Tag Archives: exhibition

Painters Tell Stories of Nature’s Resilience

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Feel like things are out of balance?  Seven narrative painters let animals take center stage get visitors thinking about the future for nature and the world in Vivarium, Exploring Intersections of Art, Storytelling, and the Resilience of the Living World at the Albuquerque Museum through February 9, 2025..

Big, bold paintings let nature tell the story and present juxtapositions that present questions about society, environmental dissonance, and what messages animals might want to send. See some of our favorites in our Flickr album.

2023 oil Astrid by Stephen J. Yazzie (Laguna Pueblo/Diné). Courtesy: private collection

Although the exhibition begins with a small selection of works from Santa Fe’s Tia Collection – Dan Namingha (Hopi-Tewa), Nanibah Chacon (Dine/Chicana), and others – the majority of the space features a selection of works by the seven featured painters. Clusters of paintings immerse viewers in each artist’s unique world, style, and narrative – mini-vivariums, or artificial worlds.

Nature explodes of Nathan Budoff’s giant canvases – tigers, meerkats, swimming octopii, schools of fish, prarie dogs – all floating and interacting in a pure, white space.  He creates realistic depictions in charcoal, oil, acrylic, and ink, but juxtaposes natural components that are startling. Visitors stand back, pause, take it all in at once, trying to make sense of how these magnificent creatures interact in unusual landscapes.  Mostly, the canvases do not include people, but Nathan enjoys letting the remarkable, minutely observed wildlife speak their own truths.

2017 charcoal, oil, acrylic, and ink Imminent Danger by Nathan Budoff – showing systems and social behaviors in the natural world. Courtesy: the artist.

Paintings by Patrick McGrath Muñiz are intellectual puzzles, mixing modern issues, depictions of modern technology, and classical Renaissance and

Baroque painting techniques.  Signs, symbols, and details on the horizon demand slow scrutiny to unravel the allegories and associations packed into the paintings.

2018 oil painting Terram Ignoramus by Patrick McGrath Muñiz – a warning about the perils of climate change; depicting a perilous Arctic journey in a boat named “We know not the earth.” Courtesy: the artist

Eloy Torres, a Chicano activist and muralist, uses religious, mythological, and surrealist pictorial conventions to construct worlds that lets the viewer their intuition to connect the dots.

2006 oil portrait of Cheech Martin It’s a Brown World After All by Eloy Torrez; the crown connects him to his ancestral past. Courtesy: Riverside Art Museum.
2010 oil on panel Meat by Eloy Torrez, a surreal allegory on precarious relationships between humans and thenatural world. Courtesy: the artist.

Stephen J. Yazzie (Laguna Pueblo/Diné) exhibits a series of works in which Coyote inhabits upscale suburban interiors, emphasizing the inside/outside, nature/culture dichotomies in contemporary life.

Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma), a member of her tribe’s Deer Clan, creates narratives featuring animals as protagonists, often metaphors for interactions between natural and spiritual realms. Large works allow players in her stories to prance, dance, and float across saturated color fields.

2018 oil and pastel Straight Legs by Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma) – a painting reflecting her membership in the Deer Clan. Courtesy: University of Wyoming Art Museum

Artist/educator Stan Netchez (Shoshone/Tataviam) presents a throught-provoking masterpiece, using Picasso’s Guernica imagery, US brands, and indigenous spiritual icons to display the chaos and destruction inflicted on indigenous peoples.

2019 acrylic, oil, and metal leaf “Guernica Flag” by Stan Netchez (Shoshone/Tataviam) – a critique of colonialism’s impact. Courtesy: Tia Collection

Listen in on a panel with four of these storytellers conducted by the Albuquerque Museum.

MIAC Connects Diné Textiles to Land and Community

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Building on the groundwork laid in the artist-curated exhibition Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery (opening in St. Louis on March 7), Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture asked five Navajo textile artists, photographers, and scholars to delve into MIAC’s historic collections to tell the story of Diné weavng.

Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles, on view through February 2, 2025, presents historic and contemporary weavings alongside epic photographs of Navajo Nation landscapes to show the connections textile artist have to ancestors, their mentors, the community, the land, and their materials.

Historic Diné weaving with photomural by co-curator Rapheal Begay. Courtesy: the artist.

Appropriately, the story told by over 30 historic textiles is presented in MIAC’s Masterpieces gallery.

The entrance presents a dazzling display – a pictorial blanket woven in the 1890s set against a photomural of co-curator Rapheal Begay’s family sheep corral. It’s a visual testament to the importance of wool, life, and the 27,000 square miles of Navajo Nation. 

The blanket’s creator (unknown today) was an astute observer of the life on the land and translated it all into warp and weft – cow punchers, cattle, boots, birds, and new-fangled railroad cars, that only arrived in Navajo Country around the 1880s. Click here to see the detail.

1885 pictorial blanket created with Germantown wool yarn introduced in the Southwest by the railroads; photomural Navel (Hunter’s Point, AZ) by co-curator Rapheal Begay. Photo courtesy of artist.

Nothing was newer than the railroad, at the time this artist depicted it – a steam-fed invention from the East that would change western life forever, but that also brought a wide array of colorful yarn that could be mixed and matched with vegetal dyes to create new Native designs.

The intertwined history of Diné (“The People” in the Navajo language), textile art, and the land is told through quotes and recollections by the exhibition’s Native collaborators. While examining masterful geometric weaving techniques in 19th-century works, visitors are provided with an historic context – the types of art materials introduced to captives imprisoned at Bosque Redondo after the Long Walk, the images that could be interpreted as a longing for the homeland by the incarcerated, and coded spiritual affirmations.

1850-1860 hand-spun wool child’s (or saddle) blanket with Spider Woman crosses; created with natural cocineal, indigo, and chamisa dye
1880-1897 rug made with Germantown wool yarn, cotton string, and raveled yarn; materials used in weaving at Bosque Redondo era, post-Long Walk.

The participants in the exhibition make sure that viewers also experience how the landscape inspires the work of the past and contemporary Native textile artists. Diné fiber artist Tyrrell Tapaha includes her two-panel dress in which incorporates images of the Utah clouds and mountains that bring her spiritual peace. The masterful wall hanging by Lillie Joe uses the palette of the desert to create a mesmerizing geometric dazzler.

2020 two-panel dress by fiber artist Tyrrell Tapaha with images from Utah landscapes that inspired her; woven from churro, silk, mohair, and marino wool..
Close up of highly detailed 1980s Burntwater wall hanging by Lillie Joe, reflecting colors and patterns of the Navajo Nation landscape.

The curators feature both the photography of co-curator Rapheal Begay and Darby Raymond-Overstreet to allow gallery visitors to experience the awesome beauty of the homeland that inspires artists. Digital artist Raymond-Overstreet overlays geometric textile patterns across his luscious, beautiful landscapes.

2018 digital print Woven Landscape, Shiprock by Darby Raymond-Overstreet (Diné), overlaying digital landscapes with traditional weavings. Courtesy: the artist

Take a look at some of our favorite works in our Flickr album. And enjoy these historic and contemporary dazzlers.

Detail of 1895 wedge weave blanket made with commercial cotton string and Germantown wool – a dramatic 19th c. weaving innovation. Courtesy: International Museum of Folk Art.
2022 wedge weave by Kevin Aspaas; white and grey wool yarn with indigo dye. Courtesy: private collection.
Detail of dynamic Diné 1960 wool tapestry weave. Courtesy: International Museum of Folk Art

Relax in Denver’s Modern Mexican Chair Collection

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2023 A Family of 4 red oak side chairs by LANZA Atelier (Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo).

Everything you could want from a design exhibition is packed into Have a Seat: Mexican Chair Design Today at the Denver Museum of Art through January 12, 2025 – history, context, videos, inspiration behind the designs, and…

Did we mention that you get to sit on the chairs?

The creative lighting and gallery layout invites visitors to take a journey that reflects Mexico’s ancient and colonial history – just like the work of the 22 designers featured here.

Everything on display is part of the Denver Museum’s permanent design collection,

The museum has created an environment that’s engaging and fun, so visitors seem to take time to read about the designers and the history of Mexican furniture while they sample the diverse range of furniture (“it’s more comfortable than it looks!”) as they wind their way through the clean, modern installation. View it all in our Flickr album.

Laura Noriega’s 2012 Your Skin chair made of walnut, handwoven cotton, and synthetic fabric, combining Japanese woodworking and Mexican textiles.

As you enter, you’re greeted by a tiny carved Guatemalan figurine from 300-100 CE, showing the type of simple thrones from which Olmec rulers or religious leaders might sit – a backless seat. Ancient civilizations are the inspiration for the innovative seats made by the first set of designers.

Some of these humble-looking stools by Camilia Apaez and HABITACIÓN 116 are made from stoneware, basalt and volcanic ash – harkening back to landscapes, environments, and simplicity that resonates with these forward-looking 21st century designers. 

Camila Apaez’s 2002 stoneware Room in the Cave seats – inspired by deep associations with Paleolithic and Neolithic architecture and ceramics.
Raúl Cabra’s 2009 Bamboo seats made from carizzo reeds; video shows public seating.

Visitors are invited to sit and experience the enjoyment of relaxing in each of the exhibition areas – and many couples and families do!  It’s nice to sit and watch the large-screen videos that take you on a trip around Mexico, showing you modern and traditional public seating areas along city streets and town squares.

Not all of the stools are minimalistic, proven by the creations of Aldo Alvarez Tostado, who turned from architecture to making smaller pieces that enabled him to work with traditional Mexican weavers and woodworkers to invent seats that are run and new.

Aldo Alvarez Tostado’s 2022 Little Horse stools, made of wool and synthetic horsehair.

The second section of the show features the history and modern interpretation of easy chairs – comfortable seating that invites visitors to stay and enjoy. There’s an upscale Spanish Colonial chair to demonstrate traditional European design roots, surrounded by Ricardo Casas’s classy designs and Mauricio Lara Eguiluz’s funny foam take on the Yucatan’s Chac-Mool Mayan deity (always reclining comfortably!)

But if truth be told, all the visitors are having the most fun flopping onto the super-comfortable recycled “stuffables” by Andrés Lhima!

An array of comfortable easy chairs – the 2013 Clara design by Ricardo Casas and the 2005 polyurethane foam Chac Seat by Mauricio Lara Eguiluz
Andrés Lhima’s fun, portable easy chairs – comfy 2011 plastic mesh Fidencio chairs filled with shredded foam and recyclables.

The final section pays tribute new takes on the Spanish side chair, comparing a 19th-century classic with high-style sets by Oscar Hagerman and La Metropolitana and outrageous reinventions by Estaban Calcendo Cortés. You can feel the Afro-Colombian rhythms in his woven palm chairs.

A highly decorative painted 1800s Mexican side chair.
2022 Palapa side chairs by Estaban Calcendo Cortés – inspired by Afro-Mexican and Colombian cultures

To learn more about the designers and their inspiration, scroll through the exhibition guide.

And this beautifully designed show would not be complete with an out-of-the-box participatory woven-wicker design section for kids of all ages!

2023 El Charco environment by Mestiz for visitors to contemplate design and the environment, including the wicker Cactus of a Thousand Eyes and Great Two-Headed Viper.

Pathfinder Marcus Amerman at The Wheelwright

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Shape-shifter, beadwork innovator, pop-culture provocateur, fashion designer, and performance artist – it’s hard to know where to start when summarizing four-decades of work by a Native-American contemporary art superstar. But his first retrospective, Pathfinder: 40 Years of Marcus Amerman, does showcases his wide range of work in spectacular fashion. See it at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe through January 11.

Marcus Amerman (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma) is best known for his intricate beaded “paintings,” which take center stage.

1994 Stormbringer beaded portrait of Lakota leader Chief Iron Hawk. Surrealist eyes by Man Ray watch from a brewing storm. Courtesy: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Once Amerman developed his bead technique, which provided a photo-realist spin to a traditional “native” craft, he really felt that he could take on any subject as a contemporary artist – movie stars, historic characters, and cartoon images. The impact is electric. 

2002 beaded painting Greetings from Indian Country, merging vintage tourism with pointed social commentary on exploitation. Private collection

Gazing across the main gallery, you see pop-culture images of “Indian” memes splashed across large canvases, cartoony self-portraits, fashion mannequins, glass sculptures, and photos by his wry collaborators. It’s a splendid mix of eye-dazzling color, technical mastery, and social commentary. Take a look at some of our favorites in our Flickr gallery.

Amerman garnered a lot of attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s for merging his beadwork into contemporary fashion. He cites his beaded leather motorcycle jacket with a beaded meme of bikini-clad Brooke Shields starting it all – a shock-worthy mix of leather toughness with one of the hottest young stars of the day.  He took on custom commissions and leapt at the opportunity to participate in fashion shows. He was overjoyed to see his buckskin fashions featured in Elle.

1982 Iron Horse Jacket with beaded Brooke Shields. Courtesy: Private collection
American eagles beaded on lapels of 1992 dinner jacket; commissioned by veteran Doug Hyde (Nez Perce, Assiniboine, Chippewa).

It’s obvious that Amerman rejects staying put into a single category. He loves collecting vintage “Indian” objects and collaging art-world and historic references in all of his work. Check out those hubcaps!

2023 acrylic painting Old Masters in the New World, showing 17th century Dutch colonizers next to a Santa Fe train. Courtesy: the artist
2023 Rattles found-object collage, mixing pop cultural and Native images. Courtesy: the artist

Amerman’s alter ego, Buffalo Man, features prominently in the show, particularly in his collaborations with acclaimed photographer Cara Romero, where icons of Native culture insert themselves into American pop culture.

Cara Romero’s 2013 photo El Graduaté – a collaboration with Amerman’s performance alter ego, Buffalo Man. Courtesy: Cara Romero
2002 Target Jacket with glass beads, worn by the artist in fashion shows as himself and as Buffalo Man. Courtesy: the artist

The gorgeous collaborations with glass artists from Amerman’s time at Pilchuk are a delight – some self-referential and others harkening back to his own culture’s ancestry.  He claims that everything he makes is genuinely as “self portrait.”

2010 blown and sand-carved Buffalo Man – a collaboration by Amerman and Preston Singletary (Tlingit). Courtesy: the artist
2006 Glass Shield, one of a series created during a residency at Pilchuk Glass School and inspired by historic Plains Indian shields. Courtesy: the artist

It’s a joyful tribute to an artist who gives back, inspires others, and keeps asking pertinent questions about the role of art and artists in our society.

Enjoy this close-up look at some of Amerman’s masterful beadwork and hear why Amerman continues to create:

Alma Thomas Splashes Denver with Color

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For a pop of color in the winter season, see Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art at the Denver Museum of Art through January 12 and at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York February 8 through May 25, 2025.

Denver has welcomed this mid-century modern painter with open arms, with visitors lounging in several living-room settings surrounded by abstractions from the Sixties and Seventies by a Washington, D.C. painter who born in the late 19th century but who lived to see a man land on the Moon.

1960 Red Abstraction by Alma Thomas. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Alma Thomas grew up in Georgia, and earned the first fine arts degree ever granted by Howard University in 1924.  After receiving a masters in education from Columbia, Alma spent the next 30 years teaching in Washington, D.C. public schools. 

Ida Jervis’s 1968 photo Alma Thomas working in her studio. Courtesy: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

But she stayed close with her professors at Howard, who founded the Barnett Aden Gallery, one of first racially integrated and Black-owned art galleries in the United States.  Alma served as the gallery’s VP, which displayed a who’s who of contemporary African-American artists, like Elizabeth Catlett, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Henry O. Tanner. 

By the early 1950s, Alma’s work was regularly shown in exhibitions at the gallery. When Alma finally retired from teaching in 1960 at age 69, she was finally able to paint full time. The Smithsonian’s exhibition features Alma’s work from this highly productive period.

Take a look at our favorites in our Flickr album.

The exhibition is centered around three subjects that inspired her – nature, the cosmos, and music. Her vivid color paintings welcome you to the exhibition but around the corner you see what really inspired her – a wall-sized photo of Alma’s beloved flower garden. 

Mid-century modern lounge in the Denver exhibition with paintings by Alma Thomas inspired by her garden

She loved the changing seasons, the patterns of gardens, and patterns observed by light flickering through the crepe myrtles in her garden or through the trees on her walks through DC’s endless greenways and parks.

1976 oil Fall Begins, suggesting rustling leaves. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Detail of 1972 acrylic, Arboretum Presents White Dogwood. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The exhibition also features an immersive environment where visitors can use colors and shapes from Alma’s paintings to splash supersized across the gallery walls.

Room in Denver where visitors use filters to create lightscapes on the gallery walls.
1976 acrylic, Grassy Melodic Chart. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

By the 1970s, Alma’s love of music and rhythm were reflected in her abstractions, although the titles of her canvases tell us that she saw expressive melodies in nature too.

Captivated by the promise of technology, Alma also reveled in the mysteries and rhythms of the planets, space, and those frontiers of exploration. She really felt that the Moon, planets, and stars represented the peace and harmony that were sometimes lacking on Earth.

Always searching for beauty in the world, continuing to paint, and contemplating a brighter future, Alma achieved unprecedented art-world recognition in 1972 at age 80 –a one-woman show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Not bad for a gal who grew up in “horse and buggy days” in Georgia! Thank you to the Smithsonian for collecting Alma’s work and producing this joyful, colorful show.

1970 acrylic The Eclipse, based on the March 7, 1970 total solar eclipse. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.
1973 acrylic Celestial Fantasy. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Click here to read more in Denver’s exhibition guide and watch this short glimpse of the galleries below:

Listen to curator Rory Padeken discuss Alma Thomas’s life and work with artist Jordan Casteel, choreographer and dancer Cleo Parker Robinson, and floral artist Breigh Jones-Coplin.

O’Keeffe Above and Beyond the Grid

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Six years before she became transfixed with the drama of the colorful New Mexico desert, Georgia O’Keeffe began translating another magnificent, magical view from her skyscraper home in Manhattan. You can see all her transformational aerial cityscapes in Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” on view at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art through February 16, 2025.

Created by the Art Institute of Chicago, the show assembles Georgia’s breakthrough city paintings and puts them squarely into the context of her better-known nature close-ups and other modernist takes – just the way she wanted it.

O’Keeffe’s 1927 Radiator Building – Night, New York. Courtesy: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Listen to the Art Institute curators talk about Georgia’s approach to New York landscapes, her life in the city’s Roaring Twenties, and what inspired her walking Manhattan’s grid at a time of of such transformational urban change:

As a total modernist, Georgia couldn’t wait to move into the Shelton Hotel, a brand-new skyscraper, with her brand-new husband (Stieglitz) in 1924. As half of New York’s art-world “power couple” it’s most likely that Georgia was one of the first women to enjoy high-rise living in Manhattan.

O’Keeffe’s 1926 The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. Courtesy: Art Institute of Chicago

The Shelton (still there at Lexington and 49th Street) was an apartment-hotel built in Midtown around Grand Central. Although it was first envisioned as a men’s residence, the marketing team soon pivoted a more expanded market with newspaper ads that would attract women, couples, and artists!

Read more about the Shelton, Georgia’s life there, and see 1920s photographs on the Art Institute’s blog post.

Georgia and Alfred moved in, captivated by the views of the East River and rapidly changing Manhattan skyline, where new skyscrapers were popping up like daisies.  Alfred took photographs and Georgia recorded ths shifting light, atmosphere, and moods of the rapidly changing landscape.

O’Keeffe’s 1928 East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel.
Courtesy: New Britain Museum of American Art.

As the exhibition demonstrates, Georgia didn’t limit herself to urban landscapes at the time. She was still depicting the natural world, but was determined to channel the rising modern city.  At the time, Alfred and her fellow artists strongly discouraged her from displaying her urban work, arguing that painting cityscapes was “best left to the men.”  You can just imagine what our Georgia thought about that! Naturally, it was full steam ahead! 

Before Google Street view, Georgia walked the Midtown Grid, exploring (and remembering) her neighborhood streets as they transformed into skyscraper canyons. More high rises! The Empire State Building! Rockefeller Center!

O’Keeffe’s 1926 City Night. Courtesy: Minneapolis Institute of Art
O’Keeffe’s 1925 New York with Moon. Courtesy: Carmen Thyssen Collection

Who knows if Georgia ever experienced Manhattanhenge, but she certainly enjoyed the verticality and sky views between the buildings.  A nature-lover, modernist, and virtuoso painter! 

Despite Stieglitz’s misgivings about her city paintings, when she finally had her annual one-woman show at his gallery, her city painting was the first work that sold!

The curators have hung some of Georgia’s paintings just as she displayed them – side-by-side flower close-ups, other nature-inspired works, and City views – to provide the full experience of a modern woman’s mastery.

O’Keeffe’s 1924 From the Lake, No. 1.
Courtesy: Des Moines Art Center
O’Keeffe’s 1929 Black Cross, New Mexico.
Courtesy: Art Institute of Chicago

For more, here’s a longer discussion about Georgia rip-roaring 1920s life and work by one of the Chicago Art Institute curators for Georgia O’Keeffe Museum members.

Pueblo Pots Speak in “Grounded in Clay”

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Contemporary artists say they can hear their ancestors speak across generations. All they have to do is hold their community’s ancient pots – living beings that connect them to the Earth and the people from the past who made them.

You can hear these modern and ancient voices and see ceramic masterworks in Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery, an exhibition on view the The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston through January 12, 2025; continuing at the St. Louis Art Museum March 7 to September 14, 2025; and on display at the Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque from March 2026 to February 2027.

In video at Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Clarence Cruz (Okay Owingeh) reflects on a pots’s personal meaning

Clay is central to Pueblo culture, and this show is special, because it’s the first major exhibition of Pueblo pots curated entirely by the indigenous community – artists, leaders, teachers, and museum professionals.

1900 Tewa-Hopi Hno jar selected by Erin Monique Grant (Colorado River Indian Tribes); it reminded her of her Hopi family. Courtesy: Vilcek Collection.

For the 100th birthday of the Indian Arts Research Center at School for Advanced Research (SAR), the exhibition debuted in 2023 at Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, and then traveled to New York to open at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1907-1910 bowl by Nampeyo (Tewa/Hopi) selected by her great-great-grandson artist Dan Namingha. Courtesy: SAR

New York’s Vilcek Foundation co-sponsored the community-curation project, exhibition, and project website. The organizers consulted with sixty curators from 22 pueblo communities across the Southwest to select work from the IARC collection and write about the spirit of these works. Communications weren’t always easy, since Internet service (email) is still spotty on some tribal lands.  

But The Pueblo Collective’s inclusive approach to create the exhibition and catalog is now considered a template for major art institutions to work with tribal communities to convey their stories and culture to the public..

The IARC collection is legendary, spanning prehistoric to modern-day works. This video takes you inside IARC archive to meet a few of the Pueblo curators and the pots they selected:

Utilitarian vessels, ancient legacies, and intergenerational connections are themes explored in the 2023 installation at Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. The exhibition design artfully integrated the words and thoughts of the curators in, around, and above the spectacular selections. Take a look at some of our favorites in our Flickr album.

Two 19th-century Tesuque water jars: a jar chosen by artist Marita Hinds (Tesuque), who saw it on a 1980s class field trip; and one admired by potter Bernard Mora (Tesuque) for its personality and imperfections. Courtesy: SAR

In some cases, a curator chose an Ancestral Pueblo pot from the 1100s and reflected on how well it’s survived today. In other cases, a curator discovered their grandmother’s pot stored for decades within the IARC collection. What a joy to bring it out and let it breathe! Listen in….

This statement about Lonnie Vigil’s magnificent vessel by Nora Naranjo Morse says it all.  The MIAC gallery space recreated a Pueblo kitchen so we can experience the environment in which most Pueblo potters create their work.

1995 micaceous clay jar made by Lonnie Vigil (Nambe) selected by Nora Naranjo Morse (Santa Clara) because it glitters like stars. Courtesy: SAR
Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s replica of Pueblo kitchen where most pottery is created

And here’s how the Met featured Lonnie’s showstopping work – made on his kitchen table – prominently in the American Wing entrance!

Micaceous clay jar by Lonnie Vigil (Nambe) in the show’s entrance at the Met’s American Wing. Photo by Richard Lee; courtesy: The Metropolitan Museum

The project website presents the curators’ biographies, their selections, and stories.

Listen to the Met’s 2023 panel with five curators behind this magnificent community-curated indigenous exhibition and find out why they believe understanding the vessels’ power is important:

Fernandez Curates Smithson at SITE Santa Fe

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It’s not often you get to see Robert Smithson’s large-scale works inside gallery walls. Strolling through SITE Santa Fe’s magnificent Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson exhibition, through October 28, provides an opportunity to see how a contemporary Brooklyn-based Cuban-American artist – inspired by landscape and societal histories of the Caribbean – positions her own work “in conversation” with Smithson’s 1960s-1970s geologic works, drawings, and photo installations.

SITE invited art-world superstar Teresita Fernández to curate this show with the Santa Fe-based Holt/Smithson Foundation. Prior to her deep dive into Smithson’s career, her primary knowledge centered around his 1970 epic Spiral Jetty – 6,650 tons of rock and earth jutting out from the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

Smithson’s 1969-1970 Mirrors and Shelly Sand and two by Fernández: 2009 Drawn Waters (Borrowdale) and 2024 Sfumato (Epic) 2. Courtesy: Dallas Museum of Art; the artist and Lehmann Maupin.
Still from Robert Smithson’s 1970 film Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah. Courtesy: Holt/Smithson Foundation.

But Fernández found a lot more from Smithson’s too-short career that she could couple with her own work to create SITE’s spectacular installation. Both artists use landscapes, deep time, ancient history, and travel.

Smithson’s 1968 installation A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey) with 2020 Archipelago charcoal work by Teresita Fernández. Courtesy: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; private collection

In the first gallery, Fernández selected a Smithson “nonsite” work – a minimalist series of boxes, each packed with rocks from the decidedly unromantic site of Franklin, New Jersey. Smithson’s “nonsite” includes a framed aerial photo that appears to document the site, but it’s a “readjusted” depiction of it. Not what it seems.

Next to the “nonsite,” Fernández hangs Archipelago, a charcoal wall sculpture., which appears to be a legit map, but it’s not. It’s an imagined map of separate Caribbean islands and continents linked together, making us reflect upon their shared socio-political colonial histories.

Viñales (Plateau) is a wall-sized “stacked landscape” depicting Cuba’s Viñales Valley, home of ancient karst caves once inhabited by Taino people and later where escaped plantation slaves sought refuge. At a distance, it evokes the valley’s ecological, social, and political legacies; up close, you see that the image is made up of thousands of tiny ceramic tiles. Something to get lost in.

2019 ceramic mosaic by Teresita Fernández Viñales (Plateau). Courtesy: the artist and Lehmann Maupin.

Both artists use reflection in their works. Manigual (Mirror) by Fernández– a tropical forest created from charcoal and sand – is affixed to a reflective surface, so you can “see yourself” in the charred thicket when you get right up to it. Smithson designed his earth-and-mirror Red Sandstone Corner Piece so that every gallery goer’s image is part of the visual experience – from close up, far back, and far away. You’re linked to the red sandstone.

Detail of 2023 Manigual (Mirror) by Teresita Fernández. Courtesy: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

On the other hand, Smithson famous photographic series, Yucatán Mirror Displacements, documents his meticulously arranged mirrors set into Mexico’s coastal landscapes. Just reflections of landscape and sky in all the settings he documented his set of mirrors; no people.

Detail of Smithson’s 1969 Yucatán Mirror Displacements (1-9). Courtesy: Guggenheim Museum.

Nature’s continual ebb and flow, the Earth’s surface, ecosystems, and the cosmos ­are all subjects explored by both artists.What’s beneath the Earth’s surface, forces of nature, and human impact on it all pop up covertly in every room.  See more in our Flickr album.

Detail of 2017 charcoal work by Fernández Charred Landscape (America). Courtesy: the artist, Lehmann Maupin.
Detail of Smithson’s 1971 ink drawing A Profile of the Atlantic Bottom. Courtesy: private collection.

And learn more about the “conversations” that works by these artists are having in the curator lectures in SITE Santa Fe’s videos with Fernández herself and her co-curator from the Holt/Smithson Foundation.

Detail of Robert Smithson’s 1961-1963 paint and photo collage Algae, algae. Courtesy: Holt/Smithson Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Detail of 2019 graphite-covered shell installation Chorus by Teresita Fernández. Courtesy: the artist and Lehmann Maupin.

National Gallery Celebrates 50 Contemporary Native Artists

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If you want to take a trip across American land with 50 living Native artists, there’s still time to catch the ground-breaking exhibition, The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, at Connecticut’s New Britain Museum of American Art through September 15, 2024.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. asked Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) to survey the United States and create an exhibition reflecting the diversity of the living Native American artists.

2014 wool weaving World Traveler by Melissa Cody (Navajo). Courtesy: Stark Museum of Art.

Smith, whose own artistic achievement was honored most recently in a three-museum retrospective in 2023-2024, became the first artist invited to curate a show at the National Gallery.

Entrance banner features Orchestrating a Blooming Desert by Steven Yazzie (Diné/Laguna Pueblo).

Smith has always done whatever possible to increase the visibilty of Native artists in the contemporary art world. For this exhibition, she chose 50 intergenerational artists from diverse regions, cultures, and artistic practices. Look at our Flickr album of the National Gallery installation to see some of our favorites.

All of the works reflect the artists’ deep connection to the land, especially Orchestrating a Blooming Desert by Steven Yazzie (Diné/Laguna Pueblo), a painting that reflects one man’s joyful encounter with a lush landscape.

Some works depict a tribe’s link to the natural world through origin stories. Visitors are mesmerized by Preston Singletary’s exquisite sculpture of Tlingit creation-myth legend, Raven stealing the Sun. It’s glorious to admire this dramatic icon fully realized in a distinctly nontraditional medium – blown and sand-carved glass.

Experiencing the large, spiritual earth-colored ceramic figure by Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo) harkens back to eras when people had a more integral connection to the earth. Simpson calls her figure Tonantzin, an Aztec name for earth mothers, corn mothers, and even the Virgin of Guadalupe.

2017 blown and sand-carved glass Raven Steals the Sun by Preston Singletary (Tlingit). Courtesy: private collector.
2021 ceramic, steel, leather, and brass Tonantzin by Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo). Courtesy: Tia Collection.

Smith has chosen to hang many smaller two-dimensional works across a long wall in a checkerboard to suggest that visitors reflect on the impact of 1887 Dawes Act upon Native lands – a law that cut Native territory into “checkerboard” lots to facilitate private ownership.

At the National Gallery, Jeffrey Gibson’s punching bag (all made of found materials) was hung nearby, reminding us of the delicate balance that has to be struck by simultaneously caring for and taking gifts from the earth.

Next to checkerboard wall, the 2020 beaded punching bag To Feel Myself Loved On the Earth by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee Nation). Courtesy: Hirschhorn Museum.

Some artists mix impressions of modern life with tribal lands, such as satiric works by Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo) and stylized symbols in a monoprint by Joe Fedderson (Colville Confederated Tribes).

2017 lithograph Girl in the Anthropocene by Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo). Private collection

In addition to sculptures, paintings, and photos, Smith has also included pieces made for fashion runways, live performances, and social protests.

Fashion designer Jamie Okuma (La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians) beaded her fringed fashion boots with a portrait of her family’s pet scrub jay.

Ten foot-long fiber seashell earrings designed for an interactive video and gallery performance by fiber and performance artist Eric-Paul Riege (Diné) are a reminder of the ancient trade networks that brought trade items from the ocean to the interior deserts.

2021 beaded and fringed Casedei boots by Jaime Okuma (La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians). Courtesy: Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum
2020 mixed-fiber installation jaatloh4Ye’iitosoh [3-4] by Eric-Paul Riege (Diné). Courtesy: Tia Collection.

A wall of “mirror shields” were mounted by artist-activist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota), showing just a small sample of the 1,000 protective and reflective shields made by people to help water protectors during thre 2016 pipeline intervention at Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation, Luger’s childhood home. Take a look at Luger’s instruction video here.

The shields served to protect the peaceful protesters from rubber bullets and water cannons, and reflected images of the security forces back to them. The crowd-sourced shields were also used in a social-action performance piece at Standing Rock.

2016 mirror shields and video for Mirror Shield Project – River (The Water Spirit) by Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota). Courtesy: the artist, Garth Greenan Gallery.

Textiles and vinyl drawings also pack a punch in this show. Take a look at the dazzler woven by Melissa Cody (Diné), who draws inspiration from video gaming and the matriarchs of Navajo Nation. Watch her interview from her recent exhibition at MoMA PS1.

Here, John Hitchcock explains how his room-sized drawing, Impact vs. Influence, incorporates his influences – nature, family, Native beadwork, and the next-door military base:

Take a look the National Gallery’s trailer and meet the 50 contemporary artists whose work and relationship to the land is celebrated in the show:

Out West in New Mexico

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The artist stories and works presented in Out West: Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Southwest 1900-1969, at the New Mexico Museum of Art through September 2, 2023, shed light on artists who lived a bit more “under the radar” in the early 20th century, compared to the post-1969 era when loud and proud artists unleashed their voices in response to the Stonewall Riots.

The exhibition focuses on how early modernists used “coded” symbols in their work, explores the legacies of two-gendered Native American artists, and introduces mid-century work by mid-century contemporary artists working.

Marsden Hartley’s 1919 still life El Santo, featuring Hispanic Catholic objects of northern New Mexico.
Russel Cheney’s 1929 New Mexico/Penitente showing a bulto, axe, and flowers associated with the Penitente brotherhood.

Take a look at our favorites in our Flickr album.

The show opens with works by Marsden Hartley and Russell Cheney – painted 10 years apart (1919 and 1929) that feature items associated with rituals by Northern New Mexico’s Penitentes – Catholic men’s associations that kept faith alive during the 19th century when clergy were scarce in their remote mountain towns.

Hartley and Cheney were captivated by the religious rituals of these mysterious, faithful “brotherhoods” that persevered for centuries, despite periodic bans by New Mexico’s Catholic Church – not unlike the early 20th century gay men’s associations whose underground culture gave rise to “coded” rituals and language.

Hence, these works feature images of the suffering Christ, yucca plants used for self-mortification rituals, adobe churches, and props associated with processional death carts – symbols of religious brotherhood that represent the importance of brotherhood among the early 20th century gay community.

The second portion of the show introduces us to the many painters, photographers, and sculptors who not only drew artistic inspiration from the Southwest, but found communities that welcomed gay and lesbian artists. Works by artists, such as Agnes C. Sims and Cady Wells, are paired with portraits by a Southwestern who’s who of modern portraiture and photography – Will Shuster, Laura Gilpin, Ansel Adams, and Anne Noggle.

Modernist Deer Dance cedar sculptures carved in 1945 by Agnes C. Sims, a tribute to native cultures
Laura Gilpin’s 1942 photographic portrait of artist Agnes C. Sims

There’s even a “portrait” stitched by maverick Cady Wells of his very best friend, modernist Rebecca James. Well known for his expressionist paintings and his large collection of Northern New Mexican religious art, Wells subversively went all in on petit-point – an art form traditionally associated with “women’s work” and beloved by Ms. James.

Detail of 1953 petit-point stitchery “portrait” of Rebecca S. James by her friend, Cady Wells – his work in a traditional “feminine” genre of craft.
John K. Hillers’ 1879-1880 albumen portrait of Lahmana We’wha of Zuni Pueblo. Courtesy: Palace of the Governors Photo Archive.

This section also includes the stories of important two-spirit Native American artists – individuals who are born “male” but who take on spiritual and other tribal roles traditionally associated with women. The first is We’wha, a respected 19th-century expert in and advocate for Zuni arts and traditions– a favorite of Smithsonian anthropologists who demonstrated weaving in D.C. and even presented a special work directly to President Grover Cleveland as a wedding gift.

Another is R.C. Gorman’s portrait of Hosteen Klah, a Navajo two-spirit, one of the the Wheelwright Museum’s co-founders. Gorman, one of the best recognized and flamboyant 20th century contemporary Native artists, excelled in colorful mid-century works. Gorman made history in Taos by opening the first Native-owned gallery in the United States.

Navajo artist R.C. Gorman’s 1960 painting Night of the Yei – a celebration of Navajo spiritual traditions.

The final portion of the show includes two works by female rule-breakers. The first is a rare Agnes Martin 1954 abstract-expressionist work typical of her experimentation prior to her acclaimed grid series. It’s much more aligned to the biomorphic symbolism of early Pollack and Rothko – reflecting what was happening earlier in her New York career during the heyday of the Cedar Street Tavern crowd.

Agnes Martin’s untitled 1954 painting. Courtesy: University of New Mexico Art Museum.

Second ia a never-before-seen 1997 installation by feminist-art innovator Harmony Hammond, who was also represented in this year’s Whitney Biennial. Hammond, who curated one of Santa Fe’s first LGBTQ exhibitions back in 1999, used to travel backroads of the Southwest, finding abandoned towns and homesteads and collecting left behinds. In this show, she presents What Have You Done With Our Desire, a mixed-media piece using ancient kitchen linoleum – an allusion to circumstances leading to repression of gay women’s sexuality.

Harmony Hammond’s never-before-seen 1997 mixed-media installation What Have You Done with Our Desire. Courtesy: the artist.

For more about these and other artists, listen to curator Christian Waguespak’s talk about LGBTQ artists in the Southwest at the Harwood Museum in Taos.