Drifting Through Intimate Landscapes with Emmi Whitehorse

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Gazing into her canvases, you enter vast space.  Is it the sky? Are you looking through a lagoon? Into the deep recesses of the universe? You’re surrounded by ethereal, tranquil work by an artist who spent her life observing the natural world, creating abstractions causing you to pause and contemplate. The masterful work in Emmi Whitehorse: Intimate Landscapes is on view at Santa Fe’s Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian through October 3, 2026.

This retrospective was mounted in two parts this year so that some of her recent large-scale canvases could have room to breathe in the hogan-inspired main gallery of the Wheelwright.

Whitehorse’s 2007 Fragment oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.

Part 1 of the exhibition was subtitled Light and Space; Part 2 Line and Form. Works in both installations have hovering biomorphic shapes against a subtle ground that seems to undulate. Take a look in our Flickr album to see the gorgeous, atmospheric works from both installations of Emmi’s show.

Whitehorse’s 2019 Kelp Moss oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.

Entering the Wheelwright, the introductory gallery features some of Emmi’s earliest work – a set of abstractions inspired by symbols of Diné culture and the color-field movement.  From the start of her art training, Emmi was attracted to abstraction. Her delicate, mixed-media layers and light touches are a prequel of her mature style.

The artist’s beginnings: Three of Whitehorse’s 1980 works from her Kin Náh Zin series – collages with dyed rice paper, chalk, conte, and pencil on paper; inspired by memories of Ancestral Pueblo sites.

Nearby, a glass-topped case shows ephemera from Emmi’s earliest showings at the Wheelwright – a featured member of the Grey Canyon Artists, a ground-breaking collective initiated by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith; a set of portfolio slides from the archives; an early typewritten artist’s statement; and photos taken at the opening of her celebrated 1991 solo show exhibition.

1991 photo of Emmi Whitehorse with her grandmother and mother at the opening of her ten-year solo show at the Wheelwright.

The retrospective includes some of the impressive works from this period, on loan from private collections – hand-applied chalk and pastel on paper mounted on canvas. Right from the start, Emmi identified her ethereal abstractions as landscapes – inspired by her days as a young girl tending to her grandmother’s sheep amidst the endless vistas of the Navajo Nation, looking at horizons, skies, and the small details of the natural world at her feet. She imagined details of landscapes beyond the horizon, and held on to those images in her memory.

Whitehorse’s 1983 Landscape – East #255 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.

Early on, she sometimes incorporated symbols and slightly recognizable images into her work – such as domestic items (like her grandmother’s comb) or mysterious symbolic figures – but over the years, these types of definable shapes gave way to less recognizable abstract elements and shapes from her memory.

Whitehorse’s 1991 Untitled #883, with an abstracted depiction of her grandmother’s comb; oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
Symbolic landscape: Whitehorse’s 1999 Untitled #902, oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.

The main gallery is populated by works of hazy, floating images created on paper with chalk, soft conte crayon, and pencil.

Whitehorse’s 2014 Charting a Walk-About oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.

Emmi works on these images flat on a table (not an easel), so she can walk around and apply delicate layers by hand from all sides. When the work is complete, she mounts the paper on canvas – a structural support that makes for sturdier display, transport, and installation.

Whitehorse’s 1997 Witch Seed I, #1147 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.

The visual experience at each canvas truly feels like standing in nature, slowly observing surrounding details. Sometimes it feels as if you’re looking at the smallest details of pods and nature; sometimes it feels like you’re peering into a microscope to see the organisims populating a pond or a deep lake or ocean. Take a close-up view:

Whitehorse’s 2002 Undercurrent, #1315 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: the artist; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
Video of details in Whitehorse’s 2002 Undercurrent, #1315

Her most recent works are confident and very large-scale, allowing you to get lost in the mystical expanse as you move across the work. It’s a lesson learned from the mid-century masters of American color-field painting but channeled through the mind of a quiet artist who has spent time really looking and feeling the world around her.

How does she do it? She treats the act of creation as a slow process, working on multiple pieces at a time. Large expanses populated with tiny details and memories.

Detail of Whitehorse’s 1996 Tó (Water), #1109 oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas; featured in Part 1 Light and Space.
Detail of Whitehorse’s 2019 Kelp Moss oil pastel, chalk, and paper on canvas. Courtesy: private collection; featured in Part 2 Line and Form.

Enjoy this visit with Emmi talking about the land and family that formed her, her life path, and how she creates in her beautiful studio. Kudos to Diné filmmaker Kelso Meyer for such an insightful portrait:

Enjoy more views of her work here.

Still of Emmi Whitehorse in the landscape from commissioned exhibition video by Diné filmmaker Kelso Meyer

Contemporary Jewelry Tells a Story at IAIA

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To celebrate over six decades of the revolutionary educational institution, museum of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) decided to showcase the breadth and scope its spectacular contemporary jewelry collection made by students, faculty, and artists-in-residence. The Stories We Carry shows that wearable art can convey ancient tales, speak truth to power, and incorporate surprising materials in the hands of forward-thinking innovators.

The exhibition – which has occupied the upper floor of Santa Fe’s IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts for a four-year run – is on view through September 28, 2026.

Dramatic 1980 fringed, beaded gauntlet cuffs on buckskin by Marcus Amerman (Choctaw); featuring spirals of energy that emanates from the artist’s hands.

Take a walk through the exhibition in our Flickr album, and see what we’re talking about right here in closeups of the displays on the IAIA site.

The diverse range of jewelry created over the years at IAIA might surprise anyone with a stereotypical view of “Native jewelry,” but it’s exactly this mastery of ideas and materials that keeps visitors coming back for a closer look and to admire new favorites from the over 100 pieces on display.

1974 silver, jet, ivory necklace by unknown artist in IAIA Honors Collection.
1995 bracelet by Robert Gresse, Jr. (Crow); made with silver, turquoise, lapis, coral, sugilite, and buffalo horn.

The first gallery is a clean, white space that presents the full range of techniquqes, processes, and types of wearable art.  It’s no surprise that the curator has chosen to present the innovative, masterful belt by Denise Wallce to kick off the show. Denise has crafted ten distinctive silver/gold inlaid figures who are each gathering materials and making traditional art of the Pacific Northwest. Take a close-up look at the miniature craft makers going about their work.

Detail of 1992 silver Craftsperson’s Belt by Denise Wallace (Chugach Aleut), featuring figures making traditional crafts; figures inlaid with semiprecious stones and gold, interspersed with incised fossilized ivory.

Over a dozen cases are filled with spectacular works that emphasize the material process that decades of IAIA students, faculty, and museum donors have contributed to the broader collection – necklaces, cuffs, belts, bolos, and pins made through inlay, casting, enamel, beadwork, and other studio techniques.

Traditional handmade bead technique with modern sensibility: 2001 white melon shell necklace by Juan Cate (Kewa-Santo Domingo Pueblo)
Leather with cast silver: 2001 Inuit Mask Bowguard by Mark Holiday (Diné), 1969 bowguard by Ramos Pacheco (Kewa-Santo Domingo Pueblo) from the IAIA Honors Collection, and 1981 Gato Bow Guard by Mark Swazo Hinds (Pueblo of Tesuque).

Some of the remarkable pieces collected by IAIA from the early years of the its Honors program are unfortunately marked “unknown artist.” But it’s still exciting to see early student pieces by artists like Estelle Loretto or Marcus Amerman who are considered leaders in contemporary Southwest art. (Click here to see our coverage of Marcus’s 1995 retrospective at the Wheelwright.)

1974 silver enameled pin by Gilbert Kellywood (Ohkay Owingeh) from the IAIA Honors Collection.
1962-1983 nickel silver and Carico turquoise bracelet by unknown Hopi artist the IAIA Honors Collection.

The second gallery begins with a large photo of the “room where it happens” – the IAIA jewelry studio. Back in the early Sixties, IAIA’s jewelry studio was begun by legendrary Charles Loloma (Hopi), who merged modernist aesthetics with traditional jewelry practice and encouraged his students to follow their own aesthetic paths. The innovation hasn’t stopped.

2022 photo of IAIA jewelry studio and student work stations by Sallie Wesaw-Sloan (Eastern Shoshone)

The gallery is filled wth workd by IAIA graduates, visiting artists, and faculty – a mind-bending experience that sets traditional, futuristic, technological, and controversial work side by side. Jewelry and wearable art that holds both a shining vision of the future and reflects upon dark corners of Indigenous history. It’s all quite a tribute to the creativity campus that IAIA was at its inception and continues to be.

Two pieces of silver, coral, turquoise, and ironweed jewelry by 1962-1965 IAIA faculty member Charles Loloma (Hopi) – a 1973 pendant and a 1963-1965 hair comb.
2017 Decimation by Decimal by IAIA 2019 artist in residence Jodi Webster (Ho Chunk/Prairie Band Potawatami; necklace made with beaver pelt, sterling silver, bone beads, glass beads (with faux blood), and sinew – all precious materials not normally associated with jewelry.

The last gallery features a mix of storytelling – everything from metalwork on a Mohawk hard hat telling a story of East Coast construction-trade prowess to pow-pow princess crowns to politics and a barely-there magical quartz amulet by Pacific Northwest artist Isaac Tait (Nisga’a). Contemporary achievement, 20th century culture, and ancient myths are all put to work in the IAIA jewelry studio.

1999 Indian Police Headdress by Richard Glazer Danay (Mohawk) – an aluminum construction worker’s hard hat with silver from buffalo nickel coins with attached BIA police badge, created in tribute to the legendary Mohawk skywalkers who specialize in Manhattan skyscraper construction.

The exhibition represents over 100 years of Indigenous jewelry in all its forms from IAIA’s permanet collection. Take a walk through the exhibition with guest-curator Brian Fleetwood (Mvskoke), who explains his inspiration behind his selections and explains how wearable art has told stories from ancient times:

See all eight of IAIA’s short videos about these artists and this fascinating tribute to creativity and culture here, including the backstory on the crowns.

Mark of Native Indigenous royalty: 1978 silver, turquoise, and beaded Miss IAIA Pow-Pow Princess crown by Lutz Whitebird (Southern Cheyenne)

Altered Landscapes and Children of the Earth Experience in Reno

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For years, the Nevada Museum of Art has been collecting photographs by artists whose work puts the environment, our culture’s addiction to nuclear and fossil fuel, construction booms, and degradation of desert landscapes front and center. Altered Lands and the Anthropocene, on view in Reno through September 20, is a beautiful installation across the second floor that causes visitors to stop, look, and contemplate what it took to record such tour de force images.

It’s all part of the museum’s massive Into the Time Horizon exhibition.  Take a walk through the galleries in our Flickr album.

Sensual, cocoon-like participatory space at the core of Ernesto Neto’s 2019 Children of the Earth – filled with futons, pots, crytals, instruments, and spice smells Courtesy: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

The masterful photo exhibition is next door to a solo installation that serves as a great respite – the immersive, colorful, magical playground-style environment Ernesto Neto: Children of the Earth, also on view through September 20. More about this in a moment.

The first section of the photography galleries features traditional documentay photography about legacies of industrial-scale extraction of oil, gas, uranium, and minerals across the West – Edward Weston’s image of big equipment at work toward the end of the Great Depression, Robert Adam’s aerial view of the legacy of Colorado mining, and Zig Jackson’s headdress-adorned Native American perched at the edge of the largest mine on earth in Utah.

Toshio Shibata’s 1997 silver gelatin print Coolidge Dam, San Carlos, AZ – a controversial project built as part of the San Carlos Indian Irrigation Project on tribal burial grounds.
2004 (printed 2020) archival inkjet print by Zig Jackson (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara) Indian Man at Kennecott Copper Mines, Toole, Utah – a man in a war bonnet sits at the edge of the largest human excavation on earth.

These share the space with evidence of long-lasting consequences of uranium mining by Patrick Nagatani and a startling document of America’s disposal culture from Edward Burtynski. Each image is crammed with feeling that the ominous impacts will be around for a long time – moving calls to action.

In pursuit of nuclear fuel: Patrick Nagatani’s 1990 chromogenic print ’Bida Hi’/Opposite Views: Northeast-Navajo Tract Homes and Uranium Tailings, Southwest-Shiprock, New Mexico – from his Nuclear Enchatment series highlighting the community contaminated from the 1950s uranium mill at Shiprock.
Impact of relying upon fossil fuel:  Edward Burtynski’s 1999 chromogenic color print Oxford Tire Pile #9a and #9b, Westley, California, USA – a documentation of a massive industrial hazard, which later caught fire and contaminated nearby communities and water resources.

To mix it up, the curators have thrown in a touch of the surreal – an arresting image by Cara Romero collaged into the oil-field landscape near where she grew up, and Meg Webster’s sculpture from living Earth. Beautiful and inviting art from across the room, but more thought-provoking as you draw near.

2015 archival inkjet print Oil Boom by Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) from her “Water Memories” series – with collaborator artist-activist Canupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota) floating in brown liquid below an oil pump.
Meg Webster’s 1986/2005 peat moss, earth, and plastic installation Moss Bed, Queen – evoking relaxation in nature with materials collected nearby from the forest; on walls, work by Martine Gutierrez and Lee Friedlander. Courtesy: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nevada Museum of Art.

Some of the largest works also require visitors to take them in from a distance – such as Rohini Devashar’s gorgeous, huge printed silk.

Visitors contemplate Rohini Devashar’s 2023 Latent Field (Field One) – colliding molecules and celestial bodies printed on silk. Courtesy: the artist and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

But in most cases in this section, you have to get close to the fine print to truly understand what you’re seeing. Most appear abstract. An epic seemingly all-black work by David Maisel is actually a collage of aerial views of the bombing runs in the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The evocative, overlapping images in a gelatin silver print by Laura Bon, Tristan Duke, and Richard Nielsen was done inside a container-shipping-sized camera obscura at the tragic environmental site of Owens Lake. The huge one-of-a-kind photo was actually developed in the sad lakewater.

2013 gelatin silver print Bubblers, Owens Dry Lakebed (Lakebed Developed) – project by the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio created by Laura Bon, Tristan Duke, and Richard Nielsen. Created on light-sensitive paper via camera obscura inside a shipping-container studio, developed in the lakebed.

A similarly epic achievement is displayed in the gallery devoted to documenting the aftermath of the Marshall Islands nuclear detonation experiment following World War II – Meghann Riepenhoff’s cyanotype tryptich made right there on a contaminated beach using plants that (like the people) are still in recovery.

Marshall Islands project: Meghann Riepenhoff’s 2023 Untitled (Adaptive Radiation: Radioactive Palm Triptych – a cyanotype made from laying native medicinal plants found across pre-treated paper; washed in the waters of Bikini Atoll, the site of extensive nuclear tests in the 1950s. Courtesy: the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery, NYC

The images are stunning but the content is disturbing (and meant to be), so visitors are actually eager to enter Ernesto Neto’s nearby recuperation chamber.  Adults and children can find respite, surrounded by natural dyed fabrics (you can even put on matching play-jackets!) that provide a mysterious, happy entry to a magical world.

Surround yourself with cushions, create healing sounds with a Tibetan singing bowl, lay down, smell the fragarent spices, look at playful Amazon-inspired hanging jungle things, think about the future, and be happy to be among the Children of the Earth.

Exploring the sensual, cocoon-like participatory space at the core of Ernesto Neto’s 2019 Children of the Earth – filled with futons, pots, crytals, instruments, and spice smells Courtesy: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC

Thanks to the Nevada Museum of Art for providing an amazing, unforgettable experience!

Indian Theater and Contemporary Art at SITE Santa Fe

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The ambitious project paid off. Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, on view at SITE Santa Fe and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts through September 7, is a masterful mix of history, contemporary art, performance, and revealing installations that challenge what you know and think you know.

Filling the entire museum, the exhibition uses painting, sculptures, and performance sculptures to chronicle how radical performances by Native Americans shifted conversations, illuminated forgotten populations and treaties, asked difficult questions, and thoroughly influenced the trajectory of the contemporary Native American art movement.

2019 lightbox portrait Headdress – Jeneen by Dana Claxton (Lakota); the sitter bedecked in beads and embroidered gifts. Courtesy: the artist and Forge Project Collection.

Take a walk through the show (and a few performances) in our Flickr album.

In the entry, a provocative neon sign by Demian DinéYazhi (Diné) beckons, but visitors are immediately pulled into the large space surrounded by a graphic history of the historic Alcatraz occupation (1969-1971, one-of-a-kind mask wall pieces by Lloyd Kiva New (leader of brand-new The Institute of American Indian Arts 1967-1978), IAIA’s 1969 manifesto on Indian Theater, and a 1972 video of a NYC production by the Native American Theater Ensemble (running on an ancient Sony Trinitron). It’s all surrounded by a wall textile designed by Linda Lomahaftawa (Hopi/Choctaw) when she was an IAIA student in the Sixties.  A provocative sculpture by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (Métis) adds the contemporary drama.

Exhibition entry: 2021 mixed media Counterblaste by Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (Métis); tobacco-stuffed pantyhose rabbit-human figure; surrounded by 1969 Alcatraz occuption documentation and paintings by Lloyd Kiva New. Courtesy: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art; Art Bridges.

This sets the stage for curator Candace Hopkins’ thesis – in the 1960s, Native American performance went hand-in-hand with greater activism, self-determination by tribes, and contemporary art in all its forms.  Listen to her explain:

Two performance spaces lie just beyond this gallery. First Nicholas Galanin’s gallery where his performance The White Carver happens weekly (surrounded by photos of previous performances since it was first staged in 2012). The White Carver tackles the subject of appropriation and Native cultural misunderstanding head on.

Behind the velvet rope: set for 2012-ongoing White Carver performance by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax) in which a Caucasian woodcarver replicates an object made by a Galinin – a commentary about appropriation and commercialization of Indigenous culture by non-Native communities. Courtesy: Gochman Family Collection.

Next, you enter a room hung with giant earring sculptures from Eric-Paul Riege (Diné), who activated them in a ritualistic performance at SITE in August. Riege’s installation allows everyone a simultaneous experience of the contemporary and cultural deep time.  Kite’s floor installation, right nearby, does this, too. (Check out our previous post about Kite’s innovative IAIA show here.)

Museum goers watch Eric-Paul Riege (Diné) interact with his mixed-fiber scultptures 2020-2022 jaatloh4Ye’iitsoh (“earrings for the big god”) (August 15, 2026); oversized jewelry suggesting knowledge by listening, harmony of natural fibers, and totems of memory. Courtesy: Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck; Art Bridges.

Two-dimensional art on display also evokes a mix of ancient and “now.” Action painting mixed with cultural symbols. Bugle beads or painted blankets echoing color-field painting.

2014 acrylic and graphite Crow Dance by Rick Bartow (Wiyot). Courtesy: Denver Art Museum.
2022 acrylic and glass bugle bead Wopila/Lineage II by Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota) – a reference to the long tradition of Lakota abstraction. Courtesy: Gochman Family Collection.

Mash-ups of pop culture, cartoony cheesecake, ancient craft, culture, and social commentary – all the work on display incorporate aspects of performance.

1990 sculpture War Dance Technology by performance artist James Luna (Payomkowicham, Ipai, and Mexican). Courtesy: Gochman Family Collection.
2014-2022 graphite and colored pencil drawing Killer Smile by Rachel Martin (Tlingit/Tsaagweidei, Killer Whale Clan of the Yellow Cedar House Eagle Moiety). Courtesy: the artist.

The back gallery takes us back into time to consider the irony of early ethnomusic recording in the Pacific Northwest during a period when potlatches were banned and ceremonies forbidden.  The exhibition has a beautiful installation of Native American LPs from the 1960s and 1970s beneath a stunning installation by Sonny Asu of copper recordings that cannot be played.

1960s-1970s LP recordings of Native American tribal songs by Indian Records; at rear, 2012 copper record installation “Ellipsis” by Sonny Asu (Ligwilda’xw Kwakwaka’wakw from the Wei Wai Kum Nation) – 138 records not intended for play. Courtesy: Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck.
1991 High Performance art magazine cover featuring James Luna during his AA Meeting/Art History performance.

In every room, videos display performances on stages (Jeffrey Gibson or Spiderwoman Theater) or in nature (asinnajaq (Inuk). One room is devoted to a set, props, and documentation of work by the influential performance artist James Luna, whose art did not shy away from the ever-present issue of alcoholism in Native communities.

The exhibition also includes an immersive, highly theatrical, multi-gallery installation by the New Red Order. Here’s the manifesto by NRO’s Adam and Zach Kahalil (Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians) and Jackson Polys (Tlingit).

2023 performance documentation video of Don’t Make Me Over by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw and Cherokee) featuring performer Ariel Twist (Nehiyaw). Courtesy: the artist.

NRO uses satiric videos, props, murals, documents and timelines,  merchandise, and graffiti style to illuminate collisions of history, pop culture, and consciousness surrounding urban Native communities today – a totally head-spinning (and brain-spinning) experience.

Video of the 2020-ongoing Progenerator installation by the New Red Order, a mixed-media installation by artists Adam and Zach Kahalil (Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians) and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) that probes societal stereotypes alongside non-Natives’ fascination with Native culture. Courtesy: the artists.

And thanks to the recreation by Erica Lord, SITE Santa Fe visitors were able to experience Artifact Revisited. Erica recreated an acclaimed 1987 performance by James Luna – a still Native body on display within a museum, encased in glass. In Erica’s recreation, her “cabinet” was surrounded by museum signage purporting to explain “Indians” and provide context for the “exhibit.” In the age of NAGPRA, the experience was unforgettable. Watch the performance heare, and listen to Erica explains how she came to perform this historic piece and how it felt.

For more background on the connections between Native American theater, politics, and art, here’s a link to the recently published book about this never-before-told story.

Watching Clay Artist Jody Folwell Break the Rules

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Contemporary ceramicist Jody Folwell (Santa Clara Pueblo) always knew she was going to make art that was a bit different, even as she was learning traditional Pueblo pottery making at the kitchen table from her her mom, celebrated artist Rose Naranjo. Satirical, sculptural, social-political, and avant-garde ceramic statements line the gallery from start to finish in O’Powa O’Meng: The Art and Legacy of Jody Folwell, a celebratory retrospective exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art through September 13, 2026.

The Santa Fe stop is the final on the exhibition’s journey across the United States, which started at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia.

2018 Ancient pot by Jody Falwell (Santa Clara Pueblo), with painting inspired by Lascaux cave painting; rim evokes fire’s importance to humanity’s art making traditions. Courtesy: private collection.

Walk through the show to see our favorites in our Flickr album.

The exhibition does not unfold chronologically, even though it features some of Jody’s (and her family’s) most ground-breaking and controversial work. At one end is Half a Step, that she credits as one of her earliest nontraditional ceramic statements, featuring a lively bison thundering around the partially polished curved surface – a “half step” away from what was expected from Santa Clara pottery at the Santa Fe Indian Market in 1975. At the other end is her collaboration with the acclaimed sculptor Bob Hazous (Chiricahua Apache) that won Best in Show in 1984. Who had ever seen a green Pueblo pot with loaded commentary?

1975 Half a Step pot by Jody Falwell (Santa Clara Pueblo) – featuring sculpted animals and an unpolished band. Courtesy: Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.
Jody’s 1984 Hero Pot collaboration with Bob Hazous (Chiricahua Apache), awarded Best in Show at that year’s Santa Fe Indian Market for its unconventional color, shape, and subject. Courtesy: private collection.

Collaborations, social commentary, sculptural details, and different painting styles encourage gallery goers to move slowly, stop, look, and circumnavigate each work to let the beauty, humor, or story sink in. Jody’s recent multi-pot ceramic installation The Cycle of Pottery is Us causes viewers to stop, think, and reflect on not only the persistence of the traditional Tewa art form, but of the entire human cycle of birth and rebirth.

Detail of Jody’s 2024 The Cycle of Pottery is Us, a sequential reference to black-and-white Ancestral Pueblo ceramic traditions, the art form’s near-loss 50 years ago, and its resurgence. Courtesy: Tia Collection.

As cultural appropriation carries a loade charge in the art world, Jody’s feels that her fascination by sinuous designs of other cultures, the cheekiness of Pop culture, and admired styles of epochs in Western art history gives her license to honor them. She incorporates Plains Indian ledger book style, Maori iconography, comic books, and even the cave paintings of Lascaux.  A wide lens from her travel and studies delights visitors as she takes them on a world journey of history, art, and people.

2008 Northwest Coast Art 101 incised with a tribute to her love of fluidity of Pacific Coast design; at rear, 2006 Doh San Quah (I Stole It) painted in Plains Indian ledger style. Courtesy: private collections.

The feelilng behind the show chronicles how much the maternal ceramic making tradition means to her. 

2013 Star Wars pot by daughter Susan Folwell (Santa Clara Pueblo), with images of Hopi style and cosmologies. Courtesy: Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at University of Oklahoma, Norman.

The exhibition includes a large traditional bread making bowl by her mother as well as work by her daughters and grandchildren – accomplished artists in their own right.

Jody titled her show O’Powa O’Meng (“I came here, I got here, I’m still going”) to demonstrate her continued commitment both to innovation in her art form and to inspire the next generation of contemporary artists.

Several pieces involve a mix of tiles (some broken) and pots with incriptions or depictions woven across all of them, such as The Buffalo Hunt that she created for the Santa Fe installation and Buffalo Soldier, a meditation on Obama’s historic presidency and the enslaved workers who originally built the White House.

Hear more about pushing the boundaries from inside a Tewa home dedicated to art making from Jody and daughter Susan as they talk about exhibition’s final stop with curator Jill Ahlberg Yohe at Santa Fe’s New Mexico Museum of Art.

Makowa: Modern Skywatching with the Ancients

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Look up at the night sky and find patterns in the stars. You can do that, even though you’re standing inside the exhibition Makowa: The Worlds Above Us at Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture through January 31, 2027. The wall-sized photo murals of day and night skies provide the backdrop to sculptures, pottery, and textiles with stylized images of stars, planets, the Sun, Moon, meteors, and changes of season.

Beautifully crafted objects and immersive photos provide contemplative spaces to consider the different types of skyward observations that Indigenous communities have made across millennia, and how stories and rituals convey this knowledge across generations.

Exhibition welcome: 2009 Evening Star ceramic sculpture by Kathleen Wall (Jemez Pueblo) – a Koshare holds stars important to celestial calendar.

Kathleen Wall’s charming Koshare holding up the Evening Star welcomes everyone to the journey. Take a look through our Flickr album to see some of our other favorites.

A mix of historic and contemporary art underscores the story behind star gazing. Tracking their slow movement across the night skies, sky watchers have long seen stars as important guides. The Ancients used petroglyph images as reminders of how to use ancestor stars for guidance – to tell time, mark seasons, and take journeys through vast desert landscapes.

Star patterns: 1930s tray woven by unknown Tohono O’ohdam artist.
2020 Star Child painting by George Toya (Jemez Pueblo), showing a star surrounded by ancestors in the night sky. Courtesy: private collection

Recent artworks suggest a range of the activity in the day and night sky. Phases of the Moon inform agricultural cycles. Planetary alignments, meteor showers, and also plane traffic are all part of night-sky viewing today. Rosemary Lonewolf’s tiny pot summarizes this dynamism nicely.

Distant worlds and a crowded sky: 1992 miniature Spaced Out jar by Rosemary Lonewolf (Santa Clara Pueblo).
2000-2001 sand painting by Joe Ben Jr. (Diné) linking phases of the Moon to planting cycles.

The curators show how traditional symbols of clouds, sky, and sky dynamics are learned, used, and adapted over the centuries by exhibiting modern woven regalia alongside ancestral Puebloan pots from Chacoan culture. It shows that abstract Indigenous symbols do not exist in a single place and time – they are used and reused.

Acknowledging the lively, changing sky: 1984 shirt with sky symbols woven by Evelyn Quintana (Okay Owingeh) with Ancestral Pueblo ceramics below.

The exhibition also takes a deep dive into how ancient architecture and landscapes across the Four Corners are used to mark cardinal directions, annual cycles, and astronomical phenomenon. Chaco’s magnificent kivas are featured in dramatic photo murals that show how a combination of architecture, horizon markers, and sunrise to mark the seasons.

Equinox and solstice: Duke Johnson’s 2022 photo of the Great Kiva Casa Rinconada at Chaco Canyon showing where the Sun rises against the landscape at key times of the year.

Aerial photographs show how buildings reflect astronomical alignments. Most visitors stand intrigued before an archaeoastronimical explanation of Chaco Canyon’s famous Sun Dagger, which transformed Fajada Butte into an observatory to mark the solstice and equinox.

Google Earth photos of Chaco Canyon National Historic Park. showing how structures are aligned to the cardinal directions – Pueblo Bonito and the Great Kiva at Casa Rinconada.
Visitor watches the Sun Dagger Explorer, a virtual experience of the archaeoastronomy site on Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon. Courtesy: Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design at Ohio State University, The Solstice Project, and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

Best of all, visitors themselves can explore the video interactive of another Chaco site – Rock of the Sun – to experience what it’s like to interact with petroglyphs, shadows, and the skies to mark time within the year. Nearby, there’s a copy of a petroglyph (carving into stone) that archeoastronomers suggest could depict an exploding star that was visible for 3 weeks in the year 1054.

Interactive video screen that provides visitors with a virtual experience of Rock of the Sun, an archaeoastronomy site in Chaco Canyon National Historic Park.

Other sections of the exhibition focus on the animals that serve as sky messengers – bats, eagles, and other birds – and rituals that honor the four cardinal directions.

One of the key themes here is to respect the elements – not try to control them – which is emphasized brilliantly in the final fitting tribute to these scientist farmers. Phenomenon such as rain, wind, clounds, and thunder seemed unpredictable to the Ancients, so ceremonies and dances were performed to convey desire for favorable elements. Beautifully woven cotton garments, paintings, and ritual headgear are rich in layered meanings – seasonal calendars, rain, and lightning.

Farmer scientists: 1920-1940 cotton shirt featuring zigzag lighting patterns by unknown Okay Owingeh artist.

It’s a reminder of the intergenerational wisdom used to coax agricultural bounty from the seemingly barren stark desert.

For deeper insights, the curators recommend a visit to the Star Stories website by WeRNative and the Native Skywatchers website.

1938 painting Mythical Corn Ceremony by Ignacio Mosquino (Waka Yeni Dewa) (Zia Pueblo).
2005-2009 Hopi tablita Butterfly Maiden by unknown Hopi artist.

Lucy Lippard and The Radical Whirlwind

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The Sixties and Seventies were a time of rebellion and change in the world at large and in the New York art world. As you enter Lucy R. Lippard: Notes from the Radical Whirlwind at the Vladem Contemporary in Santa Fe through August 9, 2026, the white gallery space appears quiet, but the art that confronts you is done by artists living, creating, and collaborating in a tumultuous, exciting time.

Post-war eclecticism, minimalism, conceptualism, feminism, environmentalism, and activism – these were the movements swirling in downtown Manhattan. Writer, curator, rabble-rouser, and activist Lucy R. Lippard seemed always to be near the center it all.

Minimal and conceptual art: Sol Lewitt’s 1979 Steel Grid 3 x 3 x 3; at rear, conceptualist Douglas Huebler’s 1971 typed 44/Variable Piece #7: 1971 (In Process) Global, and Eleanor Antin’s 1971-1973 postcard piece 100 Boots Marching.

The two-floor exhibition is just a fraction of the paintings, prints, sculptures, photographs, and art books that artists gifted to Lucy across four decades. To walk through it chronicles every important trend in American (and global) art and a “who’s who” of contemporary art in the latter half of the 20th century.

Take a look through it all in our Flickr album.

Gallery featuring minimal and conceptual artists; foreground, 1971 5 Steel Track Meander by Carl Andre.

At the center of the first gallery are pieces by minimal-conceptualists Carl Andre (a twisted piece of chanelling lying on the floor that could have jumped out of a dumpster) and Sol Lewitt (a pristine grid sculpture). Nearby are super-minimalists Larry Poons and Ad Rhinehart, where you can see the hidden black-on-black squares if you peer through the glass just right.

But as the exhibition points out, Lucy didn’t just have the typical artist-curator relationship with the people whose work is on the wall. Her mentor Ad Rhinehardt asked her to pen his monograph for his ground-breaking 1966 retrospective at the Jewish Museum where is black-on-black canvases begged the question, “Is painting at an end?”

Minimalists: 1960 silkscreen by Larry Poons and 1964 screenprint Untitled (Black Square) by Ad Reinhardt.

Lucy and Carl Andre worked side-by-side in 1969 to organize the historic Art Workers’ Coalition to advocate for artists’ rights inside the art establishment. She and Sol Lewitt met at entry-level jobs at MoMA, but when Sol published his influential 1967 essay on Conceptualism in Artforum magazine, Lucy built upon his foundation with other essays and produced her acclaimed Numbers exhibitions across the country (1996 – 1972) to show conceptual and minimalist art to new audiences.

Lucy and Sol Lewitt championed the work of post-minimalist, Eva Hesse. Lucy included Eva’s work in her 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstractionism at Fischbach Gallery, and both worked tirelessly to keep Eva’s work front and center after her untimely passing in 1970 at age 34.

The exhibition underscores the tight relationships among artists during a period of rampant experimentation, happenings, pop art, anti-war protests, and organizations protesting discrimination and advocating for justice. All forms of expression were welcomed – from performance pieces to typewritten instructions to mail art.

Post-minimalism: Eva Hesse’s 1967 ink and graphite drawing on an invisible grid.
Concepual art: Douglas Huebler’s 1971 typewritten project declaration – 44/Variable Piece #7: 1971 (In Process) Global.
Details of On Kawara’s 1968-1973 I Got Up – commercial travel postcards stamped with reductive messages and mailed to friends.

The array of feminist and political/social protest art in the exhibition reinforces the activist theme that runs through Lucy’s life.  Works by Louise Bourgeois, Harmony Hammond, Ana Mendieta, Faith Ringgold, Mary Beth Edelson, and many more are shown – including the founders of A.I.R., New York’s first women-operated cooperative gallery, and the Heresies Collective, who published the first feminist art journal. Over time, their collective pressure worked, as museums and galleries finally opened up to exhibiting works by women and people of color.

Feminist power: Mary Beth Edelson’s 1972 satirical poster Some Living American Women Artists a spoof of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper with O’Keeffe and Nevelson at center stage.
Performance art documentation: Ana Mendieta’s 1976 photo Silueta de Cohetes from her Siluetas eries – showing a body-shaped fireworks display agains the night sky.

The last section downstairs contains works on the Vietnam War, civil rights, Indigenous rights, the Cold War, and the risks from nuclear power. Lucy and her fellow artist were extremely active in response to injustice. In 1965-1967, they created the Angry Arts Festival through their collective, Artists and Writers Protest the Vietnam War to mobilize cultural leaders against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In 1975, Artists Meeting for Cultural Change successfully lobbied for disenfranchised artist’s inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. In 1979, Artists Against Nuclear Madness mobilized.

Artist power: selections from the 1986 mixed-media portfolio La linea quebrada = The Broken Line – a project to promote exhibition opportunities and cultural exchange in communities across the US-Mexico border; created by Guillermo Gomez-Pena, D.Emily Hicks, Harry Polkinhorn, and Cesar Espinoza.

In 1984, Lucy and other colleagues led Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America. Over1,100 artists and activists mobilized to create over 200 events in 27 cities. (Click here to read our 2022 post about the University of New Mexico Art Museum’s exhibition on this mobilization.)

Lucy’s philosophy: “Artists alone cannot change the world. Neither can anyone else alone. But we can choose to be part of the world that is changing.”

The second-floor gallery is dedicated to artists books – a movement that started around the same time that everything else was happening. Many artists felt the high-end art market on the East Coast was too elitist. Many artists wanted to bypass the whole thing and create affordable art.

Lucy Lippard, Sol Lewitt and others decided to open a storefront in 1976 where anyone could buy inexpensive books created by artists…books that were themselves affordable art! Although it moved from Tribeca, to Soho, and Chelsea, it’s still selling artist’s books fifty years later!

The upstairs gallery is a tribute to the decades of “affordable art” perseverance.

Environmental awareness: Kiki Smith’s 1997 accordion book The Fourth Day: The Destruction of Birds.

You can wander through imagining you are in the Printed Matter bookshop in the late 1970s, browsing through all the different projects, statements, picture books, and manifestoes flowing out of the Downtown New York art scene! 

Social commentary: 1984 book Tense by Jerry Kearns and Lucy Lippard. Publisher: Kunstverein Amsterdam.
Feminist book: Avis Lang’s 1981 book Pork Roasts: 250 Feminist Cartoons. Publisher: UBC Fine Arts.

The gallery also contains some of the artist books that started it all by Ed Rucha.

Two infamous artist books:  Ed Ruscha’s 1964 Various Small Fires and Bruce Naumann’s 1968 Burning Small Fires that documents his performance-art destruction of Ruscha’s earlier book. Publishers: Fluxus editions; Seth Siegelaub, The Louis Kellner Foundation.

But maybe some of the best books are those found in the back reading room – some of the 30 influential treatises written by Lucy herself, publications that document art, life, and society in our times.

Lucy Lippard’s celebrated publications on display in the second-floor reading room.

Viewing Deep Time with Australian Contemporary Indigenous Artists

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The massive exhibition is a blockbuster of abstraction – giant canvases, bold strokes, and enough dots and concentric circles to satisfy the most avid Kusama fan. But these visions don’t emanate from the 20th century’s Western modernist tradition. They’re the work of visionary artists from the Outback, whose abstractions use traditional icons as meditations on stories and landscapes that indigenous Australian people have relayed for thousands of generations.

The Stars We Do Not See is a journey like no other through the Denver Art Museum through July 26, 2026.

Detail of 2011 Gan’yu (Stars) by Gulumbu Yunupinju (Gumatj), referencing ancestral stories of the creation of stars and universe. Courtesy: National Gallery of Victoria, Canada

The winding path reveals principles of cyclical time, how the spirits of the land influence specific Indigenous cultures, and how icons of sacred landscapes and water sources are translated onto horizonless painted canvases.

Enjoy some of our favorites – full-size works and close-ups of paint details – in our Flickr album.

1980 painting Spirit Dreaming Through Napperby Country by Tim Leura and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri (Anmatyerre) – a recollection of ancestral homelands taken by cattle ranchers in the early 1900s. Courtesy: National Gallery of Victoria

At every turn, there are gigantic room-size works (some realized as large-group colleborations) and arrays of towering carved and painted memorial poles. Abstract symbols denote spirit beings, water, river systems, nature or animal traces. Everything is drawn from the massive collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Canada.

Epic 1995 abstraction Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming) by Emily Kam Kngwarry (Anmatyerre), depicting a network of sacred underground roots. Courtesy: National Gallery of Victoria

The curators start and end the show with arresting contemporary works by urban Indiginous artists – a neon installation, video, a painted skateboard, and representational works referencing forced relocation and unjust assimilation policies.

2020 neon “OA Warrior I (Blue) (Azul)” and “OA Warrior I (Pink) (Rosa)” by Reko Rennie (Kamilarol) – a mix of ancestral and urban culture. Courtesy: National Gallery of Victoria
2022 History Repeats by Tony Albert (Girramay/Yidinji/Kuku Yalanji)– a work made of recycled vintage commercial knicknacks featuring appropriated Aboriginal iconography. Courtesy: National Gallery of Victoria

But the majority of the show shows how traditional artists using earth pigments on eucalyptus bark prior to the 1970s gave way to community artist who used new synthetic pigments to paint first on posterboard and then on canvas.

1972 Snake and Water Dreaming by Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurray (Pintupi) from the first Indiginous art community in Papuna, Northern Territory to establish a contemporary art center; design from ritual body painting and cave art. Courtesy: National Gallery of Victoria
Conceptual Maps: 2006 conceptual abstraction Kalaya Wati (Emu Man) by Alkawari Dawson (Pitjantjatjara). Courtesy: National Gallery of Victoria

For more about the artists and how/why they create, take a look at the exhibition guide here.

Experience the majesty, scale, and experience of this exhibition through this walk-through produced by the Denver Museum of Art. Listen for the explanation of how the exhibit received its title, too!

Don’t worry if you missed this in Denver. The Stars We Do Not See will be on view at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon from September 5, 2026 through January 3, 2027, and at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts from February 27, 2027 through June 13, 2027.

First gallery with display of eucalyptus memorial poles carved by Northern Aboriginal artists and painted with ritual designs

Georgia’s Circles and Musical Abstractions

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As a young woman, O’Keeffe learned to play the violin and piano. But she was also a talented visual artist, which made her wonder which path she would take in her education – music or art? We know which career path she chose – a modernist painter of nature, New York cityscapes, and New Mexico landscapes.

But deep in her artistic upbringing, she figured out a way to have the best of both – using music as a conduit to make abstractions that express emotion, hidden feelings, and channel pure beauty. It’s a hidden, personal dimension to O’Keeffe’s creativity that is on display at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s capsure exhibition, A Circle that Nothing Can Break, on view in Santa Fe through June 7, 2026.

O’Keeffe’s 1970s watercolor Untitled (Abstraction Blue Wave and Three Red Circles). Painted after she lost her central vision with help from Belarmino López.

The title of the exhibition refers to a comment by Georgia in a 1922 letter to her husband – the influential photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz – in which she said their relationship was “like a circle that nothing can break.” Looking around the small gallery, circles and arcs are everywhere – in her earliest charcoal abstractions, a circle of blue sky seen through a curved goat horn, and her late-in-life abstractions.

O’Keeffe’s 1945 pastel Goat’s Horns with Blue. Courtesy: private collection

Even some of her favorite fashion accessories feature circles! Take a look at some of our favorites in our Flickr album.

O’Keeffe’s 1915-1916 charcoal drawing Abstraction with Curve and Circle.
Personal accessories featuring the circle motif – a 1960s-1970s Italian scarf with concentric circle designs and her signature 1930s “OK” brooch from Alexander Calder.

When O’Keeffe took summer classes at the University of Virginia in 1912, her teacher Alon Bennett often played music on his Victrola during class and encouraged her to explore expressionist synergy between music and art. Around 1914, she also read Kandinsky’s influential book, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. It made quite an impression on her with quotes such as “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmony, the soul is the piano…(and) the artist is the hand which plays…”

Georgia’s early charcoal works show her experimentation in using lines as “sounds” and interest in using circles in an expressionistic way. In letters to her long-time friend Anita Pollitzer, sent in 1915-1916 while she was teaching in South Carolina, Georgia said she did a “liberating series of drawings.” She explained that she often played violin for many hours to interpet her feelings, and then translated it all through her charcoal drawings.

O’Keeffe’s 1919 oil painting Green Lines and Pink.
O’Keeffe’s 1970s watercolor Abstraction Dark Green Lines with Red and Pink. Painted with the assistance of Belarmino López.

These drawings electrified her future husband, Alfred Stieglitz, who immediately mounted them for a show in his gallery and kick-started her career.

Four O’Keeffe 1970s watercolors (painted with assistance from Belarmino López) – Untitled (Abstraction Pink Curve and Circles), Untitled (Orange and Red Wave), Abstraction, and Untitled (Abstration Blue Curve and Circles).

In New York, the couple shared a love of live concert and recorded music throughout their lives together. By the time Georgia moved to New Mexico, she had assembled an extensive classical record collection. During the 1960s, when she began to lose her eyesight, listening to music from the comfort of her BARWA Lounger was a near-daily afternoon routine.

The exhibition selects paintings from throughout Georgia’s life featuring this circle motif – early oil paintings and sketches through to her late-in-life watercolors (done in her nineties with help from artist Mino López) that revisit these early themes. Note the upper arcs that suggest the top of a violin. She remembered it all.

Listen to this fascinating talk by music education professor Janet Revell Barret, who provides an in-depth explanation of how O’Keeffe’s early training and musical inclinations led her to greater expression on the page and canvas:  

Brooklyn Revisits 1970s Ruckus Manhattan

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Just before the US Bicentennial in 1976, a city rose inside 88 Pine Street in downtown Manhattan – Creative Time’s first public art project. It was a crazy, hilarious, participatory comic papier-mâché labrynth that was dreamed up by a beloved Pop Art power couple – Red Grooms and Mimi Gross – that was a love letter to New York City.

Their cartoon Manhattan had everything – Times Square, the World Trade Center, the Staten Island Ferry, Wall Street, and even a subway car on springs you could enter and bounce around in amid life-sized papier-mâché and soft-sculpted passengers.  

Publicity and photos from the 1976 installation of Ruckus Manhattan at Marlborough Gallery on 57th Street.

Within the 6,400-square-foot area, you could walk through big brightly painted, silly constructions to experience all the sights, sounds, and crazy characters everyone observes and bumps into on New York City streets.  It was sensational (drawing 50,000 visitors) and people came back over and over to catch things they didn’t notice the first time.

Film still from Ruckus Manhattan documentary by Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, showing Red Grooms at work on the Woolworth Building for the 1975 installation at 88 Pine Street, Financial District.

The Brooklyn Museum has pulled parts of this beloved art installation out of storage for the first time in 30 years for its exhibition, Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, and The Ruckus Construction Co.: Excerpts from ‘Ruckus Manhattan’, on view through June 5, 2026. Take a look in our Flickr album.

The major part of the first-floor installation depicts the blue waters of New York Harbor (an undulating, draped blue plastic sheet) and a big, cartoon-like Staten Island Ferry – Dame of the Narrows – pulling into its berth at the terminal. The yellow ferry boat is packed with picture-taking tourists, commuters, vehicles, and (as usual) a few passengers and a motorcyclist poised at the edge of the lower deck, waiting for the bump against the landing and the hinged gate release before scooting ashore.

Dame of the Narrows, a 1975 installation by Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, and their collaborators known as the Ruckus Construction Company; here, a cartoon version of the Staten Island Ferry is about to arrive at the dock. 

A seagull sits atop the vertical wooden pillars that line the terminal approach. It’s the same as you’ve witnessed a thousand times in real life. Funny how the harbor smells, humidity, and seagull sounds pop into your head, making you feel as if you’re really there.  

Cartoon seagull looks for a meal atop the timbers lining the Manhattan dock for the Staten Island Ferry; 1975 installation from Ruckus Manhattan.
View of the lifeboat and underwater life beneath the cartoon Staten Island Ferry Dame of the Narrows, 1975 installation from Ruckus Manhattan.

Like the rest of the larger Ruckus Manhattan, this harbor installation was created from Red’s sketches of the ferry people, architecture, and technology by a crew of around 40 other members of his team – the Ruckus Construction Company. It was a joyous mix of painters, sculptors, puppet makers, performance artists, and kids, all on view through the plate glass windows of 88 Pine Street in the Financial District, bringing the buildings and neighborhoods of Manhattan to life.

Centerfold of The Daily Ruckus comic newspaper created in lieu of an exhibition catalog; November 1975 issue includes pictures and bios of the installation artists.

Surrounding it all are two long painted murals from 1992, featuring landmarks across the waters – the skyscrapers of Jersey City above Journal Square, the looming cranes of the container shipping port, and the Verazzano Narrows Bridge is shoved in there, too, right at the edge.

Video of Design for Staren Island Ferry – enlargement of a 1992 watercolor and drawing by Red Grooms.

After Ruckus Manhattan closed downtown in 1975, the entire kit and kaboodle moved uptown to Marlborough Gallery on 57th Street in 1976.  Nearly 100,000 people came to see it in Midtown, as did Jackie O. In 1977, Dame of the Narrows was presented to the Brooklyn Museum by the newly formed Citizens Committee for New York City, which began community initiatives to help the City rise up after its devastating fiscal crisis.

Brooklyn has a nice collection of ephemera that it’s put on display in an adjacent gallery that runs Red and Mimi’s Ruckus Manhattan documentary. Here’s a clip with Red and Mimi:

Visitors can take a minute and see photos of the full-scale installation, a brochure for a 1993 installation at Grand Central Terminal, and The Daily Ruckus newspaper handed out at the 88 Pine Street opening.

Video showing the exterior of the 42nd Street Porno Bookstore and a leather-clad passerby, a 1976 installation for Ruckus Manhattan.

For visitors who want to see what Times Square was like before it was renovated into a more family-friendly environment, the museum has installed another Ruckus component (not as family friendly…be warned!).  Around the corner (hidden from the ferry installation), you’re greeted by a seedy façade and live-sized leather-clad lurker. Welcome to the 42nd Street Porno Bookstore!  Inside, you can peruse goofy magazine covers that spoof Times Square’s dicey past alongside a satirical peep show and another sketchy lurker. 

Thanks to the Ruckus team for its creation, to Alex Katz for donating the Bookstore, and to Brooklyn Museum for this walk down Memory Lane and its preservation of one of New York’s best-loved art extravaganzas!

Film still from Ruckus Manhattan documentary by Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, showing Red Grooms at work the 1975 installation at 88 Pine.