THE magazine - December - January 2012-2013 Issue by FlavorGrafix Design

Santa Fe’s Monthly

BEST BOOKS 2012

of and for the Arts • Dec./Jan. 2012-13

DYA N I W H I T E H AW K H O L I D AY OPE NING E VE N T T H U R S DAY D E C E M B E R 2 7, 5 – 7 P M NE W WOR K S B Y DYA N I W H I T E H AW K A N D P H I L L I P V I G IL T HRO U G H J A N U A RY 31 A RT I S T L E C T UR E DYA N I W HI T E H AW K F R IDAY D E C E M B E R 2 8 , 1P M P L E A S E R S V P F O R L E C T UR E

P HIL L IP V I G IL 53 OL D SANTA F E TRAIL

| UPSTAIRS ON THE PL AZ A | SAN TA F E, NE W ME XICO | 505.982 .8478 | SHIPROCKSAN TAF E .COM

TOC

UNIVERSE OF

letters

flashback—1993:

universe of

studio visits:

art forum:

food for thought:

one bottle:

Tommy S. Macaione

photographer Anne Staveley Tony Buchen and G. Wahl

Untitled photograph by Teun Hocks The Toothpick

The 1937 Château Caillou “Crème de Tête”

Sauternes by Joshua Baer 27 dining 31 art

Tomme and Santacafé

openings

32 out & 36

guide:

about

previews:

Contemporary Terrain at Turner Carroll Gallery,

New World Cuisine: The Histories of Chocolate: Mate y Más at the Museum of International Folk Art, and Pentti Sammallahti at photo-eye Gallery 39 national

spotlight:

Tenth Anniversary Exhibition at the

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 41

feature:

critical reflections:

Best Books 2012 Harold Joe Waldrum at Rio Bravo Fine

Art; Heinz Emil Salloch at A Gallery Santa Fe; ISEA2012 Albuquerque at the Albuquerque Museum; Remix: Then & Now at Hill’s Gallery; Ricardo Legorreta and Santa Fe at the Santa Fe Art Institute; Sergio Garval at Evoke Contemporary; The Transformative Surface at the University of New Mexico Art Museum; Linda Vi Vona at Red Dot Gallery; and Zachariah Rieke at Wade Wilson Art 59 green planet: Human Rights Activist Neema Namadamu, photograph by Jennifer Esperanza 61 architectural 62

writings:

details:

Frigid Morning, photograph by Guy Cross

“Monet in Boston” by Miriam Sagan

The death of a loved one is painful and can change one’s world forever. Grief is a natural reaction to loss—it can be felt emotionally, physically, and spiritually. We all cope with and process grief in our own way. Some find it helpful to keep track of their feelings in a journal. Enter Rebecca Norris Webb’s diaristic book, My Dakota (Radius Books, $50), which opens with these words, “An elegy for my brother who died unexpectedly.” Webb’s photographs, made in the South Dakota landscape, are highly personal, and her writing is replete with emotional entries such as, “I find, nestled in the ache, the surprise of grief’s expressions—the prairie unfolding in me.” And, “Does each wave of suffering teach us how to swim?” Webb’s words and photographs are almost poetry—they are heartfelt, cathartic, and a part D C e healing m b e r /process. J A N U AMy R YDakota 2012-13 THE magazine | 5 ofEher is meant to be read and looked at page by page. It is sad, yet beautiful—a poignant homage to Webb’s lost brother.

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.

hamid daBashi with david Barsamian Wednesday 5 decemBer at 7 pm Lensic performinG arts center hamid dabashi was born in the Khuzestan province of Iran and was educated in Tehran before moving to the U.S. where he received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a postdoctoral fellowship from Harvard University. He is Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of numerous books including The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism; Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest; and Iran: A People Interrupted. His newest work is The World of Persian Literary Humanism. Hamid Dabashi will speak about Iran, its history, culture and politics, followed by a conversation with David Barsamian of Alternative Radio. From the closely contested US presidential election to the bloody battlefields of Syria, Iran has remained the critical catalyst of global events that are set to alter the course of contemporary history. As the nuclear program of the Islamic Republic remains the primary concern of global attention and as crippling economic sanctions have begun to take their human toll on ordinary Iranians, the ruling regime seems adamant in asserting its regional presence and influence... What these issues conceal is the defiant will of Iranian people historically poised to navigate a critical path driven against both domestic tyranny and imperial hubris.

— Hamid Dabashi

Readings & conversations

brings to Santa Fe a wide range of writers from the literary world of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to read from and discuss their work.

Zadie smith with Gemma sieff Wednesday 30 January at 7pm Lensic performinG arts center Zadie smith’s three novels, including the acclaimed White Teeth, tackle race, marriage, class, assimilation, aesthetics, and human frailty, often with a wicked wit. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called her, “A preternaturally gifted new writer [with] a voice that’s street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time.” Smith has also written a nonfiction book about writing, Fail Better, and a recent collection called Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. A professor of Creative Writing at New York University, Smith’s new novel NW follows four Londoners as they try to make adult lives outside of the council estate of their childhood. Fiction is a completely different kind of terror. … the thing I’m attracted to when writing nonfiction is that you don’t know, but you can know, right? There’s a possibility of knowing. You can control the area in which you write. And to me it feels like a small formal garden and I can make it as nice as possible. Whereas novels are absolutely chaotic and messy and embarrassing. —Zadie Smith

TICKETS ON SALE NOW ticketssantafe.org or call 505.988.1234 $6 general/$3 students/seniors with ID

Video and audio recordings of Lannan events are available at:

www.lannan.org

letters

magazine VOLUME XX, NUMBER VI

WINNER 1994 Best Consumer Tabloid SELECTED 1997 Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids SELECTED 2005 & 2006 Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids P u b l i s h e r / C r e at i v e D i r e c t o r Guy Cross P u b l i s h e r / F o o d Ed i t o r Judith Cross Art Director Chris Myers C o p y Ed i t o r Edgar Scully P r o o fR e a d e r S James Rodewald Kenji Barrett s t a ff p h o t o g r a p h e r s Dana Waldon Anne Staveley Lydia Gonzales Preview / Calendar editor Elizabeth Harball WEB M EISTER

Jason Rodriguez facebook Chief Laura Shields

The Santa Fe Artists Emergency Medical Fund was founded in 1996 by artist Armond Lara, along with individuals concerned about the problems faced by professional artists lacking medical insurance. A fundraising event will be held at Yares Art Projects, 123 Grant Avenue, on Saturday, December 16, from 4 to 7 pm. Many of Santa Fe’s top artists are participating: Armond Lara, James Havard, Dan Namingha and sons, Louisa McElwain, Bob Haozous, Woody Gwyn, Susan Contreras, Elias Rivera, Doug Coffin, Peter Burega, Estella Loretta, Carlos Carulo, Michael Wright, Paul Shapiro, and James Hart, among many others. Each artist produces and donates an original piece of art for the event. The art will be displayed for auction, corks on Champagne bottles will be popped, and the fun begins. Be there and lend artists a helping hand. Artwork: Marty Horowitz.

Contributors

Diane Armitage, Veronica Aronson, Joshua Baer, Davis Brimberg, Jon Carver, Susan A. Chriistie, Kathryn M Davis, Erin Elder, Jennifer Esperanza, Elizabeth Harball, Hannah Hoel, Pat McKeown, Iris McLister, Michael Motley, Miriam Sagan, Richard Tobin, Susan Wider, Malin Wilson-Powell, and Bette Yozell C o VER

Photograph by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey - Courtesy UNM Press

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THE magazine: 505-424-7641 Lindy Madley: 505-577-4471 Distribution

Jimmy Montoya: 470-0258 (mobile) THE magazine is a periodical published 10x a year by THE magazine Inc., 320-A Aztec Street,, Santa Fe, NM 87501. Coporate address: 44 Bishop Lamy Road Lamy, NM 87540. Phone: (505)-424-7641. Email address: themagazinesf@gmail.com. Website address: themagazineonline. com. All materials copyright 2012-13 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 materials. THE magazine is not responsible or liable for any misspellings, incorrect iformation 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 a represent the views of their authors. Letters to the editor are welcome. Letters may be edited for style and libel, and 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. HE magazine is not responsible for any claims made by its advertisers; for copyright

DECember/JANUARY

2012-13

TO THE EDITOR: I picked up my November copy of THE magazine with the review of “Walking on the Edge of Water” at the Lensic by Janet Eigner. I want to thank THE magazine for sending in a reviewer and giving space for consideration of dance alongside the other amazing art forms in your publication. We have worked very hard with intertribal Indigenous community members—locally, nationally, and globally—to create an artistic expression that reflects perspectives on the crucial issue of water. Thus, as artists in a temporal form, the documentation through words is an important form to evidence our work by allowing the impact to reach beyond one night. Eigner’s review generously stated not only the strengths of the performance, but areas that can be re-visited for improvement in a way that was considerate and mindful. After a rather poor review from Pasatiempo— which was limited in the writer’s knowledge of dance— I was thinking about how hard it is to keep producing dance, and that it is written reviews that give validation for future funders, booking presenters, and sponsors. I appreciate Eigner’s contribution to the cultivation of this field. —Rulan Tangen, via email TO THE EDITOR: Does Rosalind Krauss matter? Being an accidental inductive and intuitive post-modernist, I lean toward Catherine David in this debate. Be that as it may, I asked myself if Rosalind Krauss mattered. I stopped by Evoke Gallery and Blue Rain Gallery to view the work of Pamela Wilson and Erin Currier, then came home and listened to Duane Allman, Rory Gallagher, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Vivaldi. I looked at visual art by John Singer Sargent, Modigliani, Atget, and Brassai, along with a collection of rock photographs and a collection of film noir stills, and I came to a conclusion. If, like me, you live for those glorious explosions when technique, chance, passion, and vision collide, then Rosalind Krauss does not matter. If I find myself second guessing myself, a little Robert Johnson or Charlie Parker should settle the argument. —Ed Fields, via email

TO THE EDITOR: I enjoyed Diane Armitage’s article about Rosalind Krauss. Years ago when I was living in New York and having a “painting career,” I sat in on Krauss’s classes at Columbia. What a treat! She is entertaining and smart, and God help you if you want to say anything, as she is caustic as hell. But that’s New York. Love the battle. —Mary McIntyre, via email TO THE EDITOR: I really enjoyed the interview of Derek Guthrie by Mokha Laget in your September issue. Guthrie is that rare voice that speaks decisively and strongly against the forces of commercialism, the market, and the institutionalization of the art world. We need more “occupy” voices in the art world that speak the truth about the power that envelops and controls what gets promoted and what does not, and how that power works. Bravo! —Diane Thodos, via email TO THE EDITOR: A fantastic article by Joshua Baer in THE’s October 2012 issue! His insight into politics and corporate money was amazing and expresses exactly what I have been saying for years. Particularly loved the segue from serious politics to serious wine: “Which brings us to the 2005 Domaine....” Laughed out loud at that one! THE keeps a lone art gallery owner/artist in Clovis, New Mexico breathing and hoping—being as I am the only gallery here. Keep up the great work. —John Pritchet, Clovis, NM, via email

THE magazine welcomes your letters. Letters may be edited for space and clarity. Email: themagazinesf@gmail.com Mail: 320 Aztec St., Suite A - Santa Fe NM 87501 All Calendar Listings for the February/March Double issue are due by Monday, Jan. 15. If possible, include two or three images.

THE magazine | 5

HILL’S GALLERY

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REMIX: THEN+NOW HOLIDAY FINAL OPENING FRIDAY DECEMBER 14, 5–7PM

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CELEBRATES STARS IN THE GALLERY GARO ANTRESIAN + LARRY BELL + FRANK ETTENBERG + LUIS JIMENEZ + BRUCE NAUMAN GAIL RIEKE + JANET STEIN ROMERO WHO KNOWS… THE RUBBER LADY MAY MAKE AN APPEARANCE! Tuesday – Saturday, Noon – 6pm (or by appointment) 217 Galisteo, Santa Fe | 989.2779 www.hillsgalleryremix.com

FINAL DAY TO VIEW THE POP-UP GALLERY JAN 3, 2013

Exhibition Dates: November 30 , 2012 – January 4, 2013 1011 Paseo de Peralta, santa Fe, nM 87501 | tel 505-954-5700

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Leich Lathrop Gallery Holiday Show & Sale Laurie Alpert: prints, books Aaron Bass: prints Rosemary Breehl: handcrafted gift cards Donna Dodson: sculpture, paintings Eason Eige: paintings Adele Frances: paper jewelry Evey Jones: prints C.A. Klimek: paintings, prints Chuck Lathrop: paintings, prints, sculpture Stephanie Lerma: mixed media Andy Moerlein: prints Krittika Ramanujan: prints Stephanie Roberts-Camello: paintings Carol Sanchez: prints, boxes & books Janet Yagoda Shagam: prints

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Who is Manuel Mendive?

Born in Havana in 1944, Manuel Mendive is perhaps the single most important living Cuban artist. Although he received a formal art education at the Academy of San Alejandro in Havana, Mendive’s art came to be strongly influenced by the Santería religion of his Afro Cuban roots. His work has been termed “living mythological thought,” which uses religious imagery to examine contemporary life. Incorporating several art mediums and genres—painting, performance pieces and sculpture, he is well-known for his performance pieces in which he paints dancers’ naked bodies for use in theatrical backdrops and environments. Representing an important strain of Cuban life, Manuel Mendive’s art can be found in museums all over the world, including the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris, museums in Russia, Norway, Denmark, Congo, Somalia and the United States. He is a recipient of the Chevalier Des Arts et Lettres from France’s Cultural Minister.

To view Mendive’s work in person, contact Donna Gunther Brown at 505.467.8672 or dlgbartist@gmail.com

flashback 1993

D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

THE magazine | 13

UNIVERSE OF

Although her subject matter varies, Anne Staveley is a throwback to First Photograph/First Camera My brother with a Kodak 110 film camera. On the Road I love to travel with my camera, I keep it minimal— one camera and one lens wrapped in a cloth in my backpack. I look for faces and places that catch my eye and intimate moments that are usually lost in time. I look for a smile. A laugh. A tear. Someone’s eyes. A crinkle in the brow. I look for something that grabs my heart. There are times I take only three or four photographs and then I put my camera away. Using Facebook Facecrack is a better name for it. A friend once referred to it as “the best waste of time.” Endless eye candy. I kinda love it, kinda hate it. Somehow it suits humans’ endless need to communicate and reach out to the world while never leaving home. I use it a lot to promote my photography and to let people know when and where I am going to be traveling to shoot. I book a lot of photoshoots on Facebook. Plus it is a great way to share my photographs with the world.

photograph by

Lydia Gonzales

photographers of the pre-digital age—Diane

Arbus,

Robert

Frank,

Gordon Parks, Bruce Davidson, Gary Winogrand, and Robert Doisneau. Staveley has no fear—she will travel anytime and anywhere to get the shot she wants.

Public Art Two years ago I did a large photo installation—twelve by a hundred and twenty feet—on the side of Warehouse 21 in Santa Fe. Sixteen-plus black-and-white portraits of teenagers with their faces twelve feet tall. It was amazing, and inspired me to continue the project I am involved with now, which is called livinlargephoto.com. After the Warehouse 21 installation, I teamed up with Jill Sutherland from Los Angeles, and we have been doing it BIG ever since. Recently we put up a show called Allusions of Grandeur in a gallery space called ARTLAB, located in San Diego. It was a great success! Check out the Website— livinlargephoto.com. Bigger is better! BAM! POW! POST PRODUCTION I shoot with 35mm BW film and digital. The beauty of film is there is very little computer post-production, and you only have thirty-six exposures per roll. That means more time is spent watching and waiting for the moment, and interacting with my subject. Shooting with film has more soul and less about what the camera can do for you. I like that. I was always a fan of x-processing film for the crazy saturated color, but it is hard to find labs to process it now, so I have gone to digital for color, and I use Lightroom for post-shoot processing, which is not only great, it is easy to use. DREAM ASSIGNMENT To travel to all the corners of the earth and photograph people. Oh yeah, I do that. Life is good, I am grateful. D

ANUARY D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

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STUDIO VISITS

Iris Murdoch wrote, “G OOD ART SPEAKS TRUTH, INDEED IS TRUTH, PERHAPS THE ONLY TRUTH.” Two artists respond to her statement. Truth is…art has little to do with truth. Art speaks for those who lack the words to express what they truly feel.

—G. Wahl G. Wahl is represented in Santa Fe by Mclarry Modern, 225 Canyon Road. Her last show was in November 2011 at G.Wahl Gallery, Wazee Street, Denver, Colorado. www.gwahl.com

I have been in an artistic collaboration (Buchen/Goodwin) for about thirty years and I’m painfully aware of how totally subjective absolutes like “truth” can be. Quantum physics confirms this; the observer influences the observed. I’ve watched a piece of my art evolve with its meaning or intent shifting dramatically. I make virtual objects which are mercurial by nature. Whether they become 2-D or 3-D experiences is purely optional. They exist only as equations. Truth feels as fluid as the process of making art itself.

—Tony Buchen A Buchen/Goodwin video was presented as a year-long loop with Gallery4Culture, Seattle, WA and at Digital Fringe, an international venue in Melbourne, Australia in 2011. Our still photography was included in Macro/Micro: Photographic Extremes at the DarkRoom Gallery, Essex Junction, VT. New work: The Myth of Abstraction: Video and Stills opened November 30 at A Virtual Artspace, 316 Read Street in Santa Fe. See more at www.buchen-goodwin.com

Photographs by Anne Staveley

D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

THE magazine | 19

ART FORUM

THE magazine asked a clinical psychologist and two people who love art to share their take on this untitled oil on toned gelatin photograph by Teun Hocks. They were shown only the image—they were not told the title, medium, or name of the artist. What frustration! An artist hard at

Remember that Roberta Flack

presence. Similarly, we see the

The image on my computer

feet away from your canvas?

work desperately tries to paint.

song “Killing Me Softly” in which

paint from the discarded tubes

screen reads as a dated

Tubes of paint scatter the

His ideas, images and feelings are

she is amazed that a stranger

littering the floor, having been

photograph. It is yellowed

floor of an otherwise empty

literally and metaphorically out

could write a song “telling my

applied to the prominent palette,

and

studio.

of his reach. We see a mixture

whole life”? That’s kind of how

with more brushes available in

Norman Rockwell sensibility

Where are this artist’s tools?

of kinetic and potential energy.

I feel staring at this Rockwell-

the background container. All that

to it. This image needs a

His

He stretches toward a canvas

like painting. The artist is of

is needed is there. The canvas,

hallmark slogan attached—it

books,

that

will

ultimately

has

mono-focused

idiot

drawings, and

indeed. sketches,

inspiration?

receive

a certain age, as indicated by

however, resists the brush’s

feels like an ad ripped out of

Where

action. Tubes of paint strewn

the grey streaks in his hair and

touch by tipping away from it.

Reader’s Digest. Regardless

coffeemaker? Is there not

throughout and a collection

the rocking chair. Is the great

An easel with rockers—what a

of its origins and its market

a couch that doubles as a

of used brushes suggest this

stretch he performs related to

metaphor for the transience of

intentions, this photograph

bed that is also storage for

painter has long worked on his

the challenges of creating while

art! The only way for the brush

clearly references painting

much-needed nickels or lost

craft. Today, however, his efforts

struggling with the inertia of later

to make contact with the canvas

and painters; it both mocks

colored pencils? This painter

are thwarted. Psychologically,

years? Having recently retired

will be for the artist to get off his

and celebrates the act of

is not only an idiot but an

conflicts

from a long career of teaching

butt, or for the canvas to rock

putting

uncommitted,

the painter’s determined yet

art, I find myself confronting

forward to it. Which, I wonder, is

Painters are idiots! is another

who

ineffective reach. He may also be

my own blank canvas. I have, at

more likely? The message is clear

possible read of this image.

on his wardrobe than on

unsure of his ability as a painter

last, limitless time in which to

to me: Resist the rocker!

Unless

image-making,

at this moment. Nonetheless

complete a piece, and my well-

—Bette Yozell

Barney, why put your easel

research, or building a life

the canvas does tip backward as

equipped studio awaiting my

on a rocker? Why sit six

that will support his work.

are

symbolized

Artist

brush

you

are

canvas.

Matthew

his

table,

lazy

worked

his

painter

far

background

if animated: “Come on, Sucker.

Stand up, man! I will concede

Try to touch me. I dare you to

this: it isn’t easy being an

put your ideas down.” I suppose

artist. But artists are certainly

this man could stand up and

not idiots. Artists are some

vigorously paint, but great art can

never be forced—it is birthed.

and hard-working people in

The canvas placed just out of

the world. Although most

reach stands as a metaphor. Art

artists experience creative

can never really feel complete to

blockages (which may be a

the artist. Something can always

more benign read on this

be done to make it better. The

image)

blank canvas is the dramatic

it takes to keep making,

moment of infinite possibilities

doing,

that every artist faces. This is

even against the odds, the

true whether the artist is a child

financial trappings, the lack

or Rembrandt. Once the artist

of validation, etc. There are

touches the canvas he has forever

plenty of moments when

altered those infinite possibilities.

aspiring

Endless options are replaced by

self-expression to be futile,

finite choices. One cannot paint

but the mastering of this

everything.

challenge

Nevertheless,

the

most

they

resourceful

know

and

producing,

artists

what

feel

exactly

their

what

some point this man will create

art practice is about. The

his vision. His appearance is that

manifestation

of great competence. Eventually

through form: this is the

a painter must paint.

creative act, and it isn’t easy.

—Davis Brimberg, Ph.D.,

—Erin Elder, Curator

Clinical Psychologist

20 | THE magazine

meaning

Center for Contemporary Arts D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

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joseph wrede behind the line

food for thought

The Toothpick Portrait of Lucina Brembati by Lorenzo Lotto, 1518-23 “Hey there—we’ve met before. Was it at that deli downtown? No, it was by the hor d’oeuvres table at that gallery opening last week. In spite of my fair complexion and thin figure, you didn’t give me a second thought, tossing me aside like yesterday’s news. But if you knew about my history, you might start to show a little respect for me—the humble toothpick. I’m one of the simplest, oldest, and most useful tools in existence. Looking at grooves in the fossils of Neanderthal teeth, scientists think my ancestors existed even before Homo sapiens. The Romans made us out of mastic wood, ancient Hindus fashioned toothpicks out of fig tree splinters, and toothpicks made of bronze have been found among the items buried in the tombs of pre-history in northern Italy. People wore my ancestors as a fashion accessory in the Renaissance. In the seventeenth century, the toothpick was considered the equivalent of luxury jewelry because it was made of precious metals adorned with precious stones. During the 1700s, a group of Portuguese nuns—who raised money by making and selling candy—became known for crafting toothpicks to accompany their sticky sweets. Today, the Portuguese still manufacture handmade, orangewood toothpicks, with delicate, curly designs. Mass-produced toothpicks were an American invention—businessman Charles Forster and inventor Benjamin Franklin Sturtevant introduced manufactured toothpicks to Boston in the 1870s, and after a few clever marketing schemes we became a fashion statement for those who had just dined at a fancy restaurant. By 1910, the United States manufactured twenty-five billion toothpicks a year. Sadly, my family has gone into decline in America. Maine was once the top toothpick-producing state, but its last toothpick manufacturing plant closed in 2003, and unfortunately, most etiquette columnists in the United States frown on my use. It’s too bad, because I’m pretty interesting for being man’s simplest tool—so show a little respect next time you see me around.” D D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

THE magazine | 23

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

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one bottle

One Bottle:

The 1937 Château Caillou “Crème by Joshua

Tête” Sauternes

Baer

Vanessa Redgrave, Suzanne Pleshette, Richard Farina, Warren Beatty, Colin Powell,

On August 2, Congress passed The Marihuana Tax Act, the bill that led to

Seymour Hersh, Jack Nicholson, Saddam Hussein, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter,

the criminalization of marijuana. On August 5, Joseph Stalin began the Great

Thomas Pynchon, Waylon Jennings, Vladimir Ashkenazy, David Hockney, Bill Cosby,

Purge. Within twelve months, 724,000 Russian citizens were killed by their

Dustin Hoffman, Jim Harrison, Jane Fonda, and Anthony Hopkins were all born in

government. On August 14, China declared war on Japan. During August of

1937. In 1937, gasoline cost ten cents a gallon. The average cost of a new house was

1937, Pablo Picasso finished Guernica and delivered the painting to the Spanish

$4100; $1780 was the average annual salary. Between January and December of

Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris. The German fair guide called Guernica

1937, the unemployment rate in the United States fell from 21% to 14%. Count

“a hodgepodge of body parts that any four-year-old could have painted.”

Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump” was the number one hit song of the year. On January 19, 1937, Howard Hughes set a record by flying an airplane

On September 21, George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. of London published the first edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

from Los Angeles to New York City in seven hours and twenty-eight minutes.

On October 9, in the ninth inning of Game Four of the thirty-fourth World

On January 20, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes swore in Franklin D. Roosevelt

Series, Lou Gehrig hit the last postseason home run of his Hall of Fame career.

for a second term as president. On February 8, Spanish Falangist troops led by General Francisco Franco took control of the city of Málaga. On February 13, the NFL’s Boston Red Skins moved to Washington D.C. On March 14, Albert Einstein celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday. On April 4, Byron Nelson won the fourth Masters Golf

Gehrig hit the home run off of New York Giants’ pitcher Carl Hubbell—who was pitching the last inning of his Hall of Fame career. On October 10, the Yankees defeated the Giants, 4-2, at the Polo Grounds, to win the series four games to one. The 1937 World Series was the fifth Subway Series, and the first World Series in which a team—the Yankees—did not commit an error. On October 25, Pablo Picasso celebrated

Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. On April 17, Porky’s

his fifty-sixth birthday. “A painting is not thought out and settled

Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series,

in advance,” said Picasso. “While it is being done, it changes

and featuring the debut of Daffy Duck, was released in theatres.

as one’s thoughts change. And after it’s finished, it goes on

On April 20, Adolph Hitler celebrated his forty-eighth birthday.

changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking

On April 26, the town of Guernica, Spain, was bombed by Spanish

at it.” Toward the end of October, the wine-growing châteaux

Falangists. In his account of the attack, British journalist George

in Sauternes and Haut-Barsac harvested their grapes.

Steer reported finding German bomb casings, connecting Luftwaffe planes with the attack. Guernica burned for three days. More than fifteen hundred residents were shot and killed as they ran from collapsing buildings.

Which brings us to the 1937 Château Caillou “Crème de Tête” Sauternes. In the glass, the 1937 Château Caillou is all amber. At first, the bouquet is charming and delicate—then it gathers itself

On May 1, eyewitness accounts of the Guernica massacre

into a force of nature. If the oceans were as sweet as they are

appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Paris. More than

salty, seawater would smell like this. On the palate, there are

one million protesters took to the streets. After seeing black-

suggestions of beeswax, Meyer lemon, and rose petals, but the

and-white photographs of the massacre, Pablo Picasso ran to

experience of tasting the 1937 Château Caillou is too powerful

his studio and made sketches for a mural entitled Guernica. On

to be described in terms of flavors. The flavors are impressive,

May 3, Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Gone with

but when you taste this wine, you taste history. Two hundred and

the Wind. On May 6, the German airship Hindenburg burst into

eighty-five dollars is a lot to spend on a bottle of wine, but the

flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey. On May 8, War Admiral, with

finish of the 1937 Château Caillou makes $285 seem like pocket

jockey Charle Kurtsinger in the saddle, won the Kentucky Derby.

change. An hour after you swallow your last sip, it is still impossible

On May 15, War Admiral won the Preakness Stakes. On May 28,

to separate your memories of the finish from the finish itself.

President Roosevelt pushed a button in Washington, D.C., signaling

On November 5, at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Adolf

the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge to vehicular traffic. On

Hitler held a secret meeting and disclosed his plans for the acquisition

May 29, John F. Kennedy celebrated his twentieth birthday.

of more Lebensraum, or “living space,” for the German people.

On June 1, Marilyn Monroe celebrated her eleventh birthday.

On December 21, Walt Disney’s Snow White premiered in

On June 3, Wallis Simpson married the Duke of Windsor at Château

selected theaters. On December 22, the Lincoln Tunnel opened

de Candé, near Tours, France. On June 5, War Admiral won the

for traffic. On December 27, Marlene Dietrich celebrated her

Belmont Stakes, and completed the Triple Crown.

thirty-sixth birthday. At midnight on December 31, as the world’s

On July 2, Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan,

two billion people celebrated New Year’s Eve, 1937 became

disappeared after taking off from Lae, New Guinea, ending

1938, and passed into history.

Earhart’s attempt to become the first woman to fly around the

One Bottle is dedicated to the appreciation of good wines and good times, one bottle at a time. The name “One Bottle” and the contents of this column are ©2012 and ©2013 by onebottle.com. For back issues, go to onebottle.com. Send comments or questions to jb@onebottle.com.

world. On July 11, George Gershwin died in Los Angeles of a brain tumor, at the age of thirty-eight. D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

THE magazine | 25

dining guide

Dry Rubbed Local Lamb Ribs

tomme 229 Galisteo Street, Santa Fe Reservations: 505-820-2253

$ KEY

INEXPENSIVE

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

Photos: Guy Cross

...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. $$$ Cuisine: French. Atmosphere: An inn in the French countryside. House specialties: Steak Frites, Seared Pork Tenderloin, and the Black Mussels are perfect. Comments: A beautiful new bar with generous martinis, a teriffic wine list, and a “can’t miss” bar menu. Winner of Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence. 317 Aztec 317 Aztec St. 820-0150 Breakfast/ Lunch. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Café and Juice Bar. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Breakfast: Eggs Benedict and the Hummus Bagel, are winners. Lunch: we love all of the salads and the Chilean Beef Emanadas. Comments: Wonderful juice bar and perfect smoothies. Andiamo! 322 Garfield St. 995-9595. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Start with the Steamed Mussels or the Roasted Beet Salad. For your main, choose the delicious Chicken Marsala or the Pork Tenderloin. Comments: Good wines, great pizzas. Anasazi Restaurant Inn of the Anasazi 113 Washington Ave. 988-3236 . Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Valet parking. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Contemporary American cuisine. Atmosphere: A classy room. House specialties: Blue Corn crustedSalmon with citrus jalapeno sauce, and the Beef Tenderloin. Comments: Attentive service. Bobcat Bite 418 Old Las Vegas Hwy. 983-5319. Lunch/Dinner No alcohol. Patio. Cash. $$ Cuisine: As American as good old apple pie. Atmosphere: A low-slung building with eight seats at the counter and four tables. House specialties: The inch-and-a-half thick green chile cheeseburger is sensational. The secret? A decades-old, well-seasoned cast-iron grill. Go. Body Café 333 Cordova Rd. 986-0362. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Organic. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: In the morning, try the breakfast smoothie or the Green Chile Burrito. We love

the Avocado and Cheese Wrap. Comments: Soups and salads are marvelous, as is the superhealthy Carrot Juice Alchemy.

specialties: The smoked brisket and ribs are fantastic. Super buffalo burgers. Comments: Huge selection of beers— from Bud to the fancy stuff.

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, the tasty specialty pizzas, or the grilled eggplant sandwich. For dinner, go for the perfectly grilled Swordfish Salmorglio.

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: For your main course, go for the grilled Maine Lobster Tails or the grilled 24-ounce “Cowboy Cut” steak. Comments: Great bar and good wines.

Café Fina 624 Old Las Vegas Hiway. 466-3886. Breakfast/Lunch. Patio Cash/major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Contemporary comfort food. Atmosphere: Casual and bright. House specialties: Ricotta pancakes with fresh berries and maple syrup; chicken enchiladas; a perfect green-chile cheese burger. Comments: Organic andhousemade products are delicious.

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 with small tables inside and a nice patio outside where you can sit, read periodicals, and schmooze. Tons of magazine to peruse. House specialties: Espresso, cappuccino, and latte.

Café Pasqual’s 121 Don Gaspar Ave. 983-9340. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Multi-ethnic. Atmosphere: The café is adorned with lots of Mexican streamers and Indian maiden posters. House specialties: Hotcakes got a nod from Gourmet magazine. Huevos motuleños—a Yucatán breakfast—is one you’ll never forget. For lunch, try the Grilled Chicken Sandwich.

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 postage-stamp-size dance floor for cheek-to-cheek dancing. House specialties: Tapas. Comments: Murals by Alfred Morang.

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, Kung Pau Chicken, and Broccoli and Beef. Comments: Combination plates available. 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

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 in extra virgin olive oil. Go, you will love it. El Parasol

833 Cerrillos Rd Santa Fe, 995-8015 30 Cities of Gold Rd., Pojoaque. 455-7185 603 Santa Cruz Rd.,  Española. 753-8852 298 Dinosaur Trail, Santa Fe. 995-8226 1903 Central Ave., Los Alamos. 661-0303 Breakfast/Lunch/Diinner

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Tacos, burritos, burgers. frito pies, and combination plates. Comments: The staff at THE magazine agrees that they serve the best Carne Adovada Burrito (no beans) that we have ever had. Geronimo 724 Canyon Rd. 982-1500. Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$$

Cuisine: We call it French/Asian fusion. Atmosphere: Elegant. 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. Il Piatto 95 W. Marcy St. 984-1091. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards. $$ Atmosphere: Cuisine: Italian. Bustling. House specialties: Our faves: the Arugula and Tomato Salad; the Lemon Rosemary Chicken; and the Pork Chop stuffed with mozzarella, pine nuts, and prosciutto. Comments: New on the menu: a perfect New York Strip Strip Steak at a way better price than the Bull Ring—and guess what— you don’t have to buy the potato. Jambo Cafe 2010 Cerrillios Rd. 473-1269. Lunch/Dinner Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: African and Caribbean inspired. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Jerk Chicken Sandwich and the Phillo stuffed with spinach, black olives, feta cheese, roasted red peppers, over organic greens. Comments: Chef Obo wins awards for his fabulous soups. Kohnami Restaurant 313 S. Guadalupe St. 984-2002. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine/Sake. Patio. Visa & Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: Japanese. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Miso soup; Soft Shell Crab; Dragon Roll; Chicken Katsu; noodle dishes; and Bento Box specials. Comments: The sushi is always perfect. Try the Ruiaku Sake. It is clear, smooth, and dry. Comments: New noodle menu. La Plancha de Eldorado 7 Caliente Road at La Tienda. 466-2060 Highway 285 / Vista Grande Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: 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 Pho Tai Hoi: vegetarian soup loaded with veggies. Comments: Friendly waitstaff and reasonable prices. La Plazuela on the Plaza 100 E. San Francisco St. 989-3300.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full Bar. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: New Mexican and Continental. Atmosphere: Enclosed courtyard. House specialties: Start with the Classic Tortilla Soup or the Heirloom Tomato Salad. For your entrée, try the Braised Lamb Shank with a spring gremolata, couscous, and vegetables. Comments: Seasonal menus. L egal T ender 151 Old Lamy Trail. 466-1650 Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: House Casual. specialties: Burgers, Pulled Pork, Lamy Cubano Sandwich, Braised Short Ribs, and the Wedge Salad. Comments: Huevos Rancheros, Belgian Waffles and a Special Drink Menu at Sunday Brunch. Kid friendly. M aria ’ s N ew M exican K itchen 555 W. Cordova Rd. 983-7929. Lunch/Dinner (Thursday-Sunday) Beer/wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American/New Mexican. Atmosphere: Rough wooden floors and hand-carved chairs set the historical tone. House specialties: Freshly made Tortillas and Green Chile Stew. Comments: Perfect margaritas. Mu Du Noodles 1494 Cerrillos Rd. 983-1411. Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Pan-Asian. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Vietnamese Spring Rolls and Green Thai Curry, Comments: Mu Du is committed to organic products. New York Deli Guadalupe & Catron St. 982-8900. Breakfast/Lunch Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: New York deli. Atmosphere: Large open space. House specialties: Soups, Salads, Bagels, Hero Sandwiches, Pancakes, and over-the-top Gourmet Burgers. Comments: Deli platters to go Nostrani Ristorante 304 Johnson St. 983-3800. Dinner Beer/Wine. Fragrance-free Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Innovative regional dishes from Northern Italy. Atmosphere: Elegant. House specialties: Start with any salad. Entrées we love: the Veal Scallopini as well as the Roasted Trout with Leeks, Pepper, and Sage. Comments: In January, Nostrani becomes VIVRE, featuring Chef Nelli Maltezos’ inspired French food.

continued on page 29 D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

THE magazine | 27

True French Food & Wine in Downtown Santa Fe 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, and The Albuquerque Journal.

award -winning wine liST exTenSive SelecTiOn OF wineS by The glaSS Full bar / lOunge area wiTh live muSic wine dinnerS

Sunday-ThurSday, 5:00 - 9:00 pm u Fri day- SaTurday, 5:00 - 9:30 pm 315 Old SanTa Fe Trail u SanTa Fe, new mexicO u www.315 SanTaFe.cOm reServaTiOnS recOmmended: (505) 986.9190

dining guide

Wonderful Pasta Specials at Santacafé

231 Washington Avenue, Santa Fe • 984-1788

Plaza Café Southside 3466 Zafarano Dr. 424-0755. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner 7 days Full bar. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Bright and light, colorful, and friendly. House specialties: For your breakfast go for the Huevos Rancheros or the Blue Corn Piñon Pancakes. Comments: Excellent Green Chile—good for allergies and colds. Rasa Juice Bar/Ayurveda 815 Early St. 989-1288 Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Organic juice bar. Atmosphere: Calm. House specialties: Smoothies, juices, teas, chai, cocoa, coffee, and espresso— made with organic ingredients. Juice: our favorite is the Shringara, made with beet, apple, pear, and ginger. Rio Chama Steakhouse 414 Old Santa Fe Trail. 955-0765. Brunch/Lunch/Dinner/Bar Menu. Full bar. Smoke-free dining rooms. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All-American Atmosphere: Easygoing. House specialities: Steaks, Prime Ribs and Burgers. Haystack fries rule Recommendations: Nice wine list and a good pour at the bar. Ristra 548 Agua Fria St. 982-8608. Dinner/Bar Menu Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ 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 57 University W. Blvd SE, #130, Alb. 982-8608. Breakfast/Lunch. Patio. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: A taste of the Yucatan with a Southwest twist. House specialties: For breakfast we love the Hard Hat Burrito and the Huevos Muteleños: corn tortillas w/ refried black beans, eggs any style topped with Rose’s famous Muteleños sauce, cotya cheese, and fresh avacado. Lunch faves are the Yucatan Pork Tacos and the delicious Patty Melt. 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 Gyoza, Softshell Crab, Sashimi and Sushi Platters, and a variety of wonderful, yes, Japanese Tapas. Comments: A very savvy sushi chef makes San Q the choice for those who love fine Japanese food. D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

San Francisco Street Bar & Grill 50 E. San Francisco St. 982-2044. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: All-American. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: San Francisco Street Burger, the Grilled Yellowfin Tuna Nicoise Salad, or the New York Strip. Comments: Their sister restaurant located in the DeVargas Center. Santacafé 231 Washington Ave. 984-1788. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Southwest Contemporary. Atmosphere: Minimal, subdued, and elegant. House specialties: The world- famous calamari never disappoints. Favorite entrées include the perfectly cooked grilled rack of lamb and the pan-seared salmon with olive oil crushed new potatoes and creamed sorrel. Comments: The daily pasta specials are generous and flavorful. Appetizers during cocktail hour rule. Santa Fe Bar & Grill 187 Paseo de Peralta. 982.3033. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Cornmealcrusted Calamari, Rotisserie Chicken, or the Rosemary Baby Back Ribs. Comments: Easy on the wallet. Saveur 204 Montezuma St. 989-4200. Breakfast/Lunch Beer/Wine. Patio. Visa/Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: French meets American. Atmosphere: Casual. Buffet-style service for salad bar and soups. House specialties: Daily chef specials, gourmet and build-your-own sandwiches, wonderful soups, and an excellent salad bar. Comments: Organic coffees and super desserts. Second Street Brewery 1814 Second St. 982-3030. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Simple pub grub and brewery. Casual Atmosphere: and friendly. House specialties: The beers are outstanding when paired with Beer-steamed Mussels, Calamari, Burgers, and Fish & Chips. Comments: Sister restaurant at in the Railyard District. Shibumi 26 Chapelle St. 428-0077. Dinner Fragrance-free Cash only. $$. Parking available Beer/wine/sake Cuisine: Japanese noodle house. Atmosphere: Tranquil and elegant.

Table and counter service. House specialties: Start with the Gyoza—a spicy pork pot sticker—or the Otsumami Zensai (small plates of delicious chilled appetizers), or select from four hearty soups. Shibumi offers sake by the glass or bottle, as well as beer and champagne. Comments: Zen-like setting. Shohko Café 321 Johnson St. 982-9708. Lunch/Dinner Sake/Beer. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Authentic Japanese Cuisine. Atmosphere: Sushi bar, table dining. House specialties: Softshell Crab Tempura, Sushi, and Bento Boxes. Comments: Friendly waitstaff, Station 430 S. Guadalupe. 988-2470 Breakfast/Lunch Patio Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Light fare and fine coffee and tea. Atmosphere: Friendly and casual. House specialties: For your breakfast choose the Ham and Cheese Croissant a Fresh Fruit Cup. Lunch fave is the Prosciutto, Mozzarella, sandwich Comments: Special espresso drinks. at El Gancho Old Las Vegas Hwy. 988-3333. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Major credit cards $$$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Family restaurant House specialties: Aged steaks, lobster. Try the Pepper Steak with Dijon cream sauce. Comments: They know steak here.

Steaksmith

Teahouse 821 Canyon Rd. 992-0972. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner 7 days Beer/Wine. Fireplace. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Farm-to-fork. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: We love the Salmon Benedict with poached eggs, the quiche, the Gourmet Cheese Sandwich, and the Teaouse Mix salad. Comments. Teas from around the world. Terra at Four Seasons Encantado 198 State Rd. 592, Tesuque. 988-9955. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Amercian with Southwest influences. Atmosphere: Elegant House specialties: For dinner, we suggest you start with the tempting Burrata Cheese, Heirloom Tomato, Asparagus, and Petite Greens appetizer or the Tempura Soft Shell Crab with Avocado, Citrus, Radish, and Margarita Aioli. Follow with the delicious Panseared Alaskan Halibut with Baby Artichokes, Angus Beef Tenderloin with Baby Vegetables and Truffle Fries. Comments: Local organic ingredients. A fine wine list and top-notch service.

The Artesian Restaurant at Ojo Caliente Resort & Spa 50 Los Baños Drive.  505-583-2233 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Wine and Beer Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Local flavors. Atmosphere: Casual, calm, and friendly. House specialties: At lunch we love the Ojo Fish Tacos and the organic Artesian Salad with Prickly Pear Vinaigrette. For dinner, start with the Grilled Artichoke with Roasted Garlic and Lemon Aioli. The Trout with a Toasted Piñon Glaze for your entree is a winner. Comments: Nice wine bar and specialty drinks. The Compound 653 Canyon Rd.  982-4353. Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Contemporary. Atmosphere: 150-year-old adobe with white linen on the tables. House specialties: Jumbo Crab and Lobster Salad. The Chicken Schnitzel is always flawless. All of the desserts are sublime. Comments: Chef/owner Mark Kiffin, won the James Beard Foundation’s “Best Chef of the Southwest” award. The Palace Restaurant & Saloon 142 W. Palace Avenue 428-0690 Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio Major credit cards $$$ Cuisine: Modern Italian Atmosphere: Victorian style merges with the Spanish Colonial aesthetic. House Specialties: For lunch: the “Smash Burger” or the Prime Rib French Dip. Dinner: Start with the Tuna Sashimi. For your main, go for the Scottish Salmon en Papillote poached in white wine, or the All-American Steak au Poivre. Comments: BBQ Oyters on Saturday. Chef Ryan Gabel is doing his stuff in the kitchen. The Pantry Restaurant 1820 Cerrillos Rd. 986-0022 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican/American. Atmosphere: Bustling with counter service and extra-friendly service. House specialties: Breakfast rules here with their famous stuffed French Toast, Corned Beef Hash, and Huevos Rancheros. A handbreaded Chicken Fried Steak rounds out the menu. Comments: The Pantry has been in the same location since 1948. The Pink Adobe 406 Old Santa Fe Trail. 983-7712. Lunch/ Dinner Full Bar Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All American, Creole, and New Mexican. Atmosphere: Friendly and casual. House specialties: For lunch we love the Gypsy Stew or the Pink Adobe Club. For dinner, get the Steak Dunigan, with green chile and sauteed mushrooms, or the Fried Shrimp Louisianne. Comments: Cocktail hour in the Dragon Room is a Santa Fe tradition. The Shed 113½ E. Palace Ave. 982-9030. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Patio. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: A local institution located just off the Plaza. House specialties: Order the red or green chile cheese enchiladas.Many folks say that they are the best tin Santa Fe. The Ranch House 2571 Cristos Road. 424-8900 Lunch/Dinner Full bar Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: BBQ and Grill. Atmosphere: Family and kid-friendly. House specialties: Josh’s Red Chile Baby Back Ribs, Smoked Brisket, Pulled Pork, and New Mexican Enchilada Plates. Comments: Nice bar. Tia Sophia’s 210 W. San Francisco St. 983-9880. Breakfast/Lunch

Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Traditional New Mexican. Casual. Atmosphere: House specialties: Green Chile Stew, the traditional Breakfast Burrito stuffed with bacon, potatoes, chile, and cheese. Comments: Always the real deal. tomme: a restaurant

229 Galisteo St. 820-2253 Dinner Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Innovative Contemporary. Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Start with the Pork Belly. Entrée: Choose the Peppered Elk Tenderloin, or the Southern Fried Chicken. Comments: Joseph Wrede is doing his thing in the kitchen. Tree House Pastry Shop and Cafe DeVargasCenter. 474-5543. Breakfast/Lunch Monday-Saturday Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Only organic ingredients used. Atmosphere: Light and bright and cheery. House specialties: Order the fresh Farmer’s Market Salad, or the Lunch Burrito, smothered in red chile. Tune-Up Café 1115 Hickox St. 983-7060. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: All World: American, Cuban, Salvadoran, Mexican, and, yes, New Mexican. Atmosphere: Down home. House specialties: Breakfast faves are the scrumptious Buttermilk Pancakes and the TuneUp Breakfast. Comments: Super Fish Tacos and the El Salvadoran Pupusas are excellent. Comments: Great breakfasts. Now serving beer and wine.Yay! Vinaigrette 709 Don Cubero Alley. 820-9205. Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Light, bright and cheerful. House specialties: The organic salads are amazing. We love the Nutty Pear-fessor Salad and the Chop Chop Salad. Comments: Vinaigrette just opened their sister restaurant at 1828 Central Avenue, SW, Albuquerque. Same wonderful salads and other dishes. Whoo’s Donuts 851 Cerrillos Rd. 629-1678 7 am to 3 pm. Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: Just donuts. Atmosphere: Very, very casual. House specialties: Using only rganic ingredients, they create donuts that The dough is not overly sweet and the donuts are not greasey. Comments: Fave donut: the White chocolate lemon pistachio. Zacatecas 3423 Central Ave., Alb. 505-2558226. Lunch/Dinner Tequila/Mezcal/Beer/Wine Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Mexican, not New Mexican. Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Try the Chicken Tinga Taco with Chicken and Chorizo or the Slow Cooked Pork Ribs with Tamarind Recado-Chipotle Sauce. Over sixtyfive brands of Tequila are offered. Comments: resonable prices. Zia Diner 326 S. Guadalupe St. 988-7008. Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio. Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: All-American diner food. Atmosphere: Down home baby, down home. House specialties: The Chile Rellenos and Eggs is our breakfast choice. At lunch, we love the Southwestern Chicken Salad, the Meat Loaf all the Burgers, and the crispy Fish and Chips (some say the besst in Santa Fe). Comments: The bar at the Zia is place to be at cocktail hour.

THE magazine | 29

GALLERY

Railyard Art District

ERIC ZAMMITT Material Distillation

Baldwin & Guggisberg, Suspended Mobility Series 5, 2012, Blown glass vessels and stainless steel rods, 120 x 46 x 46”

Eric Zammitt, Nocturnesupernatural, 2005, 124,832 pieces of colored acrylic plastic glued, sanded and polished, 99.5 x 61.5

PHILIP BALDWIN AND MONICA GUGGISBERG Suspended Mobility

Also featuring artwork by: WALL BATTERTON, Aluminum Splashes and Drips WARD JACKSON, Shaped and Colored TED LARSEN, Recent Works December 28, 2012 – February 9, 2013 Opening Reception: Friday, December 28, 2012, 5:00 - 7:00 PM DavidrichardGallery.com 544 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284 | info@DavidRichardGallery.com

openings

decemberjanuary artopenings FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7

Manitou Galleries, 123 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 986-0440. Holiday Small Works Show. 5-7:30 pm.

Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 983-1338. Goldmines: work by Patrick Kikut, David Jones and Shelby Shadwell. Connecting Liminal Nowhere—Land Arts of the American West 2012: group show. 6:30-8 pm.

Patina Gallery, 131 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 986-3432. Miraculous: jewelry by Enric Majoral. 5-7 pm.

Española Bond House, 706 Bond St., Española. 927-6229. A New Journey of Life: work by Monica Duran. 6-9 pm.

Peyton Wright Gallery, 237 E. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 989-9888. 20th Annual Historic Art of Devotion: Spanish Colonial and European works. 5-8 pm.

photo-eye

Gallery, 376-A Garcia St., Santa Fe. 988-5158. Here Far Away: photographs by Pentti Sammallahti. 5-7 pm.

Rio Bravo Fine Art, 110 N. Broadway, Truth or Consequences. 575-894-0572. Light: multimedia group show. 6-9 pm. Silver City Museum, 312 W. Broadway., Silver City. 575-538-5921. Winter Under Western Skies: holiday exhibition. 4:30-6 pm.

Stranger Factory, 109 Carlisle Blvd. NE, Alb. 505-508-3049. A One-Way Ticket to Flipsville: illustrations by Derek Yaniger. Circus Posterus Invitational: group show. 6-9 pm. Touching Stone Gallery, 539 Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe. 988-8072. Exuberance: work by Tadashi Mori. 5-7 pm. VERVE Gallery of Photography, 219 E. Marcy St., Santa Fe. 982-5009. Floating World: photographs by Brigitte Carnochan. 5-7 pm. Weyrich Gallery, 2935-D Louisiana Blvd. NE, Alb. 505-883-7410. Universal Expression, Change: group show. 5-8:30 pm. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 8

Harwood Museum of Art, 238 Ledoux St., Taos. 758-9826. Lighting Ledoux: luminaria lighting, parade, and other holiday activities along Ledoux St. 5-7 pm. Rio Bravo Fine Art, 110 N. Broadway, Truth or Consequences. 575-894-0572. Light: a multimedia group show. 6-9 pm. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 12

Axle Contemporary and SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 670-7612. Out of SITE!: works donated to “SITE Unseen” on sale. 5-9 pm. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14

GF Contemporary, 707 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-3707. Small works holiday group show. 3-5 pm. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 15

Santa Fe Art Institute, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 424-5050. 2012 Pushpin/Clothespin Show: group show and art sale. 11 am-3 pm. SUNDAY, DECEMBER 16

Las Placitas Presbyterian Church, 6 mi. E. of I-25 on NM 165, Placitas. 867-8080. Placitas Artists Series: works by Peter Boehringer, Katherine Irish Henry, Dianna Shomaker, and Vicki Bolen. 2-5:30 pm. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21

Nüart Gallery, 670 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 988-3888. Figurations: group show of figurative paintings. 5-7 pm. FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28

David Richard Gallery, 544 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 983-9555. Material Distillation: Figurations—an exhibition of figurative paintings at Nüart Gallery, 670 Canyon Road, Santa Fe. Reception: Friday, December 21, from 5 to 7 pm. Image: Vincenzo Calli. D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

continued on page 34

THE magazine | 31

HEREâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S THE DEAL For artists without gallery representation in New Mexico. Full-page B&W ads for $600. Color $900. Reserve space for February/March double issue by Tuesday, January 15. 505-424-7641 themagazinesf@gmail.com

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OPENINGS

Vortex Rotating Gallery, 217 Galisteo St., Santa Fe. 989-2779. Hill’s Gallery Remix— Then+Now: group show. Through Sat., Jan. 5. hillsgalleryremix.com

painting and sculpture of constructed acrylic plastic by Eric Zammitt. Suspended Mobility: work by Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg. Hard Edge: work by Ward Jackson. Drips and Spills: aluminum paintings and works on paper by Wall Batterton. Recent Work: steel and wood constructions by Ted Larsen. 5-7 pm.

Yares Art Projects, 123 Grant Ave., Santa Fe. 984-0044. Fundraiser for Santa Fe Artists Emergency Medical Fund. Sun., Dec. 16, 4-7 pm. By the Sea: paintings on paper by Byron Browne. Through Mon., Dec. 31. yaresartprojects.com

GVG Contemporary, 202 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 982-1494. Blair + Ernst: mixed-media paintings by Ernst Gruler and Blair VaughnGruler. 5-7 pm.

Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, 435 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 982-8111. A Square Foot of Humor: annual group show. Through Tues., Jan. 8. zanebennettgallery.com

FRIDAY, JANUARY 4

Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Pl. Santa Fe. 428-5908. Thicker than Water: group show. Summer Burial: work by Jason Lujan. Spyglass Field Recordings—Santa Fe: work by Nathan Pohio. Images of Life: work by Tryee Honga. 5-7 pm.

PERFORMING ARTS

Greer Garson Theatre at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, 1600 St. Michael’s Dr., Santa Fe. 988-1234. Count Dracula: directed by Shepard Sobel. Sun., Dec. 2; Fri., Dec. 7 to Sun., Dec. 9. Fri. and Sat., 7 pm, Sun., 2 pm. ticketssantafe.org

FRIDAY, JANUARY 25

A Gallery Santa Fe, 154 W. Marcy St. #104, Santa Fe. 603-7744. American Chianti: paintings by Vittorio Mason. 5-7 pm. SPECIAL INTEREST

516 Arts, 516 Central Ave. SW, Alb. 505242-1445. ISEA 2012 Albuquerque—Machine Wilderness: conference and exhibitions. Through Sun., Jan 6. isea2012.org A Gallery Santa Fe, 154 W. Marcy St. #104, Santa Fe. 603-7744. Journeys West: paintings by Heinz Emil Salloch. Through Sun., Jan. 6. santafegalleryassociation.org Albuquerque Museum, 2000 Mountain Rd. NW, Alb. 505-242-4600. Miniatures and More 2012: group show. Through Wed., Dec. 12. cabq.gov Axle Contemporary and SITE Santa Fe, various locations in Santa Fe. 670-7612. Out of SITE!: works donated to “SITE Unseen” on sale. Wed., Dec. 12 to Sun., Dec. 16. axleart.com Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 983-1338. Stitch Thought: installation by Tamara Wilson. Through Sun., Dec. 9. ccasantafe.org Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, 554 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 989-8688. Beyond: works by Max Cole. Through Sun., Dec. 30. charlottejackson. com Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art, 702 1/2 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-0711. Holiday Group Show. The Lost Christmas Gift—Images and Artifacts: works by Andrew Beckham. Through Sat., Dec. 29. chiaroscurosantafe.com David Richard Gallery, 544 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 983-9555. Optic Drive: paintings by Gabriele Evertz. Retrospective of paintings by Sanford Wurmfeld. Color Interference: work by Matthew Kluber. What a Long Strange Trip: work by Jay Davis. Through Sat., Dec. 22. davidrichardgallery.com Downtown Subscription, 376 Garcia St., Santa Fe. 983-3085. Iconic Images of Nature: paintings by Mel Scully. Through Mon., Dec. 31. melscully.com

34 | THE magazine

Works by Emilia Faro on view through December at Destiny Allison Fine Art, 7 Caliente Road, Suite A-1, Eldorado.

Eight Modern, 231 Delgado St., Santa Fe. 995-0231. Strong Winds May Exist: paintings by Siobhan McBride. 5-7 pm. Through Sat., Jan. 5. eightmodern.net Gerald Peters Gallery, 1011 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 954-5700. Works by Bale Creek Allen & Malu Byrne. Through Fri., Jan. 4. gpgallery.com Harwood Museum, 238 Ledoux St., Taos. 575758-9826. Unbound: work by Maye Torres. Falling without Fear—New Media in a New World: digital media group show. Works by Charles Luna. Through Sun., Jan. 27. harwoodmuseum.org Jane Sauer Gallery, 652 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 995-8513. Plainsong: sculptures by Charla Khanna. Through Sat., Dec. 29. jsauergallery.com Lannan Foundation at the Lensic, 211 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 988-1234. Hamid Dabashi with David Barsamian. Wed., Dec. 5, 7 pm. Zadie Smith with Gemma Sieff. Wed., Jan. 30, 7 pm. lannan.org Madrid Merchants Association, at locations in Madrid. 573-0743. 30th Madrid Christmas Open House: and holiday activities. Sat., Dec. 1, visitmadridnm.com

various Annual parade 4 pm.

Monroe Gallery of Photography, 112 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe. 992-0800. The Kennedys: photographs of the Kennedy family by Mark Shaw. Through Tues., Jan. 27. monroegallery.com Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Pl, Santa Fe. 428-5908. Vernacular: work by Jeff Kahm. Red Meridian: work by Mateo Romero. Dual[ing] Identities: work by Debra Yepa-Pappan. GRAB—The Movie: by Billy Luther. 50/50—Fifty Artists, Fifty Years: group show. Through Mon.,Dec. 31. iaia.edu/museum

Museum of International Folk Art, 706 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe. 476-1200. New World Cuisine—The Histories of Chocolate, Mate Y Más. Sun., Dec. 9, to Wed., Jan. 5. internationalfolkart.com Red Dot Gallery, 826 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 8207338. Remarkable: group show of women student artists. Through Sun.., Dec. 9. red-dot-gallery.com

James A. Little Theater, New Mexico School for the Deaf, 1060 Cerrillos Rd., Santa Fe. 4664656. The Eldorado Children’s Theatre and Teen Players Present Peter Pan: musical. Dec. 7, and Sat., Dec. 8, at 7:30 pm.; Sat. and Sun., Dec. 1, 2, 8, 9 at 2 pm. eldoradochildrenstheatre.org St. John’s College, 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe. 984-6000. Kiss Me Kate: musical. Fri., Dec. 7, 7:30 pm; Sat., Dec. 8, 3 pm and 8 pm; Sun., Dec. 9, 3 pm. sjcsf.edu Sunshine Theater, 120 Central Ave., Alb. 505886-1251. Slightly Stoopid: band concert. Wed., Jan. 9, 8 pm. slightlystoopid.com CALL FOR ARTISTS

Richard Levy Gallery, 514 Central Ave. SW, Alb. 505-766-9888. Weird Science: group show. Extended through Sat., Jan. 26, gallery closed Mon., Dec. 17 to Wed., Jan. 2. levygallery.com

516 Arts, 516 Central Ave. SW, Alb. 505-2421445. Flatlanders and Surface Dwellers: group show curated by Lea Anderson. Deadline: Wed., Dec. 19. 516arts.org

Rottenstone Gallery, 486 Hwy. 150, Arroyo Seco. 575-776-1042. Gold, Dust and Light: paintings by Brenden Jemison. Through Mon., Dec. 31. brendenjemison.com

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 217 Johnson St., Santa Fe. 946-1000. Flowers: photography competition. Deadline: Wed., Dec. 19. okmphotocompetition.org

Silver City Museum, 312 W. Broadway St., Silver City. 575-538-5921. Classes and other activities throughout Dec. silvercitymuseum.org

Parallel Studios, P.O. Box 31674, Santa Fe. 216-9638. Currents 2013—The Santa Fe International New Media Festival: Deadline: Fri., Feb. 1. currentsnewmedia.org

Studio Vaillancourt, 821 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 231-8961. Open Studio. Mon., Dec. 24, 6-8 pm. sandyvaillancourt.com Turner Carroll Gallery, 725 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 986-9800. Contemporary Terrain: works by Eric Zener, Deborah Oropallo, Hung Liu, and Shawn Smith. Through Sun., Jan. 20. turnercarrollgallery.com

Strong Winds May Exist, paintings by Siobhan McBride on view through Saturday, January 5 at Eight Modern, 231 Delgado Street, Santa Fe.

Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 107 W. Barcelona Rd., Santa Fe. 982-9674. Faces of the Elderly: photographs by Hal Kahn. Through Fri., Jan. 25. loveinthegardentoday.com University of New Mexico Bookstore, 2301 Central Ave. NE, Alb. 505-277-7473. Going Indian—Cultural Appropriation of North American Literature: book signing by Judit Kadar. Thurs., Dec. 6, 4 pm. bookstore.unm.edu

D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

previews

Contemporary Terrain: works by Eric Zener, Deborah Oropallo, Hung Liu, and Shawn Smith Turner Carroll Gallery, 725 Canyon Road, Santa Fe. 986-9800 Through January 20, 2013 In today’s world, it is a rare treat to dive into a lake, to gaze upward into a tree’s branches, or to stand quietly in an open field. These experiences have been allocated to the odd vacation or long weekend—budget permitting. Beleaguered by work, trapped in cities, and cocooned in cars, there is a thick buffer zone between the natural world and humanity. As a result, artists have adjusted their vision to the landscape. At Turner Carroll Gallery, a group show entitled Contemporary Terrain rethinks the contemporary landscape and its place in the modern human perspective. Austin-based artist Shawn Smith’s Re-Things explores the blurry line between the physical world and the world filtered through our iPhones and flat-screen televisions. His sculptures are built with thousands of dyed wooden strips, pieced together to resemble three-dimensional, pixilated creatures. In Erik Zener’s paintings Intertwined and Sanctuary, the photorealist painter immerses the viewer in the thick of tree branches. Chinese-American artist Hung Liu’s Old Capital depicts ancient Chinese ruins, forgotten and dripping downward into the landscape. And the woman in Deborah Oropallo’s George, State II leans casually on a cannon before a pastoral landscape, giving her removed, passive viewers a look of cool disdain.

New World Cuisine: The Histories of Chocolate, Mate y Más December 9, 2012 through January 5, 2014 Museum of International Folk Art, 706 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe. 476-1200. Though the world’s top chefs are still enamored with the concept, fusion cuisine isn’t anything new.

Hung Liu, Old Capital, oil on canvas, 68” x 60”, 1998

From the time Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492, the Old World and the New have been swapping now-common ingredients like tomatoes, wheat, peaches, and chocolate. But fusion cooking didn’t really take off until August 1598, when Juan de Oñate’s group of five hundred soldiers, families, and Franciscan friars settled in New Mexico. The Franciscans were culinary masters, experimenting with the area’s native squash, corn, and beans, and combining them with traditional Spanish dishes. And culinary fusion isn’t just tasty—it might have changed the world. With new seed varieties from the Americas, European farmers were able to grow better crops, and historian Alfred Crosby thinks that these bountiful, healthy foods resulted in the population explosion that spurred the Industrial Revolution. Starting this month, the Museum of International Folk Art will reveal the finer points of fusion foodie history with a collection of over three hundred objects. The exhibition is especially geared towards chocoholics—on display is a thousand-year-old pottery shard from Chaco Canyon that tested positive for ancient traces, as well as some Mexican spice jars, cleverly retrofitted with complex locking mechanisms to deter cacao thieves.

Here Far Away: photographs by Pentti Sammallahti December 7, 2012 to January 26, 2013 photo-eye Gallery, 376-A Garcia Street, Santa Fe. 988‐5152. Reception: Friday, December 7, 5 to 7 pm.

Chocolate Making

At first glance, there isn’t much going on in Pentti Sammallahti’s photographs—two blackbirds cross paths on a sidewalk, a horse stands tied to a barn, and a couple makes their way through a snowy landscape. But it isn’t the simple beauty of the photographer’s subjects that makes his work worth a second, longer look. Sammallahti is considered a national treasure in his native Finland, and his photographs are compositional wonders. His clever eye brings whimsy to the simplest of natural subjects and profundity to the most basic of landscapes—a pond becomes a study of contrasts as a scattering of ducks in the foreground gives way to a spread of snow-white swans on the horizon. As a dog stretches languorously in another of his works, the tree above him appears to do the same. Each painstakingly printed photograph is like a little Finnish folk tale, told in a myriad of rich, grey tones. An exhibition of Sammallahti’s elegant works is on display at photo-eye Gallery this holiday season, in celebration of the photographer’s latest monograph, a forty-year retrospective entitled Here Far Away. Pentti Sammallahti, Solovki, Venaja, Russia, gelatin silver print, 7” x 14”, 1992

36 | THE magazine

D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

ERIN

NAZZARO SOUTHWESTERN IMAGES

SELECTING ONIONS

40 X 30

DAILY CHATTER

36 X 48

203-544-9957 nazzart@mac.com

www.erinnazzaro.com

MONROE GALLERY of photography

Thank you for your encouragement and support, and we wish you the very best in 2013 Sidney and Michelle Monroe

Ida Wyman: Wrought Iron in Snow, New York, 1947

Open Daily

112 DON GASPAR SANTA FE NM 87501 992.0800 F: 992.0810 e: info@monroegallery.com www.monroegallery.com

WILLIAM R. TALBOT FINE ART

The Rio Chama from the Overlook, Late Afternoon Light, near Abiquiú, New Mexico, 1997. Photograph © Carig Varjabedian

CRAIG VARJABEDIAN

Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait

through December 29, 2012

n at i o n a l s p o t l i g h t

Studio Mix installation by

Bruce Nauman

In 1958, seventeen-year-old Tadao Ando worked as a professional boxer and traveled from his native Japan to Thailand for matches. While in Bangkok, he visited the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Buddhist temples and became fascinated with architecture. But Ando, who has said he was stubborn, temperamental, and a bad student, decided that instead of enrolling at a top architecture school like the University of Tokyo (where he would later teach), he would leave Japan and see great architecture firsthand. He toured throughout Europe and the United States, taking notes from the works of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others. Upon his return, he apprenticed himself to a carpenter and read all the books assigned by a standard four-year architecture school in only one year. In 1969, Ando again rebelled against the traditional path for Japanese architects, starting his architecture firm in Osaka instead of Tokyo. Ten years later, Ando won his first major Japanese architecture award for his stark, ultramodern Azuma House. After designing many notable buildings around the world, he went on to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1995. In 2002, Ando designed Texasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, a series of five long, geometric pavilions set in a reflecting pool. In celebration of its tenth anniversary, the museum is filling its stunning architecture with equally stunning modern art, including an early wall drawing by Sol LeWitt, a painting by Mark Bradford, and an installation by Bruce Nauman. The Modern will host a special anniversary gala on Thursday, December 6. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is located at 3200 Darnell Street, Fort Worth, Texas. For more information, visit themodern.org. D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

THE magazine | 39

pentti sammallahti

here far away Opening

Friday, December 7, 2012, 5-7pm Exhibition continues through February 9, 2013 www.photoeye.com/pentti To reserve a copy of Pentti Sammallahti’s new book Here Far Away call 505.988.5152 x202 or email gallery@photoeye.com

photo-eye

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Best Who is Gus Blaisdell Anyway?

Books 2012 Each year THE magazine receives books from local, national, and international publishers for review consideration. Reviews of the twenty-one best books are by Diane Armitage, Veronica Aronson, Jon Carver, Guy Cross, Elizabeth Harball, Hannah Hoel, Iris Mcister, Pat McKeown, Michael Motley, and Richard Tobin.

Blaisdell wrote, “I let what I see scratch me until I

Modern curator Nicholas Cullinan. In selecting the

bleed. My wound, now a little defile opening into me,

hundred and twelve black-and-white plates covering

remains unrelieved. Yet I do not wish to become one

the critical period 1949-1962, the editors drew from

of the insatiable. I withhold my body from these fields

those considered by Rauschenberg over his lifetime as

of excruciation. My pleasures are guilty and shameful;

stand-alone, or “fine art”—two hundred photographs.

I relish my squeamishness, a sordid source of arousal

The images, supported by the excellent preface by

and desire.” About Blaisdell, critic Dave Hickey

Davidson and White, and Cullinan’s essay, underscore

wrote, “Gus was the absolute, undeniable, real thing.

the critical role of Rauschenberg’s integration of his

One of the few.” This long-overdue book contains

photographic imagery in his artwork, and reveal the

introductory essays by philosopher Stanley Cavell,

still underexposed extent of the artist’s contribution to

literary critic David Morris, and an editor’s preface by

the photographic medium. –R.T.

Peterson, all of which gives the reader insight into the workings of the mind of this legendary figure. –G.C.

Photography as an Art Form Heinrich

Keen Eye

nineteenth-

been

said

that

Gus

Blaisdell—writer,

early-

twentieth-century

Rauschenberg’s

art

bichromates

his

images are some of the

photographs; still fewer

most exquisite and sensuous

have had the opportunity

photographs ever made.

familiar

see

his

with

and

gum color

substantial

Kuehn’s work—influenced

photographic

by Impressionist painting

prints. Now they will.

and the late-nineteenth-century Pictorialist movement

Robert

Rauschenberg:

in photography—while not as well known as that of his

legacy has

and

late-

Few admirers of Robert are

Kuehn’s

1949-1962

American friends Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen was

of New Mexico—was a force of nature. His critical

(D.A.P., $55) is the first book to feature his prints

every bit as rigorous. In addition, Kuehn’s autochromes are

essays addressed photography, film, painting, and

since the 1981 catalogue of the first exhibition

given an historical and a technological context as well. The

philosophy, among many other subjects. Blaisdell

exclusively

photography.

book investigates photography’s desire to be accepted

delighted in his friendships with celebrated figures in

Rauschenberg considered himself a photographer

as an art form and an integral aspect of modernism as it

the arts and humanities, which included photographer

as much as a painter; in fact, he experienced his

was unfolding in the early years of the twentieth century.

Lewis Baltz, philosopher Stanley Cavell, writer Evan

earliest success with Edward Steichen’s inclusion of

Heinrich Kuehn and His American Circle (Prestel, $49.95)

Connell, poet Robert Creeley, and art critic Max

a Rauschenberg/Susan Weil collaborative blueprint

was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the

Kozloff. Blaisdell lived a life surrounded by books—he

for the latter’s 1951 Abstraction in Photography show

Neue Galerie, in New York City. Ronald Lauder, president

was a passionate reader, as well as being an editor,

at MoMA and Steichen’s subsequent acquisition of

of Neue Galerie said, “This exhibition takes us back to a

publisher, and a bookstore owner. Gus Blaisdell

two black-and-white Rauschenberg prints for his

bygone world and casts a very deep spell.”–D.A.

Collected (University of New Mexico Press, $40) is

public collection. One depicted the interior of an

a sampling of his writings, selected and edited by

old horse-carriage, the other a car interior with John

William Peterson who writes, “Gus’s writing revolved

Cage, taken at Black Mountain in 1952. Both reveal

At the entrance to Mary

around the quest for knowledge of the self and the

Rauschenberg’s keen eye for the arresting subject,

Mito’s studio, there is a

search for understanding our human placement in

his mastery of light and dark composition, and his

quote from Proust: “The

the world.” Of particular interest in this volume are

unerring formal skills in framing and cropping. Both

real voyage of discovery

his takes on Frank Stella, Lewis Baltz, Allan Graham,

images appear in this book, edited jointly by Susan

consists not in seeking new

and Joel-Peter Witkin. In discussing Witkin’s work

Davidson and David White, with an essay by Tate

landscapes, but in having

Photographs

philosopher, critic, and educator at the University

dedicated

his

Spiritual Devotion

continued on page 42 D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

THE magazine | 41

new eyes.” Mito’s hyperrealist paintings accomplish this

A Fascination with Violence

the work of Balthus, the Surrealist Leonora Carrington,

extraordinary voyage of discovery for us, transforming

When George Bellows died

and the Neo-Expressionist Francesco Clemente.” Neo

the ground beneath our feet into complex, singular

at the age of forty-two in

Rauch & Rosa Loy: Behind the Gardens (Prestel, $49.95)

landscapes. Each work, which can easily be mistaken

1925, he was hailed as

presents work from the artists’ first joint exhibition,

for a photograph, takes approximately one year to

one of the greatest artists

at the Essl Museum, near Vienna. According to Rauch,

complete. With a simple, large format presentation,

America had yet produced.

both artists are satisfying a “long harbored wish” for

Mary Mito (Fresco Books, $75) collects the artist’s

As a young man, Bellows

which there had previously not been “a suitable venue.”

graphite-on-paper drawings and oil paintings, which

studied in New York City

“Everything is oriented on us, on our relationship, and

meticulously detail grass, scrubby pebbles, and the

with Robert Henri, leader

on the tension in our shared life and in our work,”

luminous surface of shallow ponds, rarely focusing on

of the Ashcan School. He

emphasizes Loy. The couple’s paintings are beautifully

much more than a shadow or a furrow in the sand.

participated in an exhibition organized by a group of

reproduced, and along with the insightful essays by

Prized by collectors for their rarity and extraordinary

Henri’s pupils, showing the first of his vigorous boxing

Karlheinz Essl, Tilo Baumgartel, Bernhart Schwenk,

precision, Mito’s paintings are included in the collection

paintings—a pastel entitled The Knock-Out. While some

and Günther Oberhollenzer, this volume provides

of Chicago’s Art Institute, among other major

critics praised the painting, others damned the work—but

unprecedented entrée into Rauch and Loy’s personal

museums. With her almost religious devotion to her

all singled Bellows out as an artist to watch. After 1908,

and artistic universes. –V.A.

simple subject, Mito inspires contemplation without

while continuing to depict fight scenes—Stag at Sharkey’s

need for a horizon and meditation without need for

is his most recognized work—Bellows also made paintings

movement. –E.H.

of street scenes, Mardi Gras, nudes, landscapes, seascapes

When photographer and

in Maine, and somber lithographs of war. With success

psychology professor Karl

came prestige, portrait commissions, and invitations to

P. Koenig passed away this

worked

socialize with well-heeled people. George Bellows (Prestel,

past January, he left behind

with Stanley Kubrick as a

$55) reveals the scope of the artist’s output in many

a portfolio of singularly

choreographer and performer

mediums: lithographs, oil, charcoal, pastel, watercolor,

beautiful—and

in the opening sequences of

and crayon. Bellows’ brushwork shows the artist’s

photographs. In October

2001: A Space Odyssey. While

boldness, his willingness to take risks, and his fascination

1994, Koenig and his wife

living in London, at Hanover

with violence. Couple this with a group of intelligent and

were vacationing in Austria,

Gate Mansions, Dan and his

informative essays, and over two hundred reproductions,

when on a whim they

wife Jill met and became fast

and you have a book that squarely places Bellows as a

stopped by the remains

friends with neighbors Yoko

unique American artist. A retrospective of some hundred

of a Holocaust concentration camp, preserved by the

Ono and her then husband

and forty works is on view at the Metropolitan Museum

federal government as a memorial. The experience

Tony Cox. When Yoko met

of Art through February 18, 2013. –V.A.

was, in Koenig’s words, “immediate, personal, and

Life with John and Yoko Dan

Richter

John Lennon, sparks flew and

The Horror

terrible—

powerful.” He embarked on a ten-year project, traveling

life for Dan and Jill changed forever. After meeting Lennon

Astonishing Psychological Power

to concentration camps throughout Europe. Koenig

at her art opening at the Indica Gallery, Yoko brought John

Artists Neo Rauch and

photographed abandoned architectural details like

over to Dan and Jill’s to have tea. They smoked a joint—

Rosa Loy are both from

washbasins, guard posts, and dog kennels, which appear

everyone got along. John said, “All this is happening because

the

tranquil, yet somehow sinister. These photographs are

I was bored one day and went to the Indica Gallery looking

Painting, which came into

collected in Fragments: Architecture of the Holocaust

for sex.” Yoko created conceptual art events—Dan and Jill

prominence in the 1990s.

(Fresco Fine Art Publications, $75). This is a hard book to

did heroin. They say that friends get friends dope, so Dan

They are a married couple,

look through, and some of the annotations are downright

introduced his new friends to his friend, the monster—

sharing neighboring studio

stomach churning—one describes how an instrument

heroin. The dream begins. When John and Yoko moved

spaces where each creates

cabinet held tools used for human experimentation, and

into their estate outside of London, they invited Dan

work that benefits from

another explains how a massive refrigeration system was

and Jill to join them, soliciting their opinions on various

each other’s differences as

required to store corpses before cremation. Koenig uses

projects. Dan shot album covers for John and Yoko and

well as similarities. Rauch’s paintings weave figurative

the Gumoil photographic process, which is reminiscent

worked on various films. The Dream is Over: London in the

fragments of times gone by with abstraction, giving the

of Pictorial photography, common in the late 19th and

60’s, Heroin ,and John & Yoko (Quartet Books Ltd., $45)

viewer access into worlds of astonishing psychological

early 20th century. The work is both painterly and gritty.

is loaded with encounters with the likes of Eric Clapton,

power. Loy’s paintings are equally figurative, replete

Some have questioned if it is appropriate to photograph

William Burroughs, Alexander Trocchi, Virginia Lust, Bob

with symbols, and focused on the mystery of woman—a

the concentration camps in such an artful manner. Koenig

and Sara Dylan, Derek Taylor, Arthur Janov, the Rolling

new femininity and a new romanticism. Of Loy, New

responds that his purpose was to “set up conflicting

Stones, and Marianne Faithful. It is also the story of John,

York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote, “The sense

tensions,” purposely drawing the viewer in, and then

Yoko, Jill, and Dan’s battle with and recovery from heroin

of dreamy glamour and unspecified sexual tension

bringing them “inside the hell of the camps” in a singularly

addiction. An enthralling memoir. –G.C.

emanating from Ms. Loy’s figures has precedents in

unforgettable way. –E.H.

Leipzig

School

f e at u r e

as a significant figure within the development of

Georgia O’Keeffe’s most

with its voluminous swirling skirts that would

widely known and most

inspire early cinematographers to immortalize her

beloved paintings sprang

in moving images. In Udall’s book we go on a magic

directly from time she

carpet ride that begins slowly in Puritan denial,

spent in rural New Mexico.

travels through the work of John Singer Sargent

O’Keeffe

and Mary Cassatt, slides under the feet of artists

status, and yet managed

like Josephine Baker, and proceeds headlong into

to retain a mystery as

achieved

cult

the modernist world of Isadora Duncan and Martha

sweeping and rich as the

Graham and the pursuit of dance as a form of visual

Southwestern landscapes she loved. Georgia O’Keeffe

deconstruction. –D.A.

and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu (Abrams, $50) by Barbara Buhler Lynes and Agapita Judy

Old School

World of Dreams

The Very Private Ms. O’Keeffe

early cinema. It was Fuller’s “Serpentine Dance,”

Lopez shares intimate scenes of the artist’s life with

In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women

rare photographs and quotes. Her homes at Ghost

Artists in Mexico and the United States (DelMonico

Ranch and, more famously, in Abiquiu, didn’t always

Books, Prestel, $65) is a fabulous archive of modern

figure into her paintings, but architectural elements

women artists and was published to accompany the

are delectably evident throughout her body of work.

acclaimed traveling exhibition In Wonderland that

Though she lived among dirt and tumbleweeds,

originated at the Los Angeles County Museum of

O’Keeffe’s intimate surroundings were pristine and

Art. Both the exhibition and the book cover a very

light-filled, existing in placid harmony with the severity

juicy terrain where women artists functioned as their

of the desert landscape. Photographs of a blackened

own muses during the surrealist movement, a fertile

doorway partially obscured by snow or a gently curving

period in twentieth-century art beginning in the

dirt driveway are pictured adjacent to paintings that

1920s and continuing into the present. And women

both reduce and elevate these scenes to their most

did not hesitate to take their place in the liberation of

elegantly beautiful forms. In a photograph from

the unconscious and the exploration of the world of

1937, O’Keeffe leans against a wrought-iron fence,

dreams with all its irrational and subversive content.

Jazz was the first American musical style to

skirt billowing; she looks triumphant and ecstatically

Forty-eight artists are represented here, including

influence music worldwide. Born around 1895

free. This exquisite book demonstrates that O’Keeffe

Lola Alvarez Bravo, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Miller,

in New Orleans, jazz developed from a mixture

left her thumbprint on New Mexico, but not before it

Remedios Varo, and of course Frida Kahlo. A complex

of spirituals, field hollers of the plantation slave

left its wild, indelible mark on her. –I.M.

layering of methods, materials, and messages is

workers, the beat of ragtime syncopation, the

unfurled like so many brilliant flags snapping in the

driving marches and sounds of brass bands,

winds of change. –D.A.

elements

Ragtime,

and

the

deep-down

Artists’ Opinions In

View:

Personal

growl of the blues. Around the beginning of

Reflections

the twentieth century, increasingly complex

Today’s

The influence of dance

styles were developed, marked by intricate and

(Thames & Hudson, $40)

on visual art has a long

propulsive rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing,

is an enormously satisfying

history. But Dance and

virtuosic solos, and melodic freedom. What

collection of essays that

American

Long

made jazz unique was the use of improvisation,

explores

often by more than one player at a time. Jazz

$60)

Covers (Taschen, $59.99) is a two-volume set—

Dozens of artists write

by Sharon Udall deals

designed in a square format that replicates old

about one piece of art

specifically with dance’s

LPs—containing a vast amount of visual and

that

impact on American art

historical information about jazz album cover

offering insight into their

from

nineteenth

art produced between the 1940s and the mid-

own practices while reexamining some of history’s

well into the twentieth

1990s. It features interviews with performers,

greatest works. Whether relaying memories of first

century. Her in-depth treatment of the subject

producers, designers, and writers, as well as a

encounters with favorite pieces or sharing thoughtful

goes beyond the mere “look of the dancing body,”

fact sheet listing performers and album names,

discourse on technique and compositional structure,

with all its color, rhythmic patterns, and dramatic

art directors, photographers, illustrators, the

these essays are both diaristic and scholarly. New-

energy. One of the dancers the author singles out is

year, the label, and more. If you love jazz, you

media artist Bill Viola describes coming face-to-face

the American Loïe Fuller, who has taken her place

will want to own this book—it’s got chops! –G.C.

with Giovanni Bellini’s The Dead Christ Supported by

Dance and Art

Art:

(University

Embrace Wisconsin

the

Press,

Leading

the

creative

Art

Artists

impact

inspiration.

inspired

them,

continued on page 45 D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

THE magazine | 43

Angels (1465-70) at a point when his father’s terminal

venues, were among five authors who contributed

illness was coming to its inevitable conclusion. Viola

the catalogue’s seven essays. The publication’s preface

was so moved by the tender scene of grief that he

claims it to be the first to focus on Symbolist landscape

began to weep in the museum. The book is full of

painting across Europe, apart from its inclusion in major

other surprises—who would guess that Ed Ruscha

surveys of Symbolism as a pan-European movement and

adores Millais’s romantically rendered Ophelia, calling

regional studies of Symbolist landscape, for example in

it “a trigger for his work”? Intriguingly, many of the

the Nordic countries. The international character of the

artists cite inspiration from colleagues practicing on

works argues against the inherent risk to an exhibition

different continents and in centuries past. The essays

catalogue’s scholarship being skewed by its reliance upon

included in this book are wonderfully revelatory, of

art from the museum’s own collection and the vagaries

both the author and the artists in question. –I.M.

of private and public loans. The catalogue’s contributors

Good Girl/Bad Girl

provide a thematic approach to the period that sharpens

Big and Beautiful

the treatment of different aspects of the movement.

Taschen is highly regarded

Each author addresses a specific topic: landscapes and

in the publishing industry for

symbols, arcadia contested, symbolism and naturalism,

its innovative and beautifully

dream landscapes, silent cities, the cosmos and

designed art books, from

rhythms of nature. Van Gogh to Kandinsky is a welcome

their oversized books to

contribution to the literature on a relatively little-known

their “Icons” series of small

chapter in the history of landscape painting that would

volumes. Taschen’s latest

have significant impact on the early Modern movements

release, 100 Interiors Around

of Surrealism and abstraction. –R.T.

Women play lots of roles in history, but sometimes

the World (Taschen, $59.99), is huge—seven hundred and twenty pages in two volumes—and consists of

it feels like there are only two: the Madonna and the

Exploration of Light

whore. In fin de siècle Europe these were undoubtedly

images of lavishly photographed homes, apartments,

Light

subject

the most prevalent—the chaste and innocent bride

villas, penthouses, and abodes on six continents,

where art and science

versus the street-dwelling prostitute. Most men had

representing a global gamut of modern styles. The book

remain

The

both. Egon Schiele died when he was just twenty-

is organized alphabetically—A is for an apartment in

interaction

between

eight, three days after his wife Edith passed away—

Amsterdam, B is for Beijing and Beverly Hills and Berlin,

darkness and luminosity

both during the 1918 flu pandemic. During his short

and so on—and features work by a bevy of both new

has been at the heart of

life, Schiele sketched and painted dozens of women,

and established architectural talents, including Louis

image making since its

mostly prostitutes. These images are what we know

Kahn and Tadao Ando. A love of detail is in evidence

inception. Doug + Mike

him for, kinky nudes that verge on pornography, even

throughout the volumes. 100 Interiors is yet another

Starn: Gravity of Light (Skira Rizzoli, $55) may not be

for today. Egon Schiele’s Women (Prestel, $85) is Jane

winner from publishing powerhouse Taschen. A must

compatible with your great grandma’s Impressionist

Kallir’s second publication of the artist’s work, the

for your Chritmas wish list. –V.A.

view of light, as it has more in common with Matisse’s

previous being the first Schiele catalogue raisonné.

“black sun,” though not that much. This is a very

Egon Schiele’s Women is a great big heavy art book

Landscapes and Symbols

entwined.

dark, creepy, and beautiful book about light (so that

with two hundred and sixty-five illustrations, some

Fin de siècle Symbolism

it might shine more brightly), documenting a number

surprisingly graphic but all delectable. Kallir highlights

has always been the Post-

of stunning installations that the art-twin duo recently

his female models, beginning with Schiele’s mother

Impressionist middle child,

produced, with a mad Deleuzian essay at the center

and sisters, prostitutes, lovers, and eventually Edith

overlooked by devotees of

by the brothers themselves. The introductory essay

and her sister. The book traces Schiele’s artistic

early Modernism. A broad

by editor James Crump is deeply intelligent, intriguing,

development, showing his influences—Klimt, Munch,

but elusive current in the

and excellently elucidates the work. The essay by Jan

Rodin—and culminating with the sensual portraits

wake

Aman ties his personal interaction with the Starns to

that are his great contribution to the female nude. –H.H.

Symbolism

Impressionism, soon

art-historical precedents in Leonardo and Duchamp,

absorbed or displaced by Expressionism and Cubism

was

among others. The volume is coffee-table size, but not

at the start of the new century. Van Gogh to Kandinsky:

ponderous; texts are presented on narrow, book-like

Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910 (Thames

pages while images of the artworks and installations

Heirloom

fruits

& Hudson, $60) was published to accompany the

are sumptuously glossy on wider sheets of art-book

vegetables

are

eponymous exhibition that opened in 2012 at the

paper. The design alone works wonders. Drop your

from seeds that have been

Scottish National Gallery, traveled to the Van Gogh

Thomas Kincaid “Painter of Light” masterpieces off at

passed

Museum, and then to the Ateneum Art Museum. Two

the thrift store and pick up Gravity of Light, which itself

to generation in order to

of three co-curators, one from each of the exhibition

is an illuminating work of art. –J.C.

preserve special varieties.

Our Cultural Past

down

and grown

generation

f e at u r e

They not only help safeguard agricultural diversity in the

drawings—shown for the first time ever. They were an

a complicated man

seed chain, but also add another level of variety to your

unexpected revelation. Who knew that the master of

Murderer, Knight of Malta, poseur, brute, Magnificus

plate. Many of our great grandmothers’ favorite fruits and

cold, hard, geometric color could draw like an angel?

Dominus of Rome—these are but a few of the epithets and

vegetables are disappearing. Mass-market, commercial

Better yet, like Matisse! His flowers were as voluptuous

honors bestowed on Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio

growers have replaced traditional varieties with hybrids,

as the old man’s nudes, and his line was as elegant and

during the years of his brief life (1571-1610) and in the four

obliterating the rich genetic diversity that once existed in

sure. They were the work of a supple hand and an

hundred years since his death. Caravaggio: The Artist and His

family gardens. In recognition of the importance—and

impeccable eye, and helped us to understand where the

Work (Getty Publications, $59.95) by Sybille Ebert-Schifferer

beauty—of these whole foods, garden history expert

paintings come from. Forty years later, the Met showed

is dedicated to refocusing attention on the artist’s work; at

Toby Musgrave and chef Raymond Blanc have teamed up

Kelly’s gorgeous drawings again. Ellsworth Kelly: Plant

the same time she debunks the tales of scandal, criminality,

to produce an encyclopedic book on disappearing garden

Drawings (Schirmer/Mosel, $95), will surprise those who

and psychological and sexual irregularities that now seem

varieties. Heirloom Fruits and Vegetables (Thames and

only know his painting and sculpture. It will also make

firmly rooted in the contemporary mind when considering

Hudson, $50) is organized by season, from cauliflower and

great reading in the winter, when we miss the sweet

Caravaggio. This is a rigorous and scrupulous reexamination

kohlrabi in spring to turnips and broccoli in winter. Each

green life so beautifully rendered in its pages. –M.M.

of Caravaggio’s works by the standards of art. Along the

description is accompanied by a still-life photo worthy of Cézanne, meticulously composed and sumptuously shot

way, Ebert-Schifferer questions reigning assumptions about

Artist of Many Forms

Caravaggio’s personal history, piety, intelligence, and character,

by British photographer Clay Perry. The book is published

Ken Price Sculpture: A

turning many of these assumptions on their heads. Utilizing

in collaboration with the Royal Horticultural Society and

Retrospective (LACMA,

primary and archival documents and contemporary reports

there’s nothing in this book your great grandmother

$75) and the exhibition

of the period, she provides thoughtful and cogent discussions

wouldn’t proudly put on the dinner table. –E.H.

this beautifully lucid

of each of the seventy-one extant and authenticated works.

book accompanies are

The narrative is clear and well reasoned, and the translation

as perfect a tribute

from the original German is exemplary. Copious footnotes,

as could be imagined

a compendium of important literature, and a splendid brief

for any artist in the

chronology of each of Caravaggio’s works is provided at

wake of his passing.

the end. These will be of interest and use for the hoards

of Caravaggisti of the world. And then there are the works

long-time

friend,

themselves! Gorgeously reproduced and exceptionally

architect Frank Gehry,

well integrated into the text, this is a book that should be

and curated by the book’s author Stephanie Barron,

particularly sought after by those new to the works of this

head of Modern Art and Senior Curator at LACMA, the

incomparable artist. –P.M.

Draws Like an Angel

show and text have received rave reviews. Ken Price, who earlier this year passed on to that great ceramics studio in the sky, was as much a genius as they come. His mature work is a major contribution to late 20th and early 21st century sculpture while, like Beatrice Wood or Paul Klee, he spent much of his successful career known only to a small cult of collectors. This book, with contributions by writers like Dave Hickey, a long time champion of Price’s ceramic abstractions, and the LA County Museum exhibition has finally changed that. This thick and sumptuous tome contains gorgeous fullcolor spreads and numerous images of the pieces in the exhibition, making it both scholarly and sensual. It traces In 1969 I saw Henry Geldzahler’s massive American

Price’s career from his early days at LA’s famous Ferus

Painting & Sculpture 1940–1970 exhibition at the

Gallery, to his flocking to Taos along with other Light

Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was still in school, and

and Surface School luminaries, and everything along the

it was my first real exposure to Pollock, Calder, and the

way. The illustrated timeline at the back of the book is

rest of the pantheon. It was amazing and overwhelming

especially helpful, and MaLin Wilson-Powell’s extensive

to stagger through galleries of Rothkos, Oldenburgs and

interviews with Price are intimate and full of insights into

Warhols—like going to MoMA for the first time and

Price’s incredible cultural contribution. The only thing

seeing all the paintings from your art history books. Two

that would make your coffee table look better than this

rooms are as vivid now as they were then: a gallery of

lovely monograph would be an actual Ken Price piece.

boxes by Joseph Cornell, and thirty Ellsworth Kelly plant

–J.C.

D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

2012-13

THE magazine | 45

THE-Pushpin:Layout 1

11/16/12

9:32 PM

Page 1

Santa Fe Art Institute GALLERY CLASSES STUDIOS SUPPLIES

CLASSES STARTING JANUARY 2

Santa Fe Art Institute, ArtSee, After Hours Alliance, Cut + Paste Society, RE:MIKE, and MIX Santa Fe present

2012 Pushpin/ Clothespin Show A Community-Wide Open Call Exhibition and Art Sale & Homemade/Handmade Pop-Up Holiday Shops

SANTA FE CLAY

Exhibition Opening, Art Sale, and Pop-Up Shops Saturday, December 15, 11am-3pm. Location TBD – stay tuned! Exhibition through 12/28 Submissions of work accepted on Friday, December 14 from 9am – 5pm. For more submission info and details, visit sfaiblog.org or call (505) 424 - 5050.

CONTEMPORARY CERAMICS

SFAI's Artists and Writers in Residence December Open Studio

505.984.1122

Thursday December 20, 5:30pm SFAI

545 CAMINO DE LA FAMILIA SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 87501 WWW.SANTAFECLAY.COM

WWW.SFAI.ORG, 505-424 -5050, INFO@SFAI.ORG. SANTA FE ART INSTITUTE, 1600 ST.MICHAELS DRIVE, SANTA FE NM 87505 | SANTA FE ART INSTITUTE PROMOTES ART AS A POSITIVE SOCIAL FORCE THROUGH RESIDENCIES, LECTURES STUDIO WORKSHOPS, EXHIBITIONS, COMMUNITY ART ACTIONS, AND EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH FOR ADULTS AND YOUNG PEOPLE. SFAI IS AN ENVIRONMENT WHERE CREATIVITY, INNOVATION, AND CHALLENGING IDEAS THRIVE. PARTIALLY FUNDED BY CITY OF SANTA FE ARTS COMMISION AND 1% LODGER’S TAX AND BY NEW MEXICO ARTS, A DIVISION OF DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS

Critical Reflection

Hill’s Gallery Remix: Then & Now

Hill’s Gallery 217 Galisteo Street, Santa Fe

From 1970 through 1981, Hill’s Gallery was Santa Fe’s premier showcase of New Mexico’s artistic diversity. On more than one occasion John Connell (1940-2009) filled the gallery’s capacious windows with swathed buddhas, birds, and human figures. They were messy, gooey, exalted gifts to every passerby. The grandeur of Connell’s sculptures recently graced the windows of Hill’s Gallery Remix: Then & Now, a twelveweek pop-up. One of the finest artists to make his home in New Mexico from the 1970s into the 1990s, Connell was given prime real estate during the gallery’s short life span. Among his thirteen sculptures on view, the most astonishing is Man Digging, a largerthan-life-size figure made of rough-cut lumber coated with drippy brown wax. Suspended by wires, the figure embodies the potential of human action, buoyancy, and gravitas. A master of combining rawness and elegance in every scale, Connell’s hand-size bronze

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Fear-Not Buddha has an inexplicably big presence and was utterly at peace on a pedestal in proximity to a wall of the artist’s fast, sudsy, florid drawings and paintings, all unframed. Two of Carl Johansen’s 2012 apocalyptic creatures also inhabited the windows of the temporary gallery. Altogether there were seventeen of these battered homunculi, each a detailed “Paracosm” or child’s imaginary friend. They look like Teletubbies abandoned in a Blade Runner dystopia. Bandaged, scarred, bleeding, and stained, many with severed limbs, open wounds, and sucking on cigars instead of pacifiers, Johansen’s brave and wily little survivors of madness and crime retain a remarkable measure of tenderness. They carry names insouciant and serious—Speedo, Cathy’s Clown, Poison Ivy, Smokey Joe, Smells Like Rain—“Our Gang” and street gang style monikers for those born into a devolving, hellish world.

The original Hill’s Gallery—founded by Megan and Jim Hill, both UNM graduate students in sculpture—was a heady, eclectic mixture of artists working in every genre, mastering new materials, and living and working at a healthy distance from the hegemony of officially sanctioned styles and aesthetic theorizing. As the Vietnam War raged and the 1960s deteriorated, a diaspora of artists from across the U.S. made their way to New Mexico. Graduates of UNM’s then very avant-garde art department joined others who put down roots near Santa Fe and Taos, where hardware stores would still open an account for artists, without references. More than a hundred and seventy artists exhibited in the original gallery, and Megan Hill—the impresario behind the Hill’s popup—selected the work of eight artists to hang throughout the twelve weeks, with many more installed in a changing space called the Vortex. In addition to Connell and Johansen, the core group included Helen Beck, Doris Cross, Megan Hill, Jim Hill, Solomon Hill, and Jean Promutico. The first Vortex rotation featured terrific work by sculptors David Anderson and John Tinker along with master printmaker Bruce Lowney. Without exception, all of the work stood up to the test of time. On exhibit were fully realized works by mature, hands-on studio artists who have consistently made things they felt complelled to make, in contrast to so much current art done “on demand”—or, speculatively—for the next show. The pop-up installation was a lively stew, and confirmed the sophisticated and largely ahistorical nature of their endeavors. The distinctive styles were not created to be in vogue by these 1970s transmigrants who, for the most part, arrived in New Mexico with styles firmly in place. They included the internationally acclaimed Larry Bell, Luis Jimenez, Bruce Nauman, and Ken Price—among many others—who also exhibited at the original Hill’s. The inimitable and seductive Doris Cross (1906-1994), a doyenne of cosmopolitanism, was the epitome of voluntary banishment, and she held court with aplomb, a bevy of eager young artists in attendance. Cross produced exceptional sculptures and exquisite “concrete poems” from the pages of the 1913 Webster’s Secondary School Dictionary, ten of which were on view and justly given pride of place. Exquisite graphite drawings by Helen Beck ranged from the grand to the humble and the intimate. Her large 3 Graces from 1978 is a tour de force of delicacy and

boldness with swooping, intersecting planes, touched by oh-so-soft exhalations of pastel colored pencil. Her small 2011 After Image drawing depicts a woman’s head in profile near the moment of death, skin translucent enough to see the skull, eyes closed, mouth open, totally luminous. Fourteen iridescent paintings by Jean Promutico, who showed annually at Hill’s, triumphed over their less-than-ideal placement. Promutico’s characteristic and subtle rows of slanted mark-making are thrilling devotions to pacing—the pulse of the heart, the flow of breath, the micromovements of life—and reach a crescendo in a grey-toned square canvas with Twomblyesque smoky vertical smears in a chalky field. The work of Megan Hill, Jim Hill and Sol Hill were more now than then. Megan Hill’s drawings of water-soluble pencil and crayon embrace the American modernist tradition of Dove and Burchfield, melding the interior and the exterior worlds of sensation, especially in her winter landscape abstractions and vibrating diptychs. Jim Hill’s nine-inch bronze male torsos Giraffe Hat and Lemon Head invoke whimsy, hearkening back to treasures found in curiosity cabinets. Considering that the gallery began as a venue for the work of family and friends, this pop-up version was the occasion for introducing the photographs of Sol Hill—the Hills’ son—who was born in 1971, on the day of the gallery’s first major opening, which featured the ethereal paintings of Raymond Jonson. Literally born into art, Sol Hill’s painterly large-format, color photographs are a testament to the legacy of the historical significance of this groundbreaking 1970s Santa Fe venue. —MaLin Wilson-Powell

Left: John Connell, Man Digging, mixed media, 6’ x 4’ x 30”, 1992 Bottom: Doris Cross, Foundling, mixed media, 17” x 16”, 1982

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Machine Wilderness: Re-envisioning Art, Technology

and

Nature

Albuquerque Museum of Art and History 19th and Mountain NW, Albuquerque

My journey through one segment of the huge spread of projects that comprise ISEA2012 began on the terrace of the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History. That terrace would stamp my impression of Machine Wilderness: Re-envisioning Art, Technology and Nature with this reaction: the ridiculous in close proximity to the sublime. In the latter category was Mark Malmberg’s motorized, computerized, solar-driven installation Albireo. His three audio-endowed creatures— positioned above our heads—were uber-robots swaying, chirping, and reaching for the sky. Although their mechanics were complicated, there was something quite endearing about these bird-like, plane-like beings always acting in relation to one another and to the sun, and always in touch with their “mother-board” in California, where Malmberg lives. The digital components embedded in each robot allow for both self- and other diagnostics as well as communication at a distance with Malmberg’s computer. Although one of the Albireo triplets was non-functioning at the time of my visit— no amount of self-diagnosis and messages from afar could solve the problem—Malmberg’s piece was nonetheless enchanting to listen to and to watch. It turned out that both temporary and long-term non-functionality would be a condition that dogged the heels of approximately one-fifth of the works in this complex and provocative show. And maybe this was no surprise seeing the sensitive dependence on electronics and technology at

the heart of each installation. I was particularly sorry that Daniel Miller’s on-site bat house failed to attract any bats; as a result, the main component of Chiroptera-Domus—an audio feed from bat headquarters out in one of the courtyards—was non-existent. Normally I don’t dwell on work that fails to engage my interest, but I have to say this about Meow Wolf’s utterly dreadful pile of crap that also inhabited the same terrace as Malmberg’s robots: Meow Wolf’s utter mindlessness was in stark contrast to the devilishly clever Albireo. What on earth was Meow Wolf thinking? In the extremely sophisticated context of the projects presented in this show, The Biotic Manifold inserted its manifold failure into the mix all too flagrantly. Why the museum allowed it for even one nanosecond to spill its juvenile aura on the rest of this inspired and thoughtful work is the real question. It took me a while to appreciate Colleen Ludwig’s installation Elemental Bodies: Shiver. Rivulets of water flowed down three walls of Ludwig’s alcove as a viewer entered the space and walked close to them. Triggered by the motion of our bodies, the tiny meandering vertical rivers hugged the walls and contracted slightly in their course, and these slight perturbations were meant to simulate a shiver. I never experienced that aspect of the piece, but the more I walked back and forth and studied the running water, the more I responded to its intimate dynamics and organic

associations. The walls had veins, but instead of blood flowing, there was this transparent crystalline liquid creating a kind of script that could be read like a form of visual poetry. The concept behind Agnes Chavez and Allessandro Saccoia’s (X) Trees was the presentation of algorithmic drawings of trees generated and morphed by tweets and text messages. The piece was certainly interesting enough but chilling, too, in its way—this idea of generalizing about nature several steps removed from direct knowledge of it. These stylized branches, leaves, and tree trunks suggested the manner in which nature will be experienced in some cyber-haunted future where circuit-laden culture is the main determinant of whatever remains in the landscapes around us. Most of the Machine Wilderness exhibitions installed all over Albuquerque will be open through January 6, so if it’s a truly thrilling magic carpet ride you want, François Quévillon’s gorgeous and immersive Dérive is not to be missed. This work is an extraordinary layering of geography, architecture, streaming images, and environmental and atmospheric data. Dérive—which means drift—is that rare hybrid of art, science, and technology that performs seamlessly on all levels. The work is metaphorically rich, unbelievably rigorous and elegant in its conceptual underpinnings, and technologically brilliant. Viewers can sit at the back of the room and watch the projections like a movie, or they can walk around the space and literally level or tilt the playing fields of places such

as Manhattan, Montreal, Lyon, Albuquerque, or Golden, New Mexico. By moving back and forth, the viewer becomes part of the computergenerated, 3D modeling of these sites, and the data that undergoes a continual metamorphosis seem to fly right into our faces as tiny particles of light. When you leave that darkened room, you wonder why the surface of your skin has not been perforated with holes. Dérive and its electronica blow art history apart and make it extremely porous and open-ended. The work provides a deep and prismatic experience that ranges beyond that of traditional art on several fronts as it cradles technology, nature, geography, and interactivity in its visionary reach. Quévillon’s data have been programmed to reflect information about buildings, bridges, monuments, and mountains, for example, and the visual signifiers that result look like streaming particles from another dimension. In reality, however, mundane things like street grids, rivers, heat, light sources, and even falling rain have transformed the data. Each mapping of an area is superbly high-tech, yet infused with luminous and ghostly aftereffects, and everything has been organized into breathtaking and moving digital translations. The virtual and the actual, the organic and the computer-generated, all are united in a marriage blessed by the gods Techne and Eros. —Diane Armitage François Quévillon, Dérive, networked interactive installation, 2010-ongoing

Critical Reflection

The Transformative Surface

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

Things that go “bump!” in the night unfailingly focus our attention, I thought, as I groped my way through this Stygian installation of new media artists. In fact, I’d opine, many of the works might well have lost a good deal of their bump had they been installed in the customary, brightly lit white cube exhibition mode. As it happened, most of the pieces in this show, no matter how divergent in their media, proved pretty riveting. This project presents the work of nine University of New Mexico faculty artists, with an additional six New Mexico–based artists as guests, in a show that demonstrates “the wide-ranging possibilities of transformation and surface in time-based analog, video, digital, and sound art,” as the press materials advise. A handful of works, from 1968 to 2012, illustrated how things seen, heard, or felt—optical, aural, or haptic—can be transmogrified by the seemingly fathomless hybrid practices available to today’s vanguard. This viewer could not help but think back, way back, to the first stirrings of the Art and Technology movement, launched by engineer Billy Klüver and artist Robert Rauschenberg, among others; light-years have been traversed in the worlds of both art and technology since those heady days that began in 1967. This exhibition smartly trains on a critical mass of New Mexico artists who do not simply engage with “image manipulation technology” but, very often, teach through their work, perhaps the most laudable aspect of the project altogether. The Transformative Surface was organized and curated by Michelle Penhall, Mary Tsongas, and museum director E. Luanne McKinnon, and again landmarks the UNM Art Museum as a player in twentyfirst century new media matters. The show gives panache to the Eighteenth International Symposium on Electronic Art (sub-titled Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness), whose various programs and events are taking place throughout the fall and early winter. The Duane A. Keller Memorial Fund has underwritten the brochure for the exhibition, a keeper document. Always noteworthy in expositions such as this are those works created expressly for the occasion, i.e. the site specific. Woody Vasulka’s mesmerizing installation, Light Revisited (No. 4), incorporating both video and audio components, is a new iteration of a canonical work in early video by this artist. The éminence grise of the group, Vasulka reincarnates a seminal work of electronic art

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that intends to make palpable, i.e. hyperreal, the materiality and energy of an unmediated, pure electronic signal. In the gloaming, a furiously dancing disc of projected, colorized video “snow” is intended to make the invisible visible—the grail of all modern art, as described by Paul Klee. Just as transfixing is Avatasamka—the new creation of Daniel Reeves—a projected mandala disc, which (apparently ceaselessly) changes, its sparkling palette and patterning reminiscent of the view through a child’s kaleidoscope; paradoxically, for a work of ultra-electronic art, the piece recalls antique, Venetian glass paperweights. This effulgent object, installed to hover high overhead, brings to mind the legendary and much-

coveted jewel in the forehead of some great Buddha. In the event, as the catalogue puts it, this piece “offers a profound vision… a jeweled cosmos replete with infinite realmswithin-realms.” As Santa Feans well know, Peter Sarkisian can always be counted on not simply to turn television technology back upon itself but to infuse an element of enigma into the most prosaic subjects. Of the two pieces included, his Purple Boiling in Pail is, at first, perplexing since the motif is no more than a steel pail on the floor—its videogenerated contents a viscous, bubbling fluid. I say at first, but then the viewer gradually finds himself oddly entranced, drawn in by the purplish-gray elixir. As Shakespeare said, of the

roiling witches’ brew, “Double, double toil and trouble, Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” As with much new art, it remains to be seen if any of these art and technology creations will merely devolve into oneliners, or whether they will have staying power. However that may turn out, The Transformative Surface project can’t help but make gallery visitors marvel at the University of New Mexico’s profound commitment to the visual arts, as exemplified by its museum’s long-demonstrated dedication to providing not only the campus but the community and the art-loving public of our state with such worthwhile—and intriguing—undertakings. —Jan E. Adlmann Peter Sarkisian, Purple Boiling in Pail, steel pail, concrete, tinted polymer resin, video projection, and audio, 2011

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Zachariah Rieke

Wade Wilson Art 409 Canyon Road, Santa Fe

Some years ago I had the good fortune

to visit an artist named Zachariah Rieke in his studio-gallery-home in the center of Santa Fe, and to see firsthand his place of process, experimentation, and investigation. The house was sumptuously spare, if such a thing is possible, and served as a gallery for Rieke and his wife, Gail (also an excellent artist). Both partners in art had already amassed impressive exhibition records with reputable galleries in Santa Fe and beyond, but finding themselves momentarily between local dealers sometime back, had opted to open their beautifully designed livework space as their Santa Fe exhibition space, too. For years they ran monthly exhibitions of their own work and the art of their friends. When I came to cross the threshold into the Riekes’ extra-aesthetic inhabitation that

phase was winding down. At long last the blast of having a house-gallery had finally flagged. They were looking forward to a little more privacy, more time to travel, more studio time. Let somebody else handle sales and advertising, now was a time to turn inward toward their own creative sources, a time to advance the depth and richness of their work. The stories of the lives of artists, our tribal mythology, rings with the great spiritual and material generosity artists can have toward those they consider friends and family, but protecting the resources of solitude is just as surely something artists end up doing. Zachariah Rieke is a force-of-nature painter, like Turner or Pollock, minus the bombast of either. We are all of us forces of nature, or rather formed and embodied

by natural forces. This is what Rieke and his predecessors realize and what his wondrous work so lucidly demonstrates. His processes are in many ways anti-expressive and aleatoric. At the time I met him, he favored gluing things together and then peeling them apart to see what kind of marks and shapes they might leave behind. This was a double surprise. Once in that it was a surprising way to paint, and twice when he got to peel the stuff apart, sometimes months after initial lamination. The results were often so organic, so full of active complexity (back to Jack the dripper) as to be unrecognizable as made by a human hand. “The Tao is the thing that cannot be named,” says Lao Tzu. Rieke had embarked upon a search for the formless form, or something

like that, a completely unconscious method for bringing something into being, Duchamp’s ultimate surrealist dream: an art of ridiculously pure chance. Rieke was also positing a radical break with authorship, as if that were possible, deliberately and patiently investigating just exactly when and how natural forces can subsume the ego of the maker. With total conviction, like Turner bound to the mast, he would glue his way to some answers. The work echoed with AbEx, Art Brut, and Arte Povera overtones and resembled most strongly something like a largish section of neglected asphalt in a random parking lot. Or a piece of rusted roofing panel found in an arroyo. Whatever gets dragged onto, across, or over— and then sticks to—a deliberately neglected surface, all this is the result of the sublimely mundane forces of nature at play. All human painting, from Lascaux to semi-gloss on garage walls, to Caravaggio, is simply an extension of these same sticky, natural processes. Upon exiting a Franz Kline show in Philly, I couldn’t stop looking at phone lines and girders and the broad swaths of white and yellow paint laid on the city streets to direct traffic. I had a similar experience some years ago when, as I left Rieke’s studio, I literally couldn’t keep my eyes off the ground. The sidewalk and the surface of the street had acquired a miraculous and dense complexity of richly layered shifting nuances that was instantly apparent, yet would also require a lifetime of careful study to fully grasp. I wanted to kneel in the road and take it all in. Tectonic plates, continental drift, the movement and ontology of the galaxies, the solutions to all unsolved algebras were surely herein contained. The ground beneath my feet became a crystal ball. At Zachariah Rieke’s recent show at Canyon Road’s new (to Santa Fe) Wade Wilson Art I was pleased to see years of hard-fought research had paid off with a formal rigor and elegant classicism. The show has something of the expansive feel of Frederick Hammersley’s mature work; replace Hammersley’s perfect geometry with Rieke’s perfect gesture, and remember that Rieke likes to relinquish the reins. Rieke works on both sides of the canvas, setting the viscosity of the paint for the right amount of bleed-through. Simple, calligraphic marks of intense authority (think Kline again, and Sumi-e brushwork) are thus superimposed in austere tones to beautiful effect. Not a florid beauty exactly, but a restrained and perfectly harmonized beauty, in tune with natural force and the originating oneness, born of skill, wisdom, and chance. Look closely, Grasshoppa. These paintings are an excellent choice for any Zen-ta Fe interior, and, amazingly, every one’s a home run, if you have the good fortune. —Jon Carver

Zachariah Rieke, Painting 34, acrylic on canvas, 80” x 66”, 2012

Critical Reflection

Linda Vi Vona: Born Under What Star?

Red Dot Gallery 826 Canyon Road, Santa Fe

“Somehow I must be doing something right.” —Linda Vi Vona

Indeed. And not only righT. .

This is a kind of right that is attached to so much diversity and to so much experimentation and skill with materials that the results are both beautiful and full of surprises. The Vi Vona retrospective at Red Dot Gallery brings together more than fifty artworks that span a fifty-year period. We learn quickly that Vi Vona equals variety. There is Lucite, oil paint, collage, beachtrash assemblage, watercolor, ink, and more. Her surfaces range from music staff paper to linen to ledger paper to old paint rags. Queen Theodora (1985) is our greeter, and she boasts thousands of individually cut bits of Pantone paper. The mosaic effect is lovely, but even more striking is the sense of life and purposeful movement under the geometry in this figure. Flying free of the queen’s shape are several shards of paper, looking like the water droplets a wet dog would shake off. In contrast with the angular mosaic of Queen Theodora, there are two mosaics from 1974 made of adhesive colored coding dots. Vi Vona layers the dots to create pools of color. She shapes waves and curves from the aquatic blues and greens of Atlantis #1, yet places them within a linear dotted border overpainted with silver oil stick. In Atlantis #2, she creates lines and angles with the purple, black, silver, gold, and green dots and then lets some of them escape outside the borders. Vi Vona was ahead of her time when she first used colored Plexiglas in her art making. Leaves and Growths (1971) is a Lucite sculpture that is suspended from the ceiling. She used an oven and a heat gun to shape its impossible curves and bends. The piece itself is interesting to contemplate because of the way the colors overlap and combine when viewed from different angles, a bit like those mesmerizing color wheel watches and clocks. Even more beautiful are the smoky, evolving shadows that the gently spinning piece casts on a nearby wall. The shades of green, yellow, and orange blend into animallike shapes that change with every twist. When I photograph a flower, I want to focus way inside, and Vi Vona’s flowers do a brilliant job of taking us there. In Three Yellow Tulips (1993) she layers the oil paint so that it is at its thickest deep inside each flower. Then in As Above So Below (2012) she goes one better and uses old kimono fabric— reversed to reveal the brighter colors—for the fibrous centers of each iris.

There are glimpses throughout the exhibition of Vi Vona’s whimsy and personality, for example, pen-and-ink trees that are holding one another up in Two Trees, an illustration for a poem about divorce by E. F. Weifflitz. But in several cases Vi Vona documents her thoughts directly. Horse Collage (1974) combines a magazine image of a split-twig horse figure with her ink crosshatch drawing of a similarly shaped horse that we can just perceive in the negative space. Across the top of the ledger paper background are the typed words, “Shortly after finishing the ink drawing, I found the photo in a National Geographic Magazine. It looked uncannily like the animal drawing preconceived from my subconscious.” Other forms, as their titles suggest, emerge from within the crosshatching in Iris (1974), Mother and Children (1978), and Skippy (1974). Yes, the peanut butter. Curator Jon Carver has done a splendid job of arranging the art in ways that highlight different elements. Black Lines with Yellow Ochre (2008) hangs beside HC #2 (2007-10) so that their part of the wall explodes with Giverny-like yellows and blues. Carver helps us understand Vi Vona’s range of mosaic technique by grouping half a dozen of her mosaics together so that we can compare the detail of each, whether the mosaic is created from cut paper, adhesive dots, or metal squares. Then he places Torch of Liberty (1986), which features hand-stitching along several edges of the unraveling canvas, in between Placement V and Placement XLV, which are both from 1999 and are higher-tech digital print collages. I had to have a favorite, and for me it screams with the beauty and creativity that must be at Vi Vona’s core. It is a mixed-media piece called Rose Emerging. The artist took an old paint rag and soaked it in water, causing the paint blotches to spread and combine in a watery blend. She then mounted the fabric on a handmade stretcher and painted over some of the resulting botanical shapes with water-based oils to bring out the suggestions of flowers, stems, and leaves. The result looks like a soft, shimmery chintz fabric. It is exactly the fabric that I wish my grandmother had used to make me a big-girl dress all those years ago. One rose is emerging in 3D from the canvas, ready to drop its petals in the next breeze. Vi Vona shaped the petals from cotton fabric that she dyed to match roses in her garden. How fitting that this work is from 2012 and is a suitable metaphor for the artist in Vi Vona that continues to emerge. —Susan Wider Top: Linda Vi Vona, Rose Emerging, mixed media, 23” x 21”, 2012

Linda Vi Vona, Tree and its Roots, lucite and resin, 22” x 23” x 14”, 1971 D E C e m b e r / J ANUARY

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THE magazine | 51

Ricardo Legorreta

and

Santa Fe

Santa Fe University of Art and Design 6401 Richards Avenue, Santa Fe

John Gaw Meem, father of Santa Fe’s 1957 Historical Zoning Ordinance, is considered the architect of Santa Fe style, especially as it evolved during the first half of the twentieth century. The capital city of New Mexico is known as a tourist mecca, thanks in no small part to its Pueblo Revival architecture as pioneered by Meem, who sought not to copy an historic mode but to preserve and codify its aesthetic. Late in the century, the notion that “brown town” could include the clean lines of contemporary architecture was a source of fractious dialog: It was the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta who jump-started Santa Fe into the twenty-first century with his plans for the Visual Arts Center (VAC) at what was then known as the College of Santa Fe (now the Santa Fe University of Art and Design). A tribute weekend held in midOctober honoring the arquitecto, who died at

the end of last year, was organized by the Santa Fe Art Institute in collaboration with Thornburg Investment Management, the Zócalo Condominiums, Lloyd & Associates Architects, Spears Architects, Martínez Architecture Studio, and the City of Santa Fe. The tribute comprised an exhibition at SFAI of Legorreta’s drawings and models, tours of the four Santa Fe sites designed by Legorreta—SFAI, the VAC at SFUAD, the Thornburg campus, and the Zócalo apartments—and featured a lecture by the architect’s son Victor (currently practicing under the firm name Legorreta + Legorreta), as well as presentations by Wayne Lloyd, whose team worked with Legorreta to realize his plans, and Khristaan Villela, professor of art history and scholar-in-residence at SFUAD. A local private home was also designed by Legorreta, and although it was not included

in the tribute weekend, its presence has certainly contributed to what Villela terms “the Legorreta effect” in Santa Fe. Unquestionably, however, it was the buildings at SFUAD that changed the face of local architecture from “brown and round” to broad planes in vibrant colors—a characteristic of the Mexican master of emotional architecture, Luís Barragán, who preceded Legorreta by a couple of generations. All of the speakers noted that Legorreta was devoted to imparting a sense of mystery in his work, which he called an “arch of surprise” created by his use of simple geometric forms, contrasting light and shadow, and colors that were unthinkable to Modern architects. The talk by Victor Legorreta provided personal insight into his famous father’s oeuvre, especially in terms of general concepts—such as the visual importance for him of interior

lighting effects and vernacular color—that are vital to the final Legorreta product. The son emphasized that his father found teamwork to be key as he collaborated not only with contractors but with the environments his architecture was planned for. For example, the deep blue skies of northern New Mexico are the perfect foil for the soaring red planes of the Visual Art Center at SFUAD. Color was unwelcome here through the 1990s, noted Lloyd, when Legorreta proposed the use of neon pink, deep purple, cobalt blue, and canary yellow for his walls. The city countered with the constraint that exterior walls must be painted in earth tones. Legorreta managed to convince officials that brick red and burnt orange are, indeed, earthen hues, and these were used on his exterior surfaces. The art department courtyard walls are color coded, however, in bright tones: pink for the Eugene Thaw Art History Center, purple for the Anne and John Marion Center for Photographic Arts, a yellow patio in the Tishman art hall, and blue for the Art Institute. Originally, Legorreta planned to use pink at SFAI; he switched to blue after receiving complaints that hot pink would drive resident artists up and over the walls! (Personally, after having an office off the fuchsia arcades of the Thaw Art History building, I came to love the color more than ever.) Villela’s lecture imparted interesting tidbits of the sort that come from his having been present, after his tenure as professor began in 1998, during construction of the VAC and SFAI. For Villela, a specialist in the preColumbian cultures of Mesoamerica, Legorreta was undeniably influenced by prehistoric Mayan architecture. Pre-Cortésian courtyards, arcades, and porticoes were painted in bright colors, and Legorreta’s dramatic, platonic solids reference the massive forms of the pyramids found throughout Mexico and Central America. The Italianate colonnades of Spanish Colonial convents and government palaces influenced Legorreta to utilize in his buildings the ancient charm of cool, dark interior patios with their lush plantings and nooks for intimacy and intrigue. According to the obituary Villela wrote, Legorreta described courtyards as “the connective tissue between nature, people, and functional space.” His buildings were planned with great sensitivity to their environments, incorporating all the glory of nature without resisting its allure. Ricardo Legorreta’s architecture transforms the Modernist idiom of glass and concrete into a language of the eternal.

—Kathryn M Davis Visual Arts Center, Santa Fe University of Art and Design Designed by Ricardo Legorreta Photo: Lourdes Legorreta

Critical Reflection

Heinz Emil Salloch

A Gallery Santa Fe 154 West Marcy Street #104, Santa Fe

“As a young man,my father knew great dangers. I tell myself he survived by staying out of the light.” That’s Roger Salloch describing his father, the German-born artist Heinz Emil Salloch (1908-1985). More often than not, when Roger talks about his dad, he talks about colors. Dark colors. His tweedy coats were the color of black coffee; the spines of the books in his office were dark greens and blues; the smells of spiced gingerbread and smoky stews were darkcolored smells; even the rum Heinz drank was dark. Shadowy interiors perhaps best befit Heinz Salloch’s tenebrous experience as an émigré of World War Two. He left Germany at its onset, but not because he was Jewish; he fled his home country because he didn’t agree with the Nazi regime—because he didn’t want to live in darkness. In Germany, his paintings and drawings were largely comprised of Modernist, abstracted landscapes: harbor scenes, quaint mountain villages, church spires, and Berlin buildings. Salloch settled on the American East Coast, but his travels to New Mexico inspired the modest grouping of

watercolors and pastels on display at Santa Fe’s A Gallery. Along with a deep fondness for the act of painting a picture, the works suggest an almost reverential curiosity about the American West. Painting the landscape of his adopted home was perhaps not only born of an urge to document and understand where he was, but was also an attempt to remember where he was from. Very little is known about Heinz Salloch’s early life. He left Berlin in 1937, at age 29, after he received a tip from his landlady that the Gestapo had been asking questions about him. A painter and substitute teacher, Salloch had attracted attention for refusing to use the prescribed party newspaper in his classroom and for continuing to socialize with and teach Jewish students. It’s not surprising that themes of land and identity are inextricably linked to those who study Salloch’s work. German curator Karen Peters said that while in his birth country, Salloch made paintings in a more recognizably expressionist vein: “The German watercolors have less of a

documentary quality. . . . When he came to America he became an acute and keen observer of detail in an effort to understand his new environment.” Paintings of the Southwestern landscape can be saccharine in their attempts at romance. Sunsets are painstakingly crafted to include every possible variant of a given hue, often making them look more like melting orange Popsicles than earthly events; the mountains are innocuously blue, as if covered in tasteful navy carpeting. Salloch would have none of that. He was a deeply interior person, for whom the quiet spaces of the Western outdoors made perfect sense. The clouds in Salloch’s paintings are triumphantly expressive, billowy and exultant the way a New Mexico sky can be, but even they are somehow tinged with darkness. Being with a painting by Heinz Salloch is like flipping over an object that’s been sitting in the sun: you discover how deep the original color was. Some of the works capture a certain time of day, when the exit of earth’s light is uncannily visible.

A small selection of pastels-on-felt has a wonderfully vintage quality. Rendered on black or buff backgrounds, they suggest a fondness for and understanding of the softer spaces of desert landscapes. In Mesa, the face of a jagged canyonside is rendered in thoughtful strokes of mossy greens and fuzzy-edged grays. The work’s dark, velvety background further softens the craggy landscape and gives it a ghostly, almost gothic patina. Salloch’s compositions are irrefutably somber, even secretive in their restraint. Cundiyo, NM provides an excellent opportunity for elaboration. It’s an intimate glimpse down a slender walkway, bordered on either side by windowed stoops and screen doors. Though it bears the marks of human life, the place seems abandoned or somehow organic—strange considering the relative lack of fecundity in the desert—where the cobbled street path is actually an extension of the muddy ground and an adobe roof is just as God-made as a distant grassy hill. Heinz Salloch’s depiction of the Southwestern outdoors in oxblood and umber is a refreshing and thoughtprovoking twist on the tendency of the average visiting artist to portray desert light in shocks and blasts. We aren’t bombarded by the blinding pink of a KoolAid sunset, so we pay closer attention to detail: the spiky stalks of a yucca or the little gray pebbles that line a dusty road. Salloch’s compositions tell of the thrill of a road so open it never closes, and of the denser and more complex thrill of leaving behind a tortured homeland. Though an outsider, Salloch made the language of the American Southwest his own, and it’s a soft-spoken lexicon rich in angles and corners, in nichos and nuance. In looking closer, after all, we can see what’s clean and plain, and sometimes very dark indeed. —Iris McLister

Heinz Emil Salloch, Mesa, 18” x 23”, pastel on felt, 1959

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A NEW JOURNEY OF LIFE ART SHOW

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Monista Arts invites you to join us for a night of excitement. Monica Duran is a cancer patient who is showing her artwork for the very first time. Her work tells the story of her life and the struggles she has had to overcome. Monica is in need of surgery that could save her life. 100% of the proceeds from sales of her artwork will go to her cancer foundation. Although life may bring her trials, Monica sees the world as a canvas waiting to be painted. Come and share your support and experience “A New Journey of Life” as Monica fights each day for life. Exhibition: Friday, December 7 to January 3 Reception: Friday, December 7, 6 to 9 pm. Espanola Bond House • 706 Bond Street • Espanola

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Critical Reflection

Sergio Garval: Ozymandias

Evoke Contemporary 130 Lincoln Avenue, Santa Fe

The title of Sergio Garval’s current exhibition, Ozymandias, is taken from a sonnet written in the nineteenth century by British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The short poem recounts a conversation with a traveler, who tells of standing before a fallen sculpture—a relic from times of mystery and pharaohs: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone… Near them, on the sand, a shattered visage [with] wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command.” Shelley tells us “on the pedestal these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” These words paraphrase an inscription found on the funereal pedestal of Egyptian mega-king Ramses II. These days it’s hard to imagine that a statue, however monumental its appendages and threatening its countenance, could somehow enforce control or inspire fear for centuries to come. But for Garval, this symbolic manifestation of hubris, along with the more ageless, general isolation of humanity, are creative themes of resilient and lasting effect. Garval explores them in terms of the hectic and often alienating nature of contemporary human relationships.

Works rendered in charcoal, watercolor, paint, and bronze prove that Garval is adept at a number of mediums. Effortlessly blending elements of surrealism, magic realism, and steampunk, Garval creates a dystopia populated by figures that are frayed and vulnerable, and often confused. Their vacant expressions are zombie-blank or simply disinterested, and sometimes hostile. Waiting is a large canvas dominated by water the color of a chlorinated swimming pool. Three figures clad in professional clothing stand atop an equal number of soon-to-be-submerged cars. The sky is mucky grey and though the cars are sinking, the folks on their vehicles don’t seem concerned. They’re not interacting with each other despite the troubling circumstances they’re in, making them seem pathetically out-oftouch and apathetic. Garval was born in the Southwestern Mexican state of Jalisco, which was first inhabited fifteen thousand years ago. It’s an area near the Pacific Ocean that’s diverse in vegetation and cultures; creative artifacts

like cave paintings and pottery have been discovered in abundance. In the 1500s the area was invaded by Spanish conquistadores with predictably dismal results for the indigenous populations. Large ethnic groups were killed, and millions were sold into slavery. In colonized areas, overwork and disease contributed to an estimated ninety percent decrease in Jalisco’s native population from 1550 to 1650. Seeing Garval’s work in the context of this heritage has fascinating implications. His brushstrokes are intuitive and loose, but largely successful in their aim of conveying human flesh and human feelings. With their bumpy surface textures and often distorted features, Garval’s figures appear as if in a dream, or blurred through underwater vision. Outland is one of his most minimal paintings. On a white canvas is a Cardinal or Pope—some sort of senior religious figure in the Catholic tradition—who is barefoot and slightly stooped from age or physical exertion. His hands are outstretched, palms up, in a beseeching gesture. Munzcas is a charcoal drawing of a thickset, pigeon-

toed woman. She’s naked except for a thick crown of flowers around her head. She clutches her hands across her breasts, with one shoulder cocked defensively. Her expression is aggressive in its frankness; she looks menacing, even chalada—colloquial Spanish for nuts. Garval’s faces are typically dispassionate and disinterested, but the urgency of his brushstrokes makes them human and often pitiable. In Adan, a man in a business suit stands knee-deep in a huge pile of brightly colored stuffed animals. He’s holding a teddy bear by the leg with one hand and a cell phone up to his ear with the other. His stance is awkward; he’s twisting from the torso, looking off to the right with his mouth hanging open. The composition would be funny, but the man looks genuinely confused and disoriented. Magic realism is most famously associated with Latin American culture, which makes sense considering the centuries of internal and foreign influences experienced in this part of the world. Death and sickness are not uncommon themes in magic realist writing. The novel The Death of Artemio Cruz by beloved Mexican author Carlos Fuentes has macabre elements, but its fantastic, otherworldly characters turn our expectations on their heads. Despite and because of its abject strangeness, we happily accept the coexistence of contradictory worlds—worlds that, instead of being black or white, are every color of unknown, magical rainbows. Like Carlos Fuentes, Sergio Garval seems to embrace contradiction and perplexities, asking us to suspend our beliefs and our hunches. As another Mexican of quixotic paintings once said: “I paint flowers so they will not die.” That was Frida Kahlo, who also once said that she only painted reality; she insisted she wasn’t interested in painting her dreams and nightmares. I think this is how Garval paints too—in bursts of strange and rare lucidity—and that’s a thing of lasting power. —Iris McLister Sergio Garval, Ozymandias II, oil on canvas, 74” x 90½”

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Critical Reflection

Harold Joe Waldrum

Rio Bravo Fine Art 110 North Broadway, Truth or Consequences

Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

On the walls of a dedicated gallery space at Rio Bravo Fine Art, in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, are Harold Joe Waldrum’s early works––the Window Series. This is the first time that a significant portion of this body of work has been shown in the gallery Waldrum founded in the late nineties. Started in early 1970, the Window Series was nine years in the making. Based on “tripartite” forms and thematic implications of windows set in adobe walls, Waldrum made studies of color, weight, and value. Pino Road, a 1973 acrylic on canvas, is the earliest painting in the exhibition. The

brushwork is rough––revealing underlying layers. It looks much like an adobe window that has been painted over and over again. It is pink and red and green and blue––a square within a square within a square. As the work progressed, Waldrum brushed thin layers of intensely pigmented acrylics over his canvases. As subsequent layers of color were added, the underlying colors were left visible, appearing as edges along the emerging rectangular shapes. These narrow bands of color are Waldrum’s signature. He called this “appoggiatura”—a musical term

in which notes steal time from the preceding note and lead to the note they will embellish. The largest and by far the most sophisticated painting is Una cadence plagal. The title refers to “plagal cadence,” also known as the “Amen Cadence” because of its frequent relationship to the text “Amen” in hymns. The surface of Una cadence plagal is very quiet, the brushwork hardly visible. A rectangle of matte black acrylic abuts a rectangle of lustrous black––a rectangle within a rectangle. Exposed along the outer edges of the inner rectangle are thin lines of color.

In 1974, Waldrum moved to Gusano, a tiny village near Pecos, New Mexico. Two years later a tragic event changed his life. He shot and killed a man in self-defense when an armed group of criminals broke into his studio. Three months later he left for New York City. For the next several years he spent winters in New York and summers in and around Taos. Returning full time to Taos in the early 1980s, Waldrum set up residence in the studio built in 1915 by Taos painter Joseph Henry Sharp. This began ten prolific years during which he painted his best-known works––the adobe churches and “penitente moradas” of Northern New Mexico. During these years Waldrum produced a wealth of paintings, drawings, Polaroids, and videographs, along with exploring two major graphic mediums— aquatints and linocuts. Waldrum moved to Mountain Ranch— an isolated ranch near Bernardo, New Mexico—around 1990. During this time, he produced some of his finest work. Between sessions in his studio Waldrum wrote his self-published book, Walk Stark-naked. In 1994 he wrote: “Things have never been the same since the gunfight in 1976. The gunfight was and remains today the most significant and life-altering event of my sixty years.” His final move was to Truth or Consequences, around 1997, where he worked out of a studio on Main Street before founding the Rio Bravo Fine Art Gallery. He died in Truth or Consequences on December 13, 2003 at the age of sixty-nine, after a short illness. His epitaph might be: “There are so many people to thank, but I should also mention that there are three of you out there who can go to hell.”

—Susan A. Christie

Harold Joe Waldrum, Estio, acrylic on linen, 48” x 50”, 1979 (left) El Santuario de Chimayo, acrylic on linen, 32” x 28”, 1978 (below)

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Guy Cross THE magazine | 61

WRITINGs

Monet in Boston by

Miriam Sagan

The proprietor of the Victoria Diner Serving poached eggs on toast, in a wedge Between the wholesale district and those last Parochial neighborhoods with hermetic borders Says, when he hears where we are going, that he is also planning To go to see the Monet After the crowded holiday. At the Museum of Fine Arts A man on crutches Looks at a willow tree, A Boston matron Blocks a view of lily pads. In a room awash with color, My pregnant sister-in-law Sits awkwardly, as five children Her nieces and nephews by marriage Each place a hand on her swollen belly. Today, Monet means nothing to me I can’t see Whatever it was that I first saw One rainy afternoon Long ago Things that don’t change Don’t interest me anymore I care less For what hangs on the wall Care more For light itself: a silver Inlet of actual river Flock of Canada geese Black-flecked, long-necked The moon, a line of fortune, thin dime In the streets of this city I can neither love nor forget. Miriam Sagan was born in Manhattan, raised in New Jersey, and educated in Boston. She holds a B.A. with honors from Harvard University and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University. Sagan, who settled in Santa Fe in 1984, is the author of over twenty books, including Searching for a Mustard Seed: A Young Widow’s Unconventional Story, Rag Trade, The Widow’s Coat, The Art of Love, True Body, and Aegean Doorway. “Monet in Boston” is from Inadvertent Altar (La Alameda Press, $10).

62 | THE magazine

december/january

2012-13

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