. Fernando Olea’s black pepper Angus beef tenderloin is perfection. Comments: innovative cuisine. epazote on the

Fire & Hops 222 S. Guadalupe St. 954-1635 Dinner: 7 days. Lunch: Sat. and Sun. Beer/Wine. Patio. Visa & Mastercard. $$$ Cuisine: Susatainable local food. A tmosphere : Casual and friendly. House specialties: Small plates we love: the Green Papaya Salad and the Braised Pork Belly. Fave large plates: the Cubano Sandwich and the Crispy Duck Confit. C omments : Wonderful selection of beers on tap or in bottles. Georgia 225 Johnson St. 989-4367. Patio. Aprés Lunch and Dinner - Full bar. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Clean and contemporary. Atmosphere: Friendly and casual. House specialties: Start with the Charcuterie Plate or the Texas Quail. Entrée: The the Pan-Roasted Salmon. Good wine list and a bar you will love. Comments: Aprés Lunch: served from 1:30-5:30. Geronimo 724 Canyon Rd. 982-1500. Dinner

Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: We call it French/Asian fusion. Atmosphere: Elegant and stylish. House specialties: Start with the superb foie gras. Entrées we love include the Green Miso Sea Bass served with black truffle scallions, and the classic peppery Elk tenderloin. Comments: Wonderful desserts. Harry’s Roadhouse 96 Old L:as Vegas Hwy. 986-4629 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner 7 days Full bar. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Down home House specialties: For breakfast go for the Scrambled Eggs with Smoked Salmon, Cream Cheese. Lunch: the Buffalo Burger. Dinner: the Hanger Steak. Comments: Friendly. Il Piatto Italian Farmhouse Kitchen 95 W. Marcy St. 984-1091. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Bustling. House specialties: Our faves: the Arugula and Tomato Salad; the Lemon Rosemary Chicken; and the Pork Chop stuffed with mozzarella, pine nuts, and prosciutto. Comments: Farm to Table, all the way. Izanami 3451Hyde Park Rd. 428-6390. Lunch/Dinner Sake/Wine/Beer Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Japanese-inspired small plates. Atmosphere: A sense of quietude. House specialties: For starters, the Wakame is a winner. We loved the Nasu Dengaku, eggplant and miso sauce, and the Pork Belly with Ginger BBQ Glaze. Comments: Super selection of Sake. Jambo Cafe 2010 Cerrillios Rd. 473-1269. Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: African and Caribbean inspired. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Jerk Chicken Sandwich and the Phillo, stuffed with spinach, black olives, feta cheese, and roasted red peppers. Comments: Fabulous soups. Joseph’s Culinary Pub 428 Montezuma Ave. 982-1272 Dinner. Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Innovative. Atmosphere: Intimate. House specialties: Start with the Butter Lettuce Wrapped Pulled Pork Cheeks or the Scottish Fatty Salmon Sashimi. For your main, try the Crispy Duck, Salt Cured Confit Style. Comments: The bar menu features Polenta Fries and the New Mexican Burger. Wonderful

desserts, an excellent wine selection, beers on draft, and great service. Kohnami Restaurant 313 S. Guadalupe St. 984-2002. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine/Sake. Patio. Visa & Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: Japanese. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Miso soup; Soft Shell Crab; Dragon Roll; Chicken Katsu; noodle dishes; and Bento Box specials. Comments: Love the Sake. La Plancha de Eldorado 7 Caliente Rd., La Tienda. 466-2060 Highway 285 / Vista Grande Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: An Authentic Salvadoran Grill. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: The Loroco Omelet, Pan-fried Plantains, and Salvadorian Tamales. Comments: Sunday brunch. Lan’s Vietnamese Cuisine 2430 Cerrillos Rd. 986-1636. Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Vietnamese. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: The Vegetarian Pumpkin Soup is amazing. Fave entree is the BoTai Dam: Beef tenderloin w/ garlic, shallots, and lemongrass. Comments: Friendly. La Plazuela on the Plaza 100 E. San Francisco St. 989-3300. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full Bar. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: New Mexican and Continental. Atmosphere: Casual House specialties: Start with the Tomato Salad. Entrée: Braised Lamb Shank with couscous. Comments: Beautiful courtyard for dining. M.A.M.A.’S World Take-Out 3134 Rufina St. 424-1116/ 989-8028. Breakfast/Lunch: 9am-3 pm. $$ Cuisine: Middle Eastern, American, Mexican, Asian, and Salvadoran. House specialties: Pad Thai, Falafels, Burritos, Pupusas, and the worldfamous Hiram’s Hot Dog. Comments: Grab, go,and enjoy. Midtown Bistro 910 W. San Mateo, Suite A. 820-3121. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine/ Patio. Major credit cards. $$ C uisine : American fare with a Southwestern twist. A tmosphere : Large open room. H ouse specialties : For lunch: the Baby Arugula Salad or the Chicken or Pork Taquitos. Entrée: We adore the Grilled Atlantic Salmon with Green Lentils, and the French Cut Pork Chop.Try the RIb-eye Steak at dinner. C omments : A very nice wine list and a yummy dessert menu.

continued on page 25 november

2014

THE magazine | 23


CLOUD CLIFF BAKERY at the SANTA FE FARMERS MARKET TUESDAY and SATURDAY

Locally-Sourced, Seasonally-Inspired Cuisine chef/Owner louis Moskow’s classically prepared French fare has received notable praise from Wine Spectator, Esquire, Zagat, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Fodor’s, The New Mexican & The Albuquerque Journal.

e New auTuMN MeNu uSiNg lOcally SOuRced iNgRedieNTS FReSh SeaFOOd daily awaRd -wiNNiNg wiNe liST exTeNSive SelecTiON OF wiNeS by The glaSS Full baR & lOuNge aRea wiNe diNNeRS pRivaTe ROOMS available

Sun-Thur, 5:00-9:00pm u Fri-Sat, 5:00-9:30pm 315 Old Santa Fe Trail u Santa Fe, NM www.315santafe.com u Reservations:(505) 986.9190


DINING GUIDE

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Innovative natural foods. Atmosphere: Large open room. House s p e c i a lt i e s : In the morning, try the Mediterranean Breakfast— Quinoa with Dates, Apricots, and Honey. Our lunch favorite is the truly delicious Indonesian Vegetable Curry on Rice; C o m m e n t s : For your dinner, we suggest the Prix Fixe Small Plate: soup, salad, and an entrée for $19. Wines and Craft beers on tap.

FIRE & HOPS | GASTROPUB | 222 NORTH GUADALUPE STREET | 954-1635 Mu Du Noodles 1494 Cerrillos Rd. 983-1411. Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Pan-Asian. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Vietnamese Spring Rolls and Green Thai Curry, Comments: Organic. New York Deli Guadalupe & Catron St. 982-8900. Breakfast/Lunch Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: New York deli. Atmosphere: Large open space. House specialties: Soups, Salads, Bagels, Pancakes, and gourmet Burgers. Comments: Deli platters to go. Plaza Café Southside 3466 Zafarano Dr. 424-0755. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner 7 days Full bar. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Bright and light. House specialties: For your breakfast go for the Huevos Rancheros or the Blue Corn Piñon Pancakes. Comments: Excellent Green Chile. Rio Chama Steakhouse 414 Old Santa Fe Trail. 955-0765. Brunch/Lunch/Dinner/Bar Menu. Full bar. Smoke-free dining rooms. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All-American, all the way. Atmosphere: Easygoing. House specialities: Steaks, Prime Ribs and Burgers. Haystack fries rule. Recommendations: Nice wine list. Ristra 548 Agua Fria St. 982-8608. Dinner/Bar Menu Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Southwestern with a French flair. Atmosphere: Contemporary. House specialties: Mediterranean Mussels in chipotle and mint broth is superb, as is the Ahi Tuna Tartare. Comments: Nice wine list. Rose’s Cafe 5700 University W. Blvd SE, #130, Alb. 505-433-5772 Breakfast/Lunch. Patio. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: A taste of the Yucatán with a Southwest twist. House specialties: We love the Huevos Muteleños and the Yucatán Pork Tacos. Comments: Kid’s menu and super-friendly folks. San Q 31 Burro Alley. 992-0304 Lunch/Dinner Sake/Wine Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Japanese Sushi and Tapas. Atmosphere: Large room with a Sushi bar. House specialties: Sushi, Vegetable Sashimi and Sushi Platters, and a variety of Japanese Tapas. Comments: Savvy sushi chef. S an F rancisco S t . B ar & G rill

50 E. San Francisco St. 982-2044. Lunch/Dinner Full bar.

november

2014

Major credit cards. $$ C uisine : As American as apple pie. A tmosphere : Casual with art on the walls. House specialties: At lunch try the San Francisco St. hamburger on a sourdough bun; the grilled salmon filet with black olive tapenade and arugula on a ciabatta roll; or the grilled yellowfin tuna nicoise salad with baby red potatoes. At dinner, we like the tender and flavorful twelve-ounce New York Strip steak, served with chipotle herb butter, or the Idaho Ruby Red Trout, served with grilled pineapple salsa. Comments: Visit their sister restaurant at Devargas Center. Santacafé 231 Washington Ave. 984-1788. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Southwest Contemporary. Atmosphere: Minimal, subdued, and elegant House specialties: The world-famous calamari never disappoints. Favorite entrées include the grilled Rack of Lamb and the Pan-seared Salmon with olive oil crushed new potatoes and creamed sorrel. Comments: Happy hour special from 4-6 pm. Great deals: Half-price appetizers. “Well” cocktails only $5. Santa Fe Bar & Grill 187 Paseo de Peralta. 982-3033. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Cornmeal-crusted Calamari, Rotisserie Chicken, or the Rosemary Baby Back Ribs. Comments: Easy on the wallet. Santa Fe Bite 311 Old Santa Fe Trail. 982-0544 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: For breakfast, go for either the Huevos Rancheros or the Build Your Own Omelette. Can’t go wrong at lunch with the 10 oz. chuck and sirloin Hamburger or the Patty Melt on rye toast. At dinner (or lunch) the Ribeye Steak is a winner. Good selection of sandwiches and salads (we love the Wedge Salad with smoked Applewood Bacon). And the Fish and Chips rivals all others in Santa Fe. C omments : The motto at The Bite: “Love Life – Eat good.” We agree. Santa Fe Capitol Grill 3462 Zafarano Drive. 471-6800. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New American fare. Atmosphere: Contemporary and hip. House specialties: Tuna Steak, the Chicken Fried Chicken with mashed potates and bacon bits, Ceviche, and the New York Strip with a MushroomPeppercorn Sauce. Desserts are on the mark. Comments: A great selection of

wines. Happy hours 3-6 pm and after 9 pm. Saveur 204 Montezuma St. 989-4200. Breakfast/Lunch Beer/Wine. Patio. Visa/Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: French meets American. Atmosphere: Casual. Buffet-style service for salad bar and soups. H ouse specialties : Daily specials, gourmet sandwiches, wonderful soups, and an excellent salad bar. C omments : . Do not pass on the Baby-Back Ribs when they are available. Second Street Brewery 1814 Second St. 982-3030. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Pub grub. Atmosphere: Real casual. House specialties: We enjoy the Beer-steamed Mussels, the Calamari, and the Fish and Chips. Comments: Good selection of beers Shake Foundation 321 Johnson St. 982-9708. Lunch/Early Dinner - 11am-6pm Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: All American. Atmosphere: Casual with outdoor table dining. House specialties: Green Chile Cheeseburger, the Classic Burger, and Shoestring Fries. Comments: Sirloin and brisket blend for the burgers. Take-out or eat at a picnic table. Shohko Café 321 Johnson St. 982-9708. Lunch/Dinner Sake/Beer. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Authentic Japanese Cuisine. Atmosphere: Sushi bar, table dining. House specialties: Softshell Crab Tempura, Sushi, and Bento Boxes. Comments: Friendly waitstaff. Station 430 S. Guadalupe. 988-2470 Breakfast/Lunch Patio Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Light fare and fine coffees and teas. Atmosphere: Friendly. House specialties: For your breakfast, get the Ham and Cheese Croissant. Lunch fave is the Prosciutto, Mozzarella, and Tomato sandwich. Comments: Many Special espresso drinks. El Gancho Old Las Vegas Hwy. 988-3333. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards $$$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Family restaurant House specialties: Aged steaks, lobster. Try the Pepper Steak with Dijon cream sauce. Comments: They know steak here. Steaksmith

at

Sweetwater 1512 Pacheco St. 795-7383 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner. Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine

Teahouse 821 Canyon Rd. 992-0972. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner 7 days Beer/Wine. Fireplace. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Farm-to-fork-to table-to mouth. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: For breakfast, get the Steamed Eggs or the Bagel and Lox. A variety of teas from around the world available, or to take home. Terra at Four Seasons Encantado 198 State Rd. 592, Tesuque. 988-9955. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: American with Southwest influences. Atmosphere: Elegant House specialties: Breakfast: Blue Corn Bueberry Pancakes. Dinner, start with the sublime Beet and Goat Cheese Salad. Follow with the PanSeared Scallops with Foie Gras or the delicious Double Cut Pork Chop. Comments: Chef Andrew Cooper partners with local farmers to bring seasonal ingredients to the table. An excellent wine list The Artesian Restaurant at Ojo Caliente Resort & Spa 50 Los Baños Drive.  505-583-2233 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Wine and Beer Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Local flavors. Atmosphere: Casual, calm, and friendly. House specialties: At lunch we love the Ojo Fish Tacos and the organic Artesian Salad. For dinner, start with the Grilled Artichoke, and foillow with the Trout with a Toa ste Piñon Glaze. Comments: Nice wine bar. The Compound 653 Canyon Rd.  982-4353. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: American Contemporary. Atmosphere: 150-year-old adobe. House specialties: Jumbo Crab and Lobster Salad. The Chicken Schnitzel is always flawless. The dinner steak is marvellus, an alll of the desserts are sublime. Comments: Chef and owner Mark Kiffin isinner of the James Beard Foundation’s “Best Chef of the Southwest” award. The Palace Restaurant & Saloon 142 W. Palace Avenue 428-0690 Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio Major credit cards $$$ Cuisine: Modern Italian Atmosphere: Victorian style merges with the Spanish Colonial aesthetic. House Specialties: For lunch: the Prime Rib French Dip. Dinner: go for the Salmon poached in white wine, or the Steak au Poivre. Comments: Super bar. The Pink Adobe 406 Old Santa Fe Trail. 983-7712. Lunch/ Dinner Full Bar Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All American, Creole, and New Mexican. A tmosphere : Friendly and casual. H ouse specialties : For lunch we love the Gypsy Stew or the Pink Adobe Club Sandwich. Dinner:the Steak Dunigan or the Fried Shrimp Louisianne C o m m e n t s : Cocktails and appetizers at cocktail hour in the Dragon Room is a must! The Shed 113½ E. Palace Ave. 982-9030.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: A local institution located just off the Plaza. House specialties: If you order the red or green chile cheese enchiladas. Comments Always busy., you will never be disappointed. The Ranch House 2571 Cristos Road. 424-8900 Lunch/Dinner Full bar Major credit cards. $$$ C uisine : BBQ and American/New Mexican. A tmosphere : Family and very kid-friendly. H ouse specialties : Josh’s Red Chile Baby Back Ribs, Smoked Brisket, Pulled Pork, and New Mexican Enchilada Plates. C omments : Some of the best BBQ Ribs and Brisket in Santa Fe. Tia Sophia’s 210 W. San Francisco St. 983-9880. Breakfast/Lunch Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Traditional New Mexican. Atmosphere: Easygoing and casual. House specialties: Green Chile Stew, and the traditional Breakfast Burrito stuffed with bacon, potatoes, chile, and cheese. Lunch: choose from the daily specials. Comments: Real deal. Tune-Up Café 1115 Hickox St. 983-7060. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$ C uisine : All World: American, Cuban, Salvadoran, Mexican, and, yes, New Mexican. A tmosphere : Down home. H ouse specialties : For breakfast, order the Buttermilk Pancakes or the TuneUp Breakfast. C omments : Easy on your wallet. A true local hangout. Vanessie

of

Santa Fe

434 W. San Francisco St. 982-9966 Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Piano bar and oversize everything, thanks to architect Ron Robles. House specialties: New York steak and the Australian rock lobster tail. Comments: Great appetizers and generous drinks. Vinaigrette 709 Don Cubero Alley. 820-9205. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Light, bright and cheerful. House specialties : Organic salads. We love all the salads, especially the Nutty Pear-fessor Salad and the Chop Chop Salad. C omments : NIce seating on the patio. When you are in Albuquerque, visit their sister restaurant at 1828 Central Ave., SW. Zacatecas 3423 Central Ave., Alb. 255-8226. Lunch/Dinner Tequila/Mezcal/Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Mexican, not New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Try the Chicken Tinga Taco with Chicken and Chorizo or the Slow Cooked Pork Ribs.C omments : Over 65 brands of Tequila available. Zia Diner 326 S. Guadalupe St. 988-7008. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ C uisine : All-American diner food. A tmosphere : Real casual.H ouse specialties : The perfect Chile Rellenos and Eggs is our breakfast choice. At lunch, we love the Southwestern Chicken Salad, the Fish and Chips, and any of the Burgers C omments : Wonderful selection of sweets for take-out. The bar is most defintely the place to be at cocktail hour.

THE magazine | 25


EUGENE NEWMANN SELECTIONS: THEN AND NOW

Eugene Newmann, Parade, 2014, Oil on canvas, 30” x 40”

Through - November 22, 2014

NANCY DWYER WHAT

Nancy Dwyer, Selfish Idiot, 2014, Blown glass, beads and fishing line, 36” x 45” x 1.5”

Through - December 6, 2014

DavidrichardGALLEry.com The Railyard Arts District

DAVID RICHARD

544 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501

GALLERY

(505) 983-9555 | info@DavidRichardGallery.com


OPENINGS

NOVEMBER ARTOPENINGS Duane Monczewski, Beth Moon, Jennifer

Cartagena. 5-7 pm.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30

CCA, 1050 Old Pecos Tr., Santa Fe. 982-

Schlesinger-Hanson, Takeshi Shikama, and

1338. Art Collision & Repair Shop: group

Keith Taylor. 5-7 pm.

exhibition built on creative collaboration.

Santa Fe Community College, 6401

Richard Levy Gallery, 514 Central Ave.

Richards Ave., Santa Fe. 428-1000. Doña

SW, Alb. 505-766-9888. Careless Water:

Inés Lost Her Slipper: multi-media exhibition

surrealist photographs and video by Saara

by Francisco Benítez. 5-7 pm.

Ekström. 6-8 pm.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31

SCA Contemporary Art, 524 Haines Ave. NW, Alb. 505-228-3749. Sway. Shift.

of nature by Todd Williams. 4-6 pm.

landscape paintings by Gregory Frank Harris.

Angel Wynn Photography, 1036 Canyon

Version 4.0: multi-media works presented

Rd., Santa Fe. 888-765-3332. Ghost Dance—

by Geomorphic Tank. 5-8 pm.

Spirits and Angels: photographs by Wynn. Opening: 4-6 pm. Private party: 6:30-8:30 pm.

Turner Carroll Gallery, 725 Canyon Rd.,

UNDRESS: site-specific exhibition by Paula SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 8

Wilson. 6-8 pm.

Downtown Subscription, 376 Garcia St.,

Hunter Kirkland Contemporary, 200-B

Santa Fe. Anima: black-and-white photographs

Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 984-2111. New Work: 5-7 pm.

Exhibit/208, 208 Broadway Blvd. SE, Alb. 505-450-6884. Ringtone: new work by

Red Dot Gallery, 820 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe.

Valerie Arber. 5-8 pm.

820-7338. Holiday Arts: winter-themed works

Santa Fe. 986-9800. Anomaly: new paintings by Georges Mazilu. 5-7 pm.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 1

IAIA, SFUAD, and UNM. 4:30-7:30 pm.

Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710

Verve Gallery

Rd.,

Santa Fe Clay, 545 Camino de la Familia,

Camino Lejo, Santa Fe. 476-1250. Courage

Marcy St., Santa Fe. 982-5009. Figments

Santa

Katsina

Santa Fe. 984-1122. Get Set!: ceramics

and Compassion—Native Women Sculpting

of Reality—An Exhibition of Contemporary

Carvings of Hopi Pueblo: carvings from

centered on dinnerware sets by Paul

Women: figures of women sculpted by seven

Landscape Images: works by Blue Mitchell,

the 1930s to the present. 5-7 pm.

Eshelman, Camila Friedman-Gerlicz, and

of

Photography, 219 E.

by students, faculty, and alumni from SFCC, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14

Adobe

Gallery, Fe.

221

955-0550.

Canyon The

American Indian women artists.

Clay Leonard. 5-7 pm.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 7

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 16

4685

Las Placitas Presbyterian Church, 7

505-898-

Paseo de San Antonio, Placitas. 505-867-

7203. Annual Holiday Show. 5-8 pm.

8080. Placitas Artists Series: photographs by

Corrales Corrales

Bosque Rd.,

Gallery,

Corrales.

Joe Cabaza. Jewelry by Dennis Lee Gomez. Downtown Subscription, 376 Garcia St.,

Mixed-media works by Diane Orchard. Oil

Santa Fe. Anima: black-and-white nature

paintings by Birgit Seeger-Brooks. 2-3 pm.

photographs by Todd Williams. 4-6 pm.

Concert by Willy Sucre and Friends: 3-5 pm.

IAIA, 83 Avan Nu Po Rd., Santa Fe. Blood FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21

Quantum Drive: student-designed and -built environment that will engage and educate the public about historical and controversial

photo - eye

indigenous issues. 3:30-6:30 pm.

Santa Fe. 988-5152. Solo show: photographs

Gallery, 541 S. Guadalupe St.

by Mitch Dobrowner. 5-7 pm. New Mexico Museum

of

Art, 107 W.

Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 476-5041. Hunting +

Wheelhouse Art, 418 Montezuma Ave.,

Gathering—New Additions to the Museum’s

Santa Fe. 919-0553. Sacred Body Art:

Collection: recently acquired works by Ansel

paintings, sculptures, and photographs by

Adams, Gustave Baumann, Betty Hahn, and

Michael Bergt, Steven Kenny, Ted Flicker,

others. 5-7 pm.

Robert Ash, and others. 5-7 pm.

Nüart Gallery, 670 Canyon Rd., Santa

SPECIAL INTEREST

Fe. 988-3888. Figurations III: new paintings ABQ Uptown’s Tree Lighting, 2200

by six figurative artists.To Oct. 30. 5-7 pm.

Louisiana Blvd. NE, Alb. 3rd annual photo - eye

B ookstore

+

celebration and lighting of the 45-ft. tree.

P roject

Sat., Nov. 15. simon.com

S pace, 376-A Garcia St., Santa Fe. 9885152. Carpoolers: photographs of the shifting political, economic, and physical landscape

of

Mexico

by

Alejandro

Doña Inés Lost Her Slipper, a multi-media exhibition by Francisco Benítez. Visual Arts Gallery at Santa Fe Community College—6401 Richards Avenue, Santa Fe. Reception: Thursday, October 30, 5 to 7 pm. Gallery talk: Thursday, November 6, 1 to 3 pm.

Art House, Thoma Foundation, 231 Delgado St., Santa Fe. 995-0231. Luminous continued on page 30

november

2014

THE magazine | 27


WHO WROTE THIS? “Art is about paying attention� Terry Allen or Carl Andre or Laurie Anderson or Ad Reinhardt

THE DEAL

For artists without gallery representation in New Mexico. Full-page B&W ads for $750. Color $1,000.

Reserve space for the December/January issue by Friday, November 14

505-424-7641 or email: themagazinesf@gmail.com

Honey Harris Show with THE magazine Thursday, November 6 10:30 am

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OUT AND ABOUT photographs Mr. Clix Lauren Tresp Jennifer Esperanza

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Mac (and PC) Consulting 速

Training, Planning, Setup, Troubleshooting, Anything Final Cut Pro, Networks, Upgrades, & Hand Holding

phone: (505) 577-2151 email: Pov@Skardis.com Serving Northern NM since 1996


OPENINGS

Flux: contemporary digital and geometric art.

conversation with Lucy Lippard. Tues., Nov.

Through Sat., March 21, 2015. Open: Thurs.,

18, 6 pm. sitesantafe.org

Fri, Sat. 10-5. 10-5 pm. thomafoundation.org Verve Gallery, 219 E. Marcy St., Santa Fe. Brigitte Brüggemann Studio, 667 Canyon

982-5009. Figments of Reality—An Exhibition

Rd., Santa Fe. 614-5762. After the Bombs—My

of Contemporary Landscape Images: works

Berlin: Heidemarie Sieg reads from her book on

by Blue Mitchell, Duane Monczewski, Beth

growing up iafter WWII. Sun., Nov. 9, 2 pm.

Moon, Jennifer Schlesinger-Hanson, Takeshi Shikama, and Keith Taylor. Book signing with

David Richard Gallery, 544 S. Guadalupe

Beth Moon, Sat., Nov. 8, 1 pm. Through

St., Santa Fe. Cracks In The Light: works

Sat., Jan. 10. vervegallery.com

by Suzan Woodruff. Vertical Stripes: works by Tom Martinelli. Opens Fri., Nov. 28.

PERFORMANCE

Reception: Fri., Dec. 12. 5-7 pm. National Las Cruces Museum

of

Art, 491 N. Main

Performing

Hispanic Arts

Cultural Season,

Center

1701

4th

St., Las Cruces. 575-541-2137. Fragile

St. SW, Alb. 505-246-2261. This season

Waters: photographs by Ansel Adams,

includes Siembra: theater festival, dance

Ernest H. Brooks, and Dorothy Kerper

performances, musical concerts, and more.

Monnelly. Artist/curator evening: Fri., Nov.

26 Miles: an exploration of family relations via

7, 5-7 pm. Through Sat., Jan. 20. las-cruces.

ethnicity and identity. Schedule: nhccnm.org

org/museums New Mexico Dance Coalition, Lensic Patina Gallery, 131 W. Palace Ave., Santa

Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San

C

Fe. 986-3432. Trunk Show: jewelry by Jeff and

Francisco St., Santa Fe. 988-1234. Sacred

M

Susan Wise. Fri., Nov. 7, 11 am-7:30 pm & Sat.,

Body Art: performance of music and

Nov. 8, 11 am-5:30 pm. patina-gallery.com

dance with accompanying art exhibition

Santa Fe Community College Visual Arts Gallery, Rm. 701, 6401 Richards Ave., Santa Fe. 428-1000. Doña Inés Lost Her Slipper: multi-media exhibition by Francisco Benítez. Gallery talk: Thurs., Nov. 6, 1-3 pm.

Top: On Friday, November 14, at 7:30 pm, the New Mexico Dance Coalition presents Sacred Body, a benefit performance of music and dance, with an accompanying art exhibition to benefit the Young Adult Scholarship Program for Healing Movement Arts. At the Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 West San Francisco Street, Santa Fe. Photo: Audrey Derell. Tickets: 984-1234.

to benefit the Young Adult Scholarship

Bottom: Courage and Compassion: Native Women Sculpting Women features figures of women sculpted by seven American Indian women artists. At the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture on Museum Hill, Santa Fe. Sunday, November 2 through Monday, October 19, 2015. Image: Child by Roxanne Swentzell.

sacredbodysantafe.com

Fe

Jewish

Film

MY

Nov. 14, 7:30-9:30 pm. Tickets: 984-1234.

CY

CMY

K

New Mexico School

for

the

Arts,

Festival,

Fe. 989-4423. The Children’s Hour: a tragic

CCA Cinematheque, 1050 Old Pecos Tr.,

story about the power of the spoken word

Santa Fe. 231-5874. New York Triptych: trio

at a school in Scotland. Thurs., Oct. 30, 7

of films, dessert reception, and pizza party.

and 9 pm. Fri., Oct. 31, and Sat., Nov. 1, 7

Regarding Sontag, Sat., Nov. 8 at 7:30 pm.

pm. Tickets: nmschoolforthearts.org/tickets

Sukkah City, Sun., Nov. 9 at 4:30 pm. AKA Doc Pomus, Sun., Nov. 9 at 7 pm. Info and

OneBeat

tickets: santafejff.org

Railyards, 777 1st St. SW, Alb. 516 Arts and

Albuquerque,

Albuquerque

Found Sound Nation present international Santa Fe Main Library, 145 Washington

music, art happenings, and food trucks. Sat.,

St., Santa Fe. Holiday Book Fair on Sun.,

Nov. 1, 5-9 pm. 516arts.org

Nov. 23, featuring area publishers and great prices.

Outpost Performance Space, 210 Yale Blvd. SE, Alb. 505-268-0044. Michael

Silver City Main Street 24th Annual

Datcher—Reading from AMERICUS: Datcher

Lighted Christmas Parade, Sat., Nov. 29,

reads from his historical novel and John

7 pm. silvercitymainstreet.com

Rangel plays jazz piano. Sat., Nov. 15, 7:30 pm. Tickets: outpostspace.org

SITE Santa Fe, Armory for the Arts Theater, 1050 Old Pecos Tr., Santa Fe.

ARTIST CALLS

SITEcenter Panel Discussion: Adriana Bustos in conversation with the Drug Policy Alliance

Currents, New Media Festival deadline for

and the NM Women’s Justice Project. Tues.,

2015 submissions is Mon., Dec. 1, 2014.

Nov. 4, 6 pm. SITEcenter: Patrick Nagatani in

Submit: currentsnewmedia

30 | THE magazine

CM

Program for Healing Movement Arts. Fri.,

Warehouse 21, 1614 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Santa

Y

november

2014


TANSEY CONTEMPORARY “SMALL SCALE BIG IDEAS” November 21, 2014 - January 6, 2015

Charla Khanna “NEW ARTWORKS” November 29 - December 16, 2014

SMALL SCALE BIG IDEAS A multi-media group exhibition featuring smaller versions of the gallery artists work perfect for the giving season. Including Bob Cardinale, Judith Content, Susan Taylor Glasgow, Teri Greeves, Aaron Karp, Lewis Knauss, Frances Priest, Joe Spear, Jeff Uffelman/Hannah Finn, Sheryl Zacharia, and Irina Zaytceva.


PREVIEWS

Get Set! Santa Fe Clay 545 Camino de la Familia, Santa Fe. 984-1122 November 14 to January 3, 2015 Reception: Friday, November 14, 5 to 7 pm Of the many art forms, ceramics lends itself quite elegantly to the table for presentation and use. The trio of artists in this exhibition offers finely crafted slipcast and thrown dinnerware in contrasting aesthetic styles. Contemporary profiles, architectural forms, and clean, strikingly colored glazes on red stoneware bodies characterize the pieces by Paul Eshelman, who earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, lives in rural Illinois, and operates a pottery business. Camila Friedman-Gerlicz offers place settings composed of mathematically derived shapes with patterns of intersecting lines. Each setting varies, yet all work harmonically to create a visually engaging table. Clay Leonard, the head of the ceramics department at Bowling Green University, in Ohio, will show work inspired by a love of mass-produced objects and modern design. His geometric forms allude to beautifully crafted dinnerware that came into vogue in the modern era. The dinner table can be a place of rich social interaction and communication. A beautifully set table acts to engage the eye, and the work of these artists enhances the appeal of the food and provides nourishment for the senses. Camila Friedman-Gerlicz, Dinnerware Set, porcelain, 80” x 96”, 2014

Art Collision & Repair Shop Center for Contemporary Arts 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 982-1338 November 14 to February 1, 2015 Reception: Friday, November 14, 6 to 8 pm Traditionally, artworks are considered finished things: paintings, sculptures, drawings, and other products of the creative process. These objects are viewed, discussed, admired, criticized, and some endure over time, becoming part of the history of art. We rarely see the discards and false starts, which presumably end up in the dumpster or gather dust in the studio. Art Collision & Repair Shop (AC&RS) is a process show in which artists including Charles Greeley, Bob Haozous, Jennifer Joseph, Eve Andrée Laramée, Nora Naranjo-Morse, and Judy Tuwaletstiwa among others, contribute work that are unfinished, stalled, damaged, or not working for them for whatever reasons. Without knowing the origins or back-story of the works, a creative team (Art Mechanics) will view, discuss, alter, and transform them into new works for this exhibition, releasing the problem objects from singular ownership and potentially opening new possibilities beyond the original conceptions. Most artists encounter a block at some point in their working lives. They may take years to resolve the final product or abandon the effort. At AC&RS, Art Mechanics will move the works to unexpected places, repairing faulty concepts and metaphorical malfunctions in artistic tag teams. Artists providing interventions include Paula Castillo, Sydney Cooper, Jamie Hamilton, Caity Kennedy, Katherine Lee, Michael Lujan, Stacey Neff, Erika Wanenmacher, and Jerry Wellman. This intriguing and process-driven concept was developed by co-curators Susan Begy and Kathryn M Davis. Team Robodoll’s contribution to the Art Collision & Repair Shop

32 | THE magazine

november

2014


N AT I O N A L S P O T L I G H T

Untitled (1992) by

Robert Gober

In the mid-1980s Robert Gober began to receive significant art-world attention for his

as well as drawings, prints, and photographs. The re-created installations illustrate the themes

sculptures of everyday domestic objects embedded with references to social justice, freedom,

and motifs that characterize Gober’s work, including portions of the human figure rendered

and tolerance. The oblique works offered a socio-political and psychological end-of-the-

in extreme detail juxtaposed with architectural and other, often disquieting, elements. One

twentieth-century context to their mundane formal structures. By the 90s these works had

striking work included in the exhibition, Untitled, a work that hasn’t been seen since its

evolved into room-size environments, placing viewers within sculptural and enigmatic psychic

installation at the Dia Center for the Arts in 1992, presents a three-hundred-sixty-degree

spaces. Gober represented the United States at the 2001 Venice Biennale and has had one-

hand-painted mural depicting a New England forest in summer surrounding a prone male

person exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center,

figure whose lower body serves as an altar laden with lighted candles. The artist collaborated

Minneapolis; and the Serpentine Gallery, London. His first comprehensive retrospective

with the show’s organizers, Ann Temkin, Chief Curator, and Paulina Pobocha, Assistant

survey opened in September at MoMA, in New York City. Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not

Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture to realize the show. An illustrated catalogue

a Metaphor examines the artist’s career through one hundred and thirty works drawn from

accompanies the exhibition, which runs through January 18, 2015 at the Museum of Modern

public and private collections, ranging from individual sculpture to immersive environments,

Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York City.

november

2014

THE magazine | 33


ALL E X H I B I T I O N S O N V IE W T H RO U G H D EC E M B E R 20, 2014

DAVID MAISEL BLACK MAPS

AMERICAN LANDSCAPE AND THE APOCALYPTIC SUBLIME

An exhibition organized by the CU Art Museum, University of Colorado Boulder

“BEAUTIFUL, DISINTEGRATING OBSTINATE HORROR DRAWING” AND OTHER RECENT ACQUISITIONS AND SELECTIONS FROM THE UNM ART MUSEUM’S

PERMANENT COLLECTION

THE GIFT LUZ RESTIRADA MUSEUM HOURS

Tuesday–Saturday: 10 – 4 Closed on Sundays, Mondays, and major holidays ADMISSION FREE and open to the public. A $5 donation is suggested to help support exhibitions. FOR MORE INFO Please visit: www.unmartmuseum.org or call 505.277.4001.

L ATIN AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHY F ROM THE UNM ART MUSEUM David Maisel (American, b. 1961) The Lake Project 15, 2002 (detail); pigment print, 2012; 48 48 inches; A / P; Image

×

courtesy of the artist; © David Maisel Andy Warhol (American,1928–1987) ; Queen Ntombi, 1985; from the series Reigning Queens (Royal Edition ); Screenprint and diamond dust on Lenox Museum Board; 39 3/8 31 1/2 inches; Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.; © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

×


F E AT U R E

Henry Darger and the Virgins Galactic by

Diane Armitage

Detail: At Jennie Richee. After being shown how to escape from Guern by their help, they ask creatures to display their wings, which they do. Watercolor, pencil, carbon tracing on pieced paper, Approx: 24” x 108”. The Museum of Everything.

“Darger’s external life was so small, so unobtrusive

MY

introduction to the work of the selftaught

artist

Henry

Darger,

who

was born in 1892, came from an article by A. M. Homes in the May 1997 issue of Artforum. What had

(did he fear being sent back to the institution?) that it

initially galvanized my interest in unusual or even extreme artistic visions outside of the mainstream was seeing an exhibition, in 1989, of work done

gave no clue as to the enormity of his inner/other life.”

by Adolf Wölfli (1864 -1930). Wölfli was severely emotionally disturbed and he spent most of his adult life institutionalized in Switzerland and often

—A. M. Homes, “Inside Out: The Art of Henry Darger,” Artforum, May 1997

kept in isolation, yet he was given the tools and the encouragement by his doctor to express himself

continued on page 36 november

2014

THE magazine | 35


Darger’s work was generated from his own private ocean of mysticism,

At Jennie Richee. Blengiglomenean creature of [Conceptia Type] rescues child being swept away in cushion chair by Storm. Watercolor, pencil, carbon tracing, and collage on pieced paper, 24” x 107”. The Museum of Everything.

on paper, which he did with an hallucinatory zeal.

at the age of eight Darger was put into a Catholic

In the early days of Darger-mania which set in

Wölfli’s art, like Darger’s, continues to astonish for

orphanage for boys when his father could no longer

when his work was slowly revealed to the public

its unbounded energy and its direct connection to

take care of him. So as Darger’s imaginary life was

after the artist died, in 1973, there was a certain

the inner plateaus of meaning attached to individuals

beginning to take shape, influenced by the fantasy

amount of misleading information that was also

who live outside the laws of polite society.

books he avidly read, part of his world was abruptly

disseminated about him—that he was “feeble-

extreme

shut down with the disappearance of his mother

minded,” that he was also insane, and that he lived

derangement like Wölfli’s, yet the same word,

and a tiny sibling, only to have this early shattering

as a total recluse, locked away in his “realms of the

“hallucinatory,” could be used to describe his

expanded when he was separated from his father

unreal.” Feebleminded he definitely wasn’t. And

staggering body of work created out of a self-

and put in a home—his circle of abandonment

although as a child he was traumatized by death

imposed isolation on his long road from precocious

complete and irrevocable. At the age of seventeen,

and loss, coupled with the severity of the Catholic

child—his father said he began to talk at age one and

Darger ran away from the orphanage and settled in

nuns who raised him, Darger’s early interest in

he began to read at age four—to peculiar little boy,

Chicago where he remained until the end of his life,

fantasy—for example, he owned and had read all of

a word his father used to describe him. Darger’s

supporting himself well into his seventies with jobs

the Oz books—would set in motion an obsessive

mother died when he was four after giving birth to a

such as janitor, dishwasher, and bandage maker, until

and decades-long construction of an inner universe

sister who was quickly put up for adoption, and then

he was forced to retire due to physical ailments.

of words and images so complex and bizarre that

Darger’s

story

is

not

one

of


F E AT U R E

filled with marvelous and complex revelations.

there is no other body of work in the history of art

and perverse monumental saga depicting the Vivian

Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. There is nothing

to compare it with.

Girls and their involvement in a bloody series of

that anyone could write that would prepare the

It has been said by some art historians and

battles with very wicked individuals—both adults

viewer or the reader for Darger’s mind-bendingly

aficionados that Darger is not only one of the most

and children. Bonesteel is also a contributor to the

mythic tale of murder, mayhem, torture, and hell on

influential outsider artists, but one of the most

recently reprinted and lavishly illustrated art book,

earth, where little girls with penises are captured,

important contemporary artists as well. Michael

Henry Darger, edited by Klaus Biesenbach, a curator

evade capture, apprehend grownup male soldiers,

Bonesteel, in the introduction to his survey of

at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with

are slaughtered, and engage in slaughter in return.

the artist’s work, Henry Darger: Art and Selected

other contributions by Brooke Davis Anderson and

There are pages and pages of battles, ambushes,

Writings, published in 2000, wrote, “Perhaps it is not

Carl Watkins.

enslavements, periods of rest and recreation, and

so much a matter of whether or not Darger belongs

The full title of Darger’s magnum opus—it

divine interventions by colorful flying creatures

in the Outsider art category, but more a matter

comprises a fifteen-thousand page novel and many

like the Gigantic Gazonian Type of Poisonous

of whether that category can truly contain him.”

hundreds of fantastic collages, some of them eleven-

Tuskhoriean. Reclusive though Darger was, he did

Bonesteel’s book was one of the first comprehensive

feet wide—is this tongue twister: The Story of the

have one close friend and he was out and about on

efforts to attempt an in-depth critical assessment of

Vivian Girls, in What is Known as The Realms of

the streets of Chicago collecting things and words

Darger’s strange biography and his often violent

The Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm,

and images with a vengeance. He copied, traced, continued on page 38

november

2014

THE magazine | 37


At Sunbeam Creek. Are with little girl refugees again in peril from forest fires. But escape this also, but half naked and in burned rags / At Torrington. Are persued by a storm of fire but save themselves by jumping into a stream and swim across as seen in next

and photo-enlarged his source material from

was a photograph of a five-year-old murder victim,

in a creative and positive fashion by channeling this

comic books, comic strips, newspapers, monthly

Elsie Paroubek, and when Darger realized the

personal crisis into his art.” What the madeleine

magazines, and coloring books, always altering

image had disappeared, it set in motion an inner

was to Marcel Proust, the missing photograph was

the mostly bland facial expressions of children and

turmoil from which arose the fictional character

to Henry Darger, the catalyst for a body of artwork

adults to suit his restless imagination that usually

of Annie Aronburg, heroine of the great Glandeco-

like no other before or since. Yes, little Elsie’s image

edged toward chaos and tempestuous situations.

Angelinian War. But before Darger turned his loss

was definitely Darger’s madeleine, but it was also

The sometimes small but mostly huge collages

into art, he begged God to return the photograph—

the chronic thorn in his conflicted Christian flesh.

that Darger created with these found and altered

he pleaded, threatened, and cursed his way to the

The Vivian Girls written fantasy was begun in

images were embellished with his own watercolor

other side of his already fixated mind. In Bonesteel’s

1912 and the collages began around 1920. And if

landscapes and fantasy backdrops.

view, “Darger actually may not have decided to

the reading of the novel is beyond most people’s

What seemed to be the event that triggered

use the Paroubek photo as the model for Annie

patience, the collages are nothing short of amazing.

Darger’s nosedive into his intense inner life,

Aronburg until after it was lost and the artistic and

Darger was gifted at the appropriation of his source

subsequently bringing it into the light of day, was

psychological value of the photo may have resided

materials and no matter how one might translate

the disappearance of a photograph he had clipped

precisely in the fact of its having disappeared. It is

some of his subconscious urges, he was utterly

out of the Chicago Daily News on May 9, 1911. It

conceivable that Darger deliberately used the loss

masterful in his use of space, color, texture, and


F E AT U R E

picture / At Torrington. They reach the river just in the nick of time. Their red color is caused by the glare of the flames… Watercolor, pencil, carbon tracing, and collage on pieced paper, 19” x 70½”. Collection: American Folk Art Museum. All Images: Courtesy Prestel

the various tableaux of bodies and gestures and

always thought he had visitors in his room, but that

intricate strangeness of Darger’s “realms of the

facial

was never the case.

unreal,” in the last analysis his work was generated

expressions

of

every

description—from

angelic repose to horrific near-death experiences to

Whatever the nature of Darger’s pathology—

from his own private ocean of mysticism, filled with

death by strangulation and worse. Darger’s sense

some psychologists have suggested he was on the

marvelous and complex revelations—some of them

of control over every mood, pattern, emotional

autistic spectrum with an obsessive-compulsive

peculiar indeed, but all of them created in a unique

display, weather pattern, and contextual landscape

disorder—the artist projected his convoluted

unwavering style, mirroring back to a seemingly

defies comprehension given the narrow outer

fantasies onto a continually unfolding screen that

indifferent world the artist’s rich but complicated

circumference of his life. While he was alive, no one

renders his work nothing if not cinematic and

interior life. The enormity of Darger’s inner space,

knew about these thousands of pages of a parallel

resonant with deeply rooted traumas, perverse wish

the sheer breadth of his astounding vision, in the

universe, or his five-thousand-page autobiography,

fulfillments, and the constant need to transmute his

end only ill health prevented him from adding to

or his second monumental work of fiction, or his

internal sea of struggles into a tapestry of survival

it, dredging more images from his imagination,

weather journal, which had a tornado named

against all odds. This tormented man found his own

more configurations of battles won and lost by

Sweetie Pie as a main protagonist. No one knew.

exultation in his protean imagination that took him

his Virgins Galactic—all actions in opposition to

Only sometimes, late at night, he could be heard

beyond his physical pains and conflicted sense of

and in agreement with the topography of his

talking to himself in many different voices so people

self. However you want to regard the immense and

inward being.

november

2014

THE magazine | 39


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November 1 - 30, 2014 Opening Reception & Award Ceremony: Nov. 1, 1 - 6pm Hours: Tuesday - Sunday, 10am - 5pm (Closed November 27 for Thanksgiving)

EXPO NM in Hispanic Arts Center 300 San Pedro NE • Albuquerque

Open to Public ❖ Free Admission ❖ Free Demos For More Info go to: .www.pastelsnm.org

Available FREE at art venues throughout the state

To order your copy visit www.NorthLightShop.com or call 800.258.0929


CRITICAL REFLECTION

Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime

University of New Mexico Art Museum 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

In the Marxian sense of dialectics, all thought is subject to nature. Nature is not subject to our systems…. Dialectics could be viewed as the relationship between the shell and the ocean. Art critics and artists have for a long time considered the shell without the context of the ocean. —Robert Smithson, The Writings of Robert Smithson

ONE OF THE MOST STUNNING PHOTOGRAPHS EVER CAPTURED OF ROBERT SMITHSON’S Spiral Jetty is by David Maisel. This iconic aerial view, which is part of Maisel’s Terminal Mirage series, appeared as the lead image in an article about Smithson in a December/January 2005 issue of Bookforum. The dramatic photograph—half black land, half blood-red lake, punctuated by the all-white Spiral Jetty—has all the hallmarks of Maisel’s style. He shoots his images from an airplane high above a site, and his provocative compositions are mediated by the artist’s feel for color, texture, and form—visual artifacts of the aftermath of industrial interventions on the land. Maisel’s exhibition Black Maps is nothing if not unbelievably gorgeous, but it’s also problematic. Is there something questionable about making the toxic and the tainted look so alluring? Even as I wanted to steep myself in the dense beauty of the twentyeight large photographs—lose myself in the vibrant yet poisonous blues, greens, yellows, and reds—I had to remind myself that these works are visions of entropy by the yard. Although Maisel’s famous shot of the Spiral Jetty is not part of this touring exhibition, there are other images from his Terminal Mirage pieces along with four other series: Oblivion, American Mine, The Lake Project, and The Mining Project—all aerial photographs and so thoroughly abstracted from the original land formations that you think you’re looking at reproductions of abstract paintings. Thoughts about Clyfford Still’s work surfaced along with many references to Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series. It’s hard to believe that the viewer is looking instead at documentation of mine tailings, for example, or abandoned excavation sites, or the residues of a drained lake left to a continual process of erosion. Or maybe it’s a tailings pond with its phantasmagoric color schemes that partially come from the natural world—a range of hues originating from minerals, algae, and bacteria in a toxic embrace with pollution—a crystallization of the devastation in certain parts of the American West yet so utterly ravishing it hurts. What is painful about all of these phenomenal images is that Maisel’s aestheticization of the awful obliterates the true scope of the damage done and leaves us contemplating ruined landscapes as incidents of the sublime—his ruins become a labyrinth of extreme pictorial exposures from which there is no escape into any hope of reclamation. There are only our awestruck shivers at so much terrible beauty. In 1757, Edmund Burke introduced to European aesthetes the concept of the sublime in his treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Some of Burke’s thoughts on the sublime came from writers like John Dennis who crossed the Alps in 1688 and shivered at the sensations he experienced: “a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, which produced a pleasant kind of trembling.” It was this terribilità, this “agreeable horror” that was at the center of the awestruck feelings, generated within extreme experiences of nature, november

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that Burke extolled. “So it would be in shadow and darkness and dread and trembling, in caves and chasms, at the edge of the precipice, in the shroud of the cloud, in the fissures of the earth, that he insisted in his “Inquiry” the sublime would be discovered,” wrote Simon Schama in his masterful book Landscape and Memory. That concept of ruins, chaos, and catastrophe fed the Romantic imagination as it continues to do in our own contemporary minds. And for all the cynicism in Smithson’s thinking, he was a postmodern Romantic who sprinkled images of landscape as a “vast crystal lattice”—both inspiring and culturally unredeemed— throughout his extraordinary work. He gave us, if nothing else, the Spiral Jetty and its dialectical presence in the Great Salt Lake, submerging and reemerging in cyclical fashion. However, Maisel’s photographs seem one step removed from direct experiences of the devastated landscapes he documents. The tailings ponds, the excavated remains of mining sites— all the mysterious formations he has photographed in his quest for images of the postmodern sublime have the patina of too much detached beauty, and they tend to eclipse the chaos at the fulcrum of his images. How far can we let an aesthetics of catastrophe take us from the root level of the problem? I was of two minds looking at this profoundly arresting body of work: I felt I could look at these images forever, dissecting each crack in the desiccated floor of the earth, each tonally rich gradation of lethal aqua water that, if one were immersed in it, would strip us to the bone in no time. Every blasted hill and mesa, every containment pond in its grid of banked and poisoned earth, can sustain prolonged scrutiny by the viewer. But I also felt a sense of despair that each of Maisel’s “terminal mirages” was just one more shell without its ocean—a series of beautiful losers beckoning us to join them in our own apocalypse now.

Top: David Maisel, Terminal Mirage 2, 2003, pigment print, 48” x 48”, 2012 Bottom: David Maisel, Terminal Mirage 5, 2003, pigment print, 48” x 48”, 2012

—Diane Armitage

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Evolving Intentions in Public Art

Center for Contemporary Arts 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe

WHAT IF ART ISN’T AN OBJECT BUT A SURPRISE, A RIPPLE IN THE FABRIC of everyday life, just lying by the roadside waiting for us to notice? CCA’s recent daylong symposium—the morning panel devoted to work and projects, the afternoon devoted to a roundtable, with provocative questions by moderator Michelle LaFlamme-Childs—touched on fundamental issues about what art can mean or do in our fragmented social environment, including original elaborations on the eternal question of why artists make art. Evolving Intentions in Public Art explored the heady experimentation and deep commitment involved in long-term projects involving many people, or individual anonymous guerilla actions, unexpected interventions, and ephemeral works. Documented by organizer Christy Hengst, it will be made into a book. Issa Nyaphaga, from Cameroon, who lives in Santa Fe and Paris, started a people’s radio station that did not parrot official government views; he was persecuted in his country for a graphic newspaper for those who could not read. The issue of “permission” for art reminds us that there are always boundaries. In America we may be simply ignored, but imagine a society where you are jailed and tortured for your work. Still, there’s risk in this kind of work. Anonymous, unsanctioned things allow little control over security. And an artist wants to get credit for her work. Permission for many of these events or interventions, however temporary and non-invasive, might not have been granted, due to the nature of institutions, agencies, and bureaucracies. How does one get funding or even document the work? The strategy of Nancy Holt, who owns the land on which she built Sun Tunnels, is not always

available. To reach the general public in their everyday life, you must place things in their path, go to them, not wait for them to come to you, enter a gallery, or deliberately choose to “view” some art. Paula Castillo, Alysa Shaw, Aly Krekmeier of El Otro Lado, Molly Sturges (COAL and Lifesongs), and Dominique Mazeaud and Bobbe Besold of Rivers Run Through Us discussed goals and challenges in their projects in terms of engaging people with their environment or one another—from school children and local residents to elderly dementia patients, who needed some listening to be able to tell their stories. Edie Tsong talked about Snow Poems—which solicited short poems—and posted them in large type in the windows of buildings. Christy Hengst installed her delicate life-size porcelain white bird-like small sculptures with silk-screened images of war and peace in public spaces. Birds in the Park alighted around Santa Fe (City Hall, the Santa Fe Public Library) and in places as diverse as the Washington Mall and Galapagos Islands. Temporary and fragile, they opened up a space for people to linger, tilt their heads, and ask questions. Perhaps we don’t often enough just linger for a moment to notice something subtle and ask who did that; why did they do it? Matthew Chase-Daniels’ Gourdsigns on local road medians mimicked other more mundane street signage. He saw it as a playful way to give bored drivers something different to look at. He and Jerry Wellman are the force behind Axle Contemporary, whose most visible manifestation is a converted van, a mobile art gallery,

seen around town—like an ice cream truck for the soul. For Chase-Daniels it was important that, while he did not get “permission” for those Gourdsigns, they were kept within a public-safety paradigm. Wellman spoke about a kind of “dancing around legality” with this work. One can start as totally “rogue” and seamlessly morph into a commodity, as Banksy demonstrates. For Chase-Daniels’ Dollar Distribution, fifteen hundred dollars, raised on Kickstarter, was left as individual dollar bills around Santa Fe—on sidewalks, in a tree, or in a book in the library. Though he posted photographs of some of the greenbacks in their spots, they were unmarked; so fifteen hundred people had an experience, unique for each of them. The point is not whether art should be a commodity or should rebel against that status. The immersive installations now so common may be a transitional form between these two poles. Vince Kadlubek of Meow Wolf talked about the Due Return installation, produced collaboratively by numerous artists. For some people it seemed too messy or even “fun” to be serious art, Kadlubek said. True artists are driven to make their work. Certainly they need income, residencies, commissions, and support. But limiting “art” to an object that we look at in a museum or buy and take home is too narrow. What is it about sports events, Wellman asked, that makes twenty million people tune in and be utterly involved? How could art have that same kind of appeal? Sanjit Sethi, director of Santa Fe Art Institute, referenced scenarios for collective “ritual” forms in some cultures, such as civic or religious processionals. We have few public rituals unmediated by corporate products. There are immediatist moments, like Halloween, when people walk around their neighborhoods participating in their own way in a wider cultural ritual. In my neighborhood on July 4, people take chairs into the street to enjoy the fireworks. No one tells us where to sit, when to leave, and we don’t buy anything—we even sometimes talk to one another! Maybe such banal times and places are potential points for art intervention—what Hakim Bey calls Temporary Autonomous Zones. How does one create, even for a moment, something that brings into being a sense— perhaps the only sense that might save humanity and our planet—that “we are all in the same boat.” Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift argues that certain important aspects of life are badly organized by the marketplace—artistic practice, which is what the book mostly discusses, but also pure science, spiritual life, healing, and teaching. Hyde eloquently demonstrates that the economy of artistic practice is akin to the ancient practice of gift exchange.

—Marina La Palma

Issa Nyaphaga, Cameroon or Bust, photograph, 2014


CRITICAL REFLECTION

Dirk de Bruycker: Logos 1613 Paseo

LewAllen Galleries Peralta, Santa Fe

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THE TERM LOGOS HAS INTRIGUING, MULTIVALENT MEANINGS WITHIN VARIOUS contexts and time periods. It makes for a provoking exhibition title for the recent show of Dirk de Bruycker’s oil paintings at LewAllen Galleries’ Railyard location. The ancient Greek word originally meant “word,” “speech,” “account,” “to reason,” “a plea.” It became a philosophical term for the principles of order and reasoned knowledge beginning with Heraclitus (c. 535-475 B.C.). The Stoics understood logos as the governing or animating principle that ordered all things. In Christianity, logos is the divine Word of God through which all

things are made. In de Bruycker’s words, “Logos is a Greek word for non-mathematical, non-scientific, non-linear order, rather an intuitive, subjective, and complex order.” The exhibition of the Belgian painter’s canvases is framed in these concepts of organic order and the productive powers of intuitive knowing. De Bruycker is an abstract painter currently splitting his time between Santa Fe and Granada, Nicaragua. His body of work reflects a sincere dedication and faith in the many possibilities of his choice of simple media and process.

He begins with brushwork in asphaltum—a transparent brown-black mineral pigment—over which he layers gesso. He then adds luminous colors by pouring oil paints and manipulating the canvas to allow them to spread and blossom into fluid veils and washes. The variable timing of this layering process creates surface textures that range from cracking, rippling colors to glossy reflections and matte depths. This technique and the resulting aesthetic fall into the lineage of color-field painting. De Bruycker’s work has been likened to that of Helen Frankenthaler. His semi-automatic technique recalls the canvas-staining of Joan Miró. Within this lineage de Bruycker surrenders some of his authority by allowing gravity to exert itself, and by holding space for the natural reactions between his media. Chance and randomness are allowed to express their own sense of reason and order. The task for the artist is in striking a balance between controlled and uncontrolled activities, between conscious and un- or subconscious execution of the desired effect. The resulting images share a visual and conceptual kinship with Rorschach inkblots: they are familiar and evocative in their organic fluidity, yet truly and purely abstract. The most striking element of the exhibition is de Bruycker’s choice of palette; these are the most vivid and brilliant hues he’s ever used—crimson, violet, ochre, and yellow bloom and burgeon in layers of remarkable lucidity. These amorphous silken veils express the beauty of color itself, charged with light and grounded by the earthen traces of asphaltum underpainting. Conspicuously absent are shades of green and blue—two colors abundant in nature. The painter instead favors a palette he has encountered during his travels to India, Latin America, and New Mexico. For de Bruycker these tones carry spiritual undertones and imbue his act of painting with the practices of spiritual longing. These process paintings are meditations, both in their creation and viewing, though they are not without drama. The artist uses the Flemish word tweestrijd to describe an inner battle or divisiveness: “Let’s say the struggle between passion and gloom, or reason versus excess, or action versus meditation. The restless heart or soul is searching for a more harmonious ‘coexistence’ of conflicting emotional states.” Often within each canvas this conflict is working itself out. Ominous clouds of deep purple complement and give weight to the joyous flowerings of vermilion and gold. More subtly, the pervasive asphaltum washes are like ghostly echoes of the material ground from which these sublime plumes of light emerge. For example, in Surge (2014) ripples of gray asphaltum crawl toward the edges of the canvas in an elliptical mandala. Unrelenting yellow radiates and unfurls from a bed of terra-cotta and purple. Here, color becomes logos: it gives life and breath to the stoic and still. Harmony arises from the gentle turmoil.

—Lauren Tresp Dirk de Bruycker, Surge, asphalt, gesso, cobalt drier and oil on canvas, 72” x 60”, 2014

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THE magazine | 43


Persistence of Memory

Wheelhouse Art 418 Montezuma Avenue, Santa Fe

“THE MIND WILL ALWAYS MAKE ASSOCIATIONS OF SOME KIND. IT WANTS MEANING.” So says Dirk Kortz, the artist whose surrealist paintings were on exhibition at Wheelhouse Art this past October. The new kid in town, Wheelhouse is in the Railyard, around the corner from the Jean Cocteau Cinema, and is the result of a partnership between two veterans of the Santa Fe art world, Joyce Stolaroff and Scott Chambers. Welcome to the biz, you two! Kortz is another old-timer, and I’ve been seeing his work around town for years now. I gather that he tends to work in series, always in his signature, mostly realist vein; figurative work usually rendered in a style that leans toward the illustrative, with references to comic-book graphics of the mid-twentieth century. In this series, Kortz pays worshipful tribute to Salvador Dalí’s legendary arrangement of melting watches, complete with a crude—possibly sexualized—self-portrait, and ants marching to the beat of corruption and decay. According to the Web site of the famous painting’s keeper, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory (1931) with what he called “‘the most imperialist fury of precision,’ but only, he said, ‘to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.’”

Surrealism, arguably the offspring of psychoanalysis and Dada, generally encompassed two modes: amorphous, organic shapes associated with the occult practice of automatic writing (think of André Masson and Joan Miró), and a trompe l’oeil style that belied the underpinnings of reality (Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, René Magritte). Both modes symbolized the realm of the subconscious. Both made a mess of meaning. Kortz’s artwork shares with the Surrealists a denial of ready access to interpretation. His jumbles of dream-like images, with their signposts of the past, beg for explanation. However, as he posits, “my intention was to make them as purely visual as possible while still using representational images, to create a kind of mysterious resonance between images that cannot be associated in a literal way. The more the associations bypass explanation, the better.” Boy, do they bypass explanation! It’s almost maddening, by and large in a good way. The best works in the show, in my opinion, follow the densely packed visual style of the lotería card in a satisfying composition packed with colorful and arbitrary symbols. The giclée, Persistence of Memory, consists of gridded squares six images across and six down and really brings home the lotería

motif. Anything and everything, it seems, is fodder for Kortz’s paintings: Buddha, birds, a woman dancing with a man, magic mushrooms, a white cat, a man working on an old car, the Botero-like figure of a swimming man in red trunks and goggles, more birds, dolls and clowns, a ballerina, a Frisbeecatching dog, cowboys, pieces of machinery, apes, a body builder. All of them hint at the kind of excitement of danger and action a little boy might have found in Saturday-morning cartoons during the 1950s and 60s. One may suppose, from his ironically retro imagery, that Kortz was that boy. My one complaint with this work is that its emphasis on that retro-hipness gets to feeling rather formulaic and forced. I can’t help but wonder how a painting by him with its iconography set in the present would come across. In person, I was quite fascinated by the atypically simple composition of I Dreamed I Was Young Again. A horizontally bifurcated canvas with Hokusai’s wave topped by a bevy of brunette women in their little black dresses, many of the ladies wearing pearls, the picture was strangely compelling. Maybe I just like Hokusai. Maybe it was the juxtaposition of a direct reference to classical Japanese art with women from the Junior League that hooked me; I remain stumped. And intrigued. The Explanation is perhaps the best indicator of what this exhibition looked like. Despite the title, the painting defies reason, explication, or rationalization. In fact, precisely because it is so nonsensical, the viewer stares at each image within the picture, certain that there is a connection between the dunce-capped, dismayed man at its center and the surrounding images. Triumphant fishermen pull in the world’s biggest trout while a couple fox trots. A red-breasted, black-winged bird seems ready to warble happily, while the comicstrip woman in the lower right corner laughs derisively. The grisaille background of jagged mountain peaks is balanced by a foreground straight out of Arches National Park. Are these snapshots of the artist’s past? Memories of a nightmare? An existential crisis that just won’t quit? The problem with, and the strength of, this painting is that it just won’t resolve on an overt level. I like that in my art.

—Kathryn M Davis Dirk Kortz, The Explanation, oil on canvas, 38” x 48”, 2013


CRITICAL REFLECTION

Sam Scott: Messages from the Wounded Healers

Center for Contemporary Arts 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe

CARL JUNG INTRODUCED THE ARCHETYPE OF THE WOUNDED HEALER. Jung devised the concept to describe a dynamic between analyst and analyzed, arguing that only a physician who was “wounded” also had the empathy required to effect healing in a patient. Jung drew upon the ancient Greek myth in which the immortal centaur Chiron, a son of the Titan Cronos with great healing skills, was wounded by a poisoned arrow yet continued to heal others, until at length he could trade his immortality with Prometheus in return for the release of death and new life as a constellation. Recently, the topos of the wounded healer has been examined as a cultural archetype represented throughout various periods in a range of diverse cultures, including African, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. Sam Scott’s Messages from the Wounded Healers (2004-2006) adopts this archetype as the underlying narrative of the fourteen large canvases (80” x 54”) in his series of oil paintings whose theme is the loss inflicted by 9/11 and absorbed through healing over time. Images of several paintings from the series can be viewed at http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3042. Scott’s totemic healer figure assumes diverse guises of more or less anthropomorphic cast, depending on the cultural sources, some of which the wall text references. There is the avenging creature Golem (“shapeless mass”) from the psalms and the Talmud, created from the soil; the Greek Titan Enceladus, born from the blood of Uranus and buried under Mount Etna; the gigantic but well-meaning Hindu god Kumbhakarna; and Native American traditions of the guardian figures. What is common to all these creatures is their origin in the earth, or nature, and some magical trait tied to their amorphous—thus “disfigured”—state that brands or “wounds” them at the same time as it empowers them to

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heal as well as to destroy. It is the source of their dual fate: to “suffer and safeguard.” The titles as well as the specific forms of the wounded healer throughout the fourteen paintings attest to the cultural reach of Scott’s archetypal guardian figure. In several paintings, such as Bell in an Empty Sky (2006), the figure is a coarsely rendered towering peak set against a vast backdrop of barren plain—a primordial Shiprock. In other paintings the figure assumes anthropomorphic aspects that allude to its ancient culture. One work conjures the Hindu Kumbhakarna, another evokes some Egyptian demon or the Titan Enceladus. But many of the paintings, such as Canyon Walker: Song of the Canyon Wren (2004), Corn (2005), and Yellow House Walking (2004), appear to call up protectors from Native American mythologies, a resource that Scott drew upon from earlier times spent with the Oglala Sioux tribe and from his life in the Southwest. Twenty-one preparatory studies for the series accompany the Messages exhibition. Scott brings the full range of his prodigious gifts as a painter to bear in these small studies, abstracted desert tableaux produced by calligraphic passages of pen and ink over pastel washes on paper. The guardian motifs explored in the studies are a key impetus for Scott, yet they are not critical to viewer response or the success of the compositions, each of which stands alone as an errant arabesque of tremorous line and lyric color. For the series itself, however, Scott has restrained those formal qualities in the service of the underlying narrative. The heavy brushwork is more frenzied than fluid; the resulting guardian forms are broadly outlined in oxblood reds, cadmium yellows and deep viridian greens against

garish desert blue or alizarin skies, yielding a stark figure-ground contrast that imbues the surface and its pervasive impasto with the ritual force of a sand painting or a pictograph. In the instances where Scott has visually integrated the guardian figure with the surrounding landscape, the painting’s harmony subtly alters its focus from that of the purgative “wound” to that of the act of healing. Yet in Messages from the Wounded Healers it is not so much the formal aspects of the compositions but the narrative element— mythic, symbolic, ritual—that transmits the emotive weight. What comes to mind is Surrealist painting, for example by Max Ernst, where the German Expressionist syntax of the work is subsumed by the surreal narrative of its abstracted figuration. Closer to home, Scott’s ideographic style here shares an affinity with Jackson Pollock’s recourse to indigenous myth. In Pollock’s 1943 Guardians of the Secret, its pervasive gestural marks and vibrant colors defer to the two gateway sentry figures, inspired by Native American sentinel spirits that dominate the composition and convey its import. Each painting in the exhibition works when seen as part of the ensemble much in the same way that monolithic temple columns achieve their effect as a colonnade. Taken as a whole, Sam Scott’s Messages from the Wounded Healers imparts to its cryptic narrative an expressive content embodied, as Scott aptly described it, as “solitary figures in a transcendental landscape.”

—Richard Tobin Sam Scott, Installation view, 2014

THE magazine | 45


Between Two Worlds: Folk Artists Reflect on the Immigrant Experience

Museum of International Folk Art 706 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe

“Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” —John Lennon

WHAT EXACTLY IS IMMIGRATION AND HOW DOES IT AFFECT PEOPLE, as a construct and an actuality? The exhibition Between Two Worlds, in the Mark Naylor and Dale Gunn Gallery of Conscience at the International Folk Art Museum, explores this question and others through art objects, informative wall texts, and active viewer participation. The art comes from IFAM and collections around the world, and is also accomplished in real time, often anonymously, at multiple interactive stations where viewers express themselves and their own experience of immigration in writing or pictures. Mildred Rodriguez’s poem We Survive (courtesy of the sixteen-year-old poet) is a testament to the perseverance of those who uproot from ancestral or multi-generational surroundings to make life elsewhere and anew, though governments and national boundaries often oppose them. As in so many of the pieces and stories, the sense of two homes is strongly felt. Sometimes this is expressed as being split in two, and sometimes it emerges as a life of richer meanings. Opportunities to respond or react with your own poetry are amply supplied. Kimimila Immigration Cradle, a traditional tanned hide and beadwork baby backpack made by Florida artist Thomas “Red Owl” Haukaas, bears the beaded inscription The border crossed us. Turns out you don’t even have to uproot to become an immigrant. Though of course the vast majority of the indigenous people of the Americas were “relocated” by “border guards” of one form or another during the world’s largest ethnic cleansing campaign. That’s Haukaas’s point. Or ask those Semites seeking a peaceful return of their ancestral homeland, the people of Palestine. I suspect they share the sentiment. The Hellenistic Hebrews in 72 AD, when Titus of Rome trashed the Second Temple of Solomon, or those fleeing Nazism, must have also felt hard crossed by the border. Which is why zealous, bigoted—you call it genocide, we call it “mowing the lawn”—Zionism comes as such a sad surprise. Or Africans forced at gunpoint into slave ships to make an immigration journey they never asked for. In fact, in all cases of immigration where we see

people suffer it is at the hands of nation-state regimes imposing (always) imaginary, often religious, strictures upon a given population defined as ethnically different, and therefore sub-human. Worldwide ethnic tribalism, so much a source of pride for all peoples for good reasons, is a plus for humanity and this exhibition. The fact that it can be exploited, and turned to hatred and racism has been a major stumbling block since the late Neolithic. It girds the greed that is war, the destruction of culture that is militant globalism, and the xenophobia that is genocide. In reality it’s always the border that does the crossing, not really the other way around. Or settle into this immigration story. You’re a fourteen-year-old girl from El Salvador, Earth’s current homicide capital, who has made the dangerous trip through Central America to seek asylum in the United States only to be deported “home.” You aren’t an immigrant in the existential sense, because you haven’t

successfully immigrated, and the border you can’t cross has just crossed you out. Stay or go, everyone is trapped as long as the planet’s people continue with nation-state border mis-conceptions, and the human misery they inevitably birth. The solution to the so-called immigration crisis in the United States and elsewhere lies in the rapid distribution of wealth away from the one-percenters into the hands of the working people across the globe. The best bet at this point is a globalism based upon respect for indigenous culture worldwide and a green and clean and well-intentioned economic structure that allows for sustainable affluence as defined by normal human needs and respect for the cultural prerogatives of each diverse tribal population. Basic worldwide affluence is the key to the fear-of-scarcity-derived worries about overpopulation. In affluent nations the birth rates decrease. The world economy needs to be maintained sustainably for the benefit of all, not run as something to make a killing on (pun intended) despite deadly consequences to future generations, soil, water, and air. Some version of Herman E. Daly’s “steady-state economy” is definitely in order. Imagine that. All of us indigenous to a planet criss-crossed in our minds with lines that hurt and kill, but don’t really exist; a clear case of mistaking the map for the territory, with dreadful consequences. If we are going to be bound by imaginary maps and makebelieve economic constructs, let’s imagine better ones. The biggest lesson of the International Folk Art Museum, throughout all its events and exhibitions is that we are all of us born of unique and significant cultural circumstances that add meaning to our lives and simultaneously, no matter how amazingly different we might seem, no matter how many languages we speak, or diverse customs we observe, each and every day, all over the world, we are in actuality one people. You might say that I’m an idealist. I’d say it’s the only realistic way to see it. The rest is just in your imagination.

—Jon Carver Cenia Gutierrez Alfonso, Menina con Gallo (Young Girl with Rooster), acrylic on canvas, 2013


CRITICAL REFLECTION

Beatrice Mandelman: Paintings and Drawings from the 1950s and 1960s

203 Fine Art 203 Ledoux Street, Taos

“MY WHOLE WORLD IS ABOUT LIFE AND COLOR SURROUNDING ME.” Beatrice Mandelman was born December 31, 1912, the same year as her friend and fellow Taos artist Agnes Martin. At the time of her death, in 1998, Mandelman’s prolific career in painting had spanned seven decades and left a legacy of several hundred paintings, prints, works on paper, and collages. The thirty-one works in her Winter Series were done in the last year of her life. A native of New Jersey, Mandelman’s life in art began as early as age twelve with the classes she took at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art, and continued in the 1930s at Rutgers University and the Art Students League, in New York City. But her career began in 1935 in the Works Progress Administration as a muralist and later a printmaker with the WPA’s New York City Project. By the time the WPA was disbanded in 1942, Mandelman at age thirty had encountered the work of fellow WPA artists Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, and Louis Ribak, and had her own work included in exhibitions by MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. That same year Mandelman married Ribak, whom she’d met in the WPA. Ribak was a student of John Sloan at the Art Students League and a painter in the Social Realism movement that came to maturity in the Depression era 1930s and into the 1940s. It gave way by 1950 to the post-War dominance of the “New York School” of abstract art. In 1944, Mandelman and Ribak moved to Taos for Ribak’s health and to leave a New York art scene still split by the “dissension between Social Realists and Abstract Expressionists (Mandelman).” Mandelman and Ribak would be the forerunners of a new wave of artists from New York and California during the late 1940s and 1950s who would come to be known as the Taos Moderns. And in an irony of Modernist art history, after the move to Taos both Mandelman and Ribak would come to embrace abstraction, in particular the Abstract Expressionist idiom of the New York School. The recent show of Mandelman’s work at 203 Gallery in Taos features paintings and drawings from the later 1950s and 1960s. They

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show her transition to full abstraction and its debt to Agnes Martin’s biomorphic painting in Taos between 1953-1957. Following Martin’s personal reprise of this inchoate Abstract Expressionist current of the 1940s, Mandelman’s painting reveals her astute grasp of its nascent abstraction and a natural command of abstract line and color. Her ink drawing 50-DR 1-37 evokes the symbolic motifs of Gottlieb’s pictographs. And a comparison of her casein on masonite painting Untitled (50-P63), from the late 1950s, with her Dawn and Sea and Time—both dating from 1960—shows that she indirectly references Agnes Martin’s study of Arshile Gorky, whose sense of the symbiotic link of organic and tectonic abstraction was implicit in his biomorphic compositions. And Mandelman’s

gouache on paper Space Series of 1960 recalls Rothko’s transition to the tectonic clarity of his massive floating rectangles. A fast-forward to the 1995 retrospective and second one-person exhibition of her work at the Harwood Museum of Art finds her later painting largely consisting of acrylic-on-canvas arabesques produced by a brighter palette of primary and secondary hues. But the flat, irregular shapes that animate and anchor the compositions can be traced back directly to the paintings and works on paper of the late 1950s and 1960s. For all her debt to Martin, Mandelman’s path and underlying aesthetic were very much her own. In a 1995 feature on the artist in THE magazine she noted, “I’ve been working on a series for the past three years called the Rio Grande Quartet. I go to the Rio Grande gorge every morning and look at the rocks and formations. Out of that comes my particular language.” Mandelman’s aesthetic, and with it her embrace of abstraction, are rooted in Taos and northern New Mexico. Once she assimilated the AE biomorphic vocabulary and syntax, they became her “particular language” in the service of her exploration of the local landscape. Mandelman was a regional painter in the best sense of the term: “I’ve been absolutely isolated and not involved with the art establishment for thirty years,” she said in 1995. That isolation was a price she was willing to pay. The Rio Grande gorge was her Bibemus Quarry. Taos and its breathtaking environs of landscape and light were her Barbizon, her Forêt de Fontainebleau. Biomorphic abstraction, which for Agnes Martin was a necessary passage to her grid paintings, became for Beatrice Mandelman the abiding visual syntax for her life in northern New Mexico. And as Mandelman made clear, that life was a collage of line and color: “It has to do with formal boldness. Repeated rhythms are over the entire canvas. There is no rest for the eye. … a pictorial flamboyance with no limit.”

—Richard Tobin Beatrice Mandelman, Sea and Time, casein on masonite with collage, 48” x 36”, 1960

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Xavier Mascaró

Gebert Contemporary 558 Canyon Road, Santa Fe

XAVIER MASCARÓ’S MEDIEVALISM IS ENTICING. THERE’S A POPULAR THIRST for a time when magic, religion, royals, sex, titles, birthright, bloodlines, swordfights, and death by beheading, dismembering, burning, and hanging were realities. Mascaró’s metal and ceramic sculptures evoke these dramas, which are escapist yet instinctual. The artist is Spanish, though he was born in Paris, and keeps studios in Madrid and Mexico City. His work is raw, rugged, and personal. It’s long preceded by Iberian bronze workers and a handful of contemporary Spanish sculptors. It incites questions of law and revolution, social realism and paganism, the real and the magical. His recent solo show at Saatchi Gallery, in London, Departure (now closed), displayed some of his signature monumental sculptures installed outside like historic heroes. The Guardians series was previously exhibited at the Palais Royal garden in Paris and the Paseo del Prado in Madrid. They evoke an assortment of icons whose associations run throughout Mascaró’s work and solidify his penchant for something lasting, if not primal. At Saatchi, five iron-armature-clad figures sitting in lotus position, each ten feet high, greeted visitors. Although inspired by ancient Greek and Egyptian statues, their repetition and stoicism is equally reminiscent of the funereal Chinese terracotta warriors meant to protect and serve the first Emperor of China in the afterlife. Their hierarchical scale suggests the Soviet-style social realist idealized politicians, but the titanic rusted iron bodywork, the most notable characteristic, is bound with promises of integrity and protection. These statuesque sentinels are faultless public monuments: Buddhas ready to serve and protect.

A smaller version of Mascaró’s totemic guardian is here at Gebert Contemporary, cast in ceramic with iron fixtures—a juxtaposition of white and metal evocative of fencing attire. The sculptor’s Santa Fe show has no public monuments, but does present a very cool, equally epic capsule collection of smaller works. The horsemen in Riders, whose mounts look like miniature Trojan horses, have strength in numbers. They may be small, but the seven shin-height warriors suspended above svelte stilts are purposeful. The rods make them taller, suggest infrastructure and weaponry, and lend import to their otherwise stalky puppetry. Their iron bodies are tarnished, holey, and show protruding nails. They tell of defeat and survival: the horses are missing sections here and there as if dismembered or burned, which is fitting for a medium subject to such extreme, sometimes-ravenous heat. In a magical twist, the men have no legs. The torso meets the horse and becomes one, fusing man and animal into a mammal of centaur descent. Eleanora is a four-foot-high head resting on a low pedestal. Its large scale suggests a fallen, dismembered ruler taken down in political upheaval whose original embodied stature was purposefully deific. The bronze head is hollowed and the surface, cut to leave a puzzle pattern, imbues her skin with a lacey, feminine ephemerality. The likeness is based on profiles from ancient coins, and the head, contoured by iron, suggests the lingering presence of the antiquated coin itself. In fact, Mascaró’s desire to sculpt came from a longing

to leave something behind, and his works are artifacts in their own right. Eleanora, despite her phantom embodied scale, does not tower above but rests low where we may inspect her as voyeurs of something esteemed. Across from her is Circle, seven smaller versions of Eleanora in ceramic with iron fastenings, all facing one another. Their insularity feels Wiccan and cliquish, and with iron bandages that mask their eyes they become anonymous, even replaceable. Nonetheless, each figure exudes mysterious strength. Five hearts hang in the entryway of the gallery. Love is a quintet of the dangling organs made from glass, copper, pewter, resin, and iron. Their tesserae surfaces glisten in the light like Christian mosaics, but iron bars stab through the interiors to hold the things together, protruding like pins in a voodoo doll. They vary in size, each one a different color, each harboring the talismanic strength of pagan puppetry. Armor is integral, soldiers ride on horses, and hearts are accessible for magical malpractice. Mascaró’s sculpture indulges an escapist longing so poignant to our smooth, arguably vacant habitat. He leaves a trail of tactile objects that propose an honorific narrative, where solemnity is rife, and our emblems are heroic.

—Hannah Hoel Xavier Mascaró, Queen, head of Alexandra with four heads of Eleonora, iron, variable dimensions, 2014


CRITICAL REFLECTION

Beautiful Disintegrating Obstinate Horror Drawing and Other Recent Acquisitions and Selections from the UNM Art Museum’s Permanent Collection UNM Art Museum, Jonson Gallery UNM Center for the Arts, Albuquerque

THE EXHIBITION’S TITLE MAY BE A MOUTHFUL, BUT THE CONTENT IS IMMENSELY satisfying. University of New Mexico Art Museum director Lisa Tamiris Becker selected twenty-five works for this show and it would be fascinating to know how she made her decisions, given that she had some thirty thousand pieces of art to choose from. The UNM Art Museum has the largest public art collection in New Mexico and every time they bring out a new round of items for us to see and experience, it feels like being invited inside a secret treasure trove. There are familiar favorites, like the lilies in Georgia O’Keeffe’s White Flowers, and her less-familiar Shell I, an open, inverted mussel shell that looks just like a dark heart. Even the bits of sea grass above the shell’s “left ventricle” are eerie metaphors for protruding veins and arteries. It’s nice to see another favorite, Raymond Jonson’s Cloud Forms and Mesas No.3, hanging in his namesake gallery. The gray, blue, and white clouds are geometric within their curves, and the steep mountains and mesas are sharp and angular. Nearby is an untitled oil by Richard Diebenkorn that not only offers a beautiful example of his early abstractions, but also shows us the kind of work he was painting while completing his master’s degree at UNM. We are also introduced to Margaret Evangeline’s recent JFK on Emergency Blanket, a digital print on an actual gold emergency blanket. It’s a manipulated photograph of JFK holding hands with his son, three-year-old John-John, who looks up at his father from beneath two bullet exit holes. The blanket flutters gently

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in the gallery breeze causing it to shimmer beautifully, in sharp contrast to the sadness the subject invokes. We are also introduced to the museum’s first ancient sculpture, a Bronze Age Bactrian idol in the form of a seated female figure from what is now Turkmenistan. It is an excellent example of these stone icons, with its detailed, carved garment, and elongated neck and head, in contrasting stone. Other more recent sculptural works introduce us to the “junk sculpture” movement of the 1950s with the work of Richard Stankiewicz, which is assembled from scrap metal, and the “funk art” movement from a decade later represented by the work of Robert Hudson. It’s as if Hudson took the same scrap metal and added Pop colors, human features, and splatters of paint. Four lithographs by Argentina-born artist Liliana Porter offer some much-needed whimsy across the gallery from JFK. Porter’s minimalist subjects—in this case four bunnies and one miniature suitcase-toting figure from my old Lionel train set—are each enhanced in some way. The tiny man in Traveler has two short lines drawn behind him, perhaps indicating the endless road he finds himself on. The first line-drawn bunny appears in Dreamer and reclines on lined notebook paper, but its head is raised from the surface and rests on a fluffy, white pillow. Bunny number two from To Dress Up is also a line drawing and she wears a party dress with a satin bodice, ribbon sash, and net skirt with bead detailing. The third bunny simply contemplates a floating gold rhinestone in To See Gold. Each picture suggests a story, but Porter leaves this up to the

viewer. She has described her work as akin to watching a film while leaving the lights on. Two examples of Vivian Maier’s street photography join Dawoud Bey’s street portrait, A Boy Eating a Foxy Pop, which is new to the collection. Other new acquisitions are three Andy Warhol prints from the 1985 series Reigning Queens: Queen Margrethe, Queen Ntombi, and Queen Beatrix. They hang together on the gallery’s east wall and their explosion of color balances the colors in works by Beatrice Mandelman and Louis Ribak, who have their own wall at the gallery’s opposite end. The exhibition’s blend of recent acquisitions with art from the permanent collection reminds us that while one of the museum’s goals is to educate its students and its public, another important goal is stewardship of the collection and its expansion. The very good news in all of this? Becker’s exhibition marks the beginning of the Jonson Gallery’s use as a dedicated space for works from the permanent collection. We can all look forward to much more from the treasure trove, and on a regular basis.

—Susan Wider

Left: Andy Warhol, Queen Ntombi (from the series Reigning Queens, screenprint and diamond dust on Lenox Museum Board, 39” x 31½”, 1985. Gift of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. Right: Raymond Jonson, Cloud Forms and Mesas No. 3 (detail), oil on canvas, 44” x 33”, 1928. © The Raymond Jonson Collection, University of New Mexico Art Museum. s s Photo: Margot Geist/UNM Art Muse.

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M ATHE M AT ICIA N • A RT I ST • T R AV EL ER • S TU DEN T OF JOSEP H B EU YS The hand of an artist, or nature’s dynamics, are the origins of my paintings and compositions, from where the imagery and music spins into a concerto of new motions and subtle variations. Natural, computer-generated, and man-made are inseparable categories in this process of entangled interactions, body signals, dreams, and synchronicities. Art-computing (Painting-Poetry-Music) is both math and psychology. www.mathemartist.com

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WRITINGS

What they are saying about Joan Logghe’s The Singing Bowl (University of New Mexico Press, $19.95)? “Logghe is one of the most exciting poets in America today. Her words sing, slide, slip, and jive. I love everything by Joan.” —Natalie Goldberg. “Joan Logghe is the true muse of New Mexico’s Española Valley, as intimately tied to place as Emily Dickinson to New England or Sappho to her island.” —Miriam Sagan

54| THE magazine

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The SouThweST’S LargeST aucTion of cLaSSic weSTern arT

Live Auction! SAturdAy, december 6, 2014 1:30PM MST | geraLd PeTerS gaLLery, SanTa fe, new Mexico

ErnEst l. BlumEnsChEin (1874-1960), Portrait of Sheldon Parsons oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

EangEr irving CousE (1866-1936), Spearing the Fish, ca. 1932 oil on canvas, 19 5/8 x 35 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches

Carl rungius (1869-1959), Pack Horses on a Trail oil on canvas, 30 1/8 x 40 1/4 inches

willard nash (1898-1942), Santa Fe Landscape, ca. 1930 oil on canvas, 19 1/2 x 23 1/2 inches

For F urt h er inFormation contact Peter L. riess, Di rector , 505-954-5858 or curator@santaFeartauction.com reGist er to Bi D or at t enD t h e auct ion at www.san taFeartauct ion.com

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