Tag Archives: new mexico

Master Printmaker Gene Kloss Sees Taos

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Do you wish you could travel back to Taos in the Thirties and Forties to experience the quiet, small, out-of-the-way place that inspired so many artists? Take a walk through this two-site exhibition, Legacy in Line: The Art of Gene Kloss, on view through June 8, 2025 at the Harwood Museum of Art and through May 31 at the Couse-Sharp Historic Site just off the Taos Plaza.

Kloss, whose artistic style was honed in the 1920s and 1930s, is arguably one of New Mexico’s favorite artists.  Kloss specialized in printmaking, creating an immediately recognizable style – a landscape, village, or pueblo scene with dramatic contrasts (often at night). Look at some of our favorites in our Flickr album

Kloss 1934 aquatint and drypoint Eve of the Green Corn Ceremony –Domingo Pueblo, which received a gold medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Courtesy: Couse Sharp Historic Site

Kloss fell in love with plrintmaking as an undergraduate art student at UC-Berkeley. She was captivated by the printmaking revival that swept Paris and Britain in the mid-19th century. Artists owned their own presses and produced affordable prints of landscapes and small towns that encouraged everyone to collect art.

Kloss 1941 drypoint Church of the Storm Country. Courtesy: Taos Municipal Schools.

A lifelong resident of the Bay Area, she first came to Taos on a car-camping honeymoon in 1925 with her writer-composer husband. She fell in love with the landscape, the culture, and the pueblos of Northern New Mexico. Did I mention she brought along her 60-lb. portable printing press?

Kloss 1934 drypoint All Saints Day Mass – Taos. Courtesy: Taos Municipal Schools.

Kloss was prolific, and the next year showed over 100 of her paintings and prints – including Taos subjects – at a wildly successful solo show in Berkeley. She and her husband were hooked on the inspiration Taos provided, and soon rented a getaway home, where they would spend two to four months per year. 

Kloss 1934 drypoint Acoma. Courtesy: Taos Municipal Schools.

Kloss developed her images from quick sketches and from memory, bringing the drama as she precisely worked her impressions into the copper.

In the Thirties, Kloss did artwork under several New Deal programs and produced a nine-part series on New Mexico that was gifted to public schools in the state.

As a master of intaglio, drypoint, and aquatint, she developed an innovative technique in which she painted acid directly into the ground with a brush or pencil that allowed her to create super-deep tones, gradations, and atmospheres in her prints.

Few others could create scenes like hers – dramatic nighttime scenes at the pueblos, tiny pilgrims making their way at dusk among the mountains, or aerial views of old Spanish valleys.

Over her lifetime, Kloss would create over 18,000 signed prints, show in New York and Europe, and be honored with membership in the National Academy of Design. She always pulled her own prints in the studio, and kept on working through the Seventies, until the quality of commercial copper and ink that she had always used became unavailable.

Kloss 1950 drypoint and aquatint Desert Drama. Courtesy: Harwood Museum (Purcell gift)

The Couse-Sharp Historic Site (where the Taos Society of Artists was founded) and the Harwood Museum have mounted this fantastic show to honor a gift bestowed upon them by Joy and Frank Purcell, Taos residents and Kloss collectors that ultimately amassed over 130 of her works.

To see more of her work, watch this short New Mexico PBS documentary on Ms. Kloss with art historian David Witt, who talks about his friendship with her, her process, and unique interpretation of her Taos world:

Walking Into the Broken Boxes Podcast

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Did you ever want to walk into a podcast? The grand installation of Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue lets you experience large-scale work by some of the socially conscious artists that have been featured on Ginger Dunnill’s interview series. Enter, listen, and get inside the heads of 23 artists at the Albuquerque Museum through March 2, 2025.

The exhibition honors ten years of Broken Boxes conversations, which you can hear at various “listening spots” inside the exhibition. Ginger began her project as a way to encourage community among artists who were creating disruptive work that prompts viewers to imagine a different world.

Kate DeCiccio’s Blooming Abolition depicts formerly incarcerated community members who develop gardens. Created by local artists, Planting Justice, Hiroyo Kaneko, and Malaya Tuyay.

The show spills way beyond this main gallery into a theater showing artist videos, another space featuring a soundscape by Raven Chacon, and a courtyard reflecting artist-educator Kate DeCiccio’s vision for sustainable community gardens that give purpose and fulfillment to formerly incarcerated neighbors. 

Inside the main space, visitors wind through and around different installations, such as Marie Watt’s hanging jingle sculptures and her spectacular collaboration with Cannupa Hanska Luger. The jingle “clouds” take a traditional element of powwow and turn it into fine art that invites participation in the soundscape.

2023 dangling jingle sculptures Sky Dances Light: Revolution VII, VIII, and IX created by Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians). Courtesy: private collection

Across the way is an enormous canine created by Luger and Watt. As he’s done with other large-scale participatory projects, Luger sent out a call worldwide requesting people to embroider messages on bandanas and send them in. Visitors are fascinated by the Each Other collaboration, circling around the wolf to discover messages about rescue, shelter, and sustainability.

Guadalupe Maravilla’s installation draws inspiration from his own story and struggle. He assembled the piece from items picked up when he retraced his migration route from El Salvador to the United States when he was a child. But he made it to emit therapeutic vibrational sounds, similar to the sound therapy that brought him relief as an adult when he underwent therapies to cure his own cancer.

2020-2021 Each Other community bandana-sculpture created by Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Ankara, Lakota) and Marie Watt (Seneca Nation of Indians). Courtesy: the artists
Guadalupe Maravilla’s 2021 Disease Thrower #17 – a therapeutic sound installation using materials found when he retraced his El Salvador-US migration route. Courtesy: the artist

Work by Ethiopian refugee Tsedaye Makonnen includes a performance video and installation that focuses attention on African refugees who risk dangerous ocean crossings to escape violence in their home countries. The blue fabric represents the ocean, and each mirror a life lost.

Tsedaye Makonnen’s Astral Sea Views video with Astral Sea Series mirrored fabrics – commemorating women migrants who perished attempting dangerous European ocean crossings. Courtesy: the artist. 

See some of our other favorite installations here in our Flickr album – a shrine by Mario Yvarra, Jr. dedicated to his Chicana-activist mother –Music My Mom Played While Cleaning House – and works by Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc) that are straight from her recent show at the Whitney.

2023 mixed-media sculptures by Natalie Ball – ribbon skirt: There’s Indian and than there’s Indian; (rear) Baby Board. Courtesy: the artist.
Music My Mom Played While Cleaning the House…, a parade float by California artist Mario Ybarra, Jr. that honors his mother, a Chicana civil rights activist.

Listen to the Broken Boxes podcast to hear Ginger and international artists talk about making art, building community, and meeting the challenge of the moment.

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.

How O’Keeffe Saw Trees

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Whether she contemplated her surroundings among the greenery at Lake George or the multicolord rocks at Ghost Ranch, Georgia O’Keefe often started by sketching the trees around her.

in Rooted in Place, a special exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe through November 3, 2024, you are surrounded by Georgia’s watercolors, oils, and sketches interpreting (and abstracting) trees she encountered on her walks and international travels.

Take a look at our favorites in our Flickr album.

Georgia’s 1937 painting Gerald’s Tree I, a tree enjoyed by her friend, science historian Gerald Heard

The curators have selected works from the full span of Georgia’s life. The earliest are from her trips to Lake George, such as the glorious autumn maples surrounding the Stieglitz home.

The show’s curators leverage Georgia’s habit of collecting inspirational bits and pieces of nature from her Ghost Ranch walks, showing the twisted juniper she brought home alongside the dramatic oil painting in which it stars.

Piece of juniper that Georgia collected from the land surrounding her Ghost Ranch home.
Georgia’s 1940 painting Stump in Red Hills

The museum’s collaboration with the Santa Fe Botanical Garden adds scientific insights about the three cornerstone species of New Mexico wilderness that from which Ms. O’Keeffe drew inspiration – pinons and junipers next to the red rock, and wide, leafy cottonwoods along the river.

Georgia’s 1930 Cottonwoods Near Abiquiu showing the breeze catching the wide branches

A gorgeous photo by Ansel Adams shows Georgia nestled up against one of her favorites nearby in the desert. She loved the fruit trees she planted near her home garden, but she never painted them.

When Georgia was a young student at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905-1906, she studied with John Vanderpoel, well known for being a master educator in figure drawing. Looking at her drawing of a banyon tree from her trip to the Bahamas over thirty years later, it’s clear she employed those early lessons – bringing trees to life as living beings in her work ­– throughout her life.

Ansel Adams’1938 portrait of George O’Keeffe resting against a dramatic tree stump in northern New Mexico
Georgia’s 1934 figure-like drawing Banyon Tree created on her trip to Bermuda

Listen to the museum’s panel about Georgia’s approach to painting her favorite trees and the role they play in the ecosystem of northern New Mexico:

Past and Future of Santa Fe’s Indian Market

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There’s no better way to see the best of the best at the Santa Fe Indian Market than to visit the remarkable retrospective assembled at the New Mexico History Museum in their honorary centennial exhibition, Honoring Tradition and Innovation: 100 Years of Santa Fe’s Indian Market, 1922-2022, on view through August 31.

The curators have gathered loans from private collections, museums, individual artists, and big-name galleries to give visitors a decade-by-decade chronicle of the people, families, maker innovations, and contemporary-art trends that converged to showcase works from one the most exciting confluences of creativity in the United States.

Santa Clara artist Nancy Youngblood’s 2018 polished pottery jar (best of pottery category award), granddaughter of Margaret Tafoya. Courtesy: private collection.

The items in the show – traditional pots, dazzling Navajo weavings, whimsical figurines, elaborately embroidered accessories and clothing, social-commentary photos and paintings – are so compelling that it takes two or three visits to actually focus on the thoughtful, illuminating text that accompanies each portion of the show.

Embellished 1890 buckskin Apache/Ute dress; behind, a 1925-1930 Navajo rug. Courtesy: Cowboys and Indians Antiques, Historic Toadlena Trading Post Museum.

The organizers have provided a revealing chronology of the politics, economics, and social context of each decade of the arts festival, noting changes in the people, processes, power, and patronage over time.

The first gallery brings you back to the earliest days of the market – a time when there were no Indian curators or judges (unlike today!) and when Native makers were not even allowed to sell their own work or interface directly with non-Native buyers. 

The wall mural harkens back to the days when Pueblo people sold their pots and creations to tourists along the railroad, which in the late 1890s and early 1900s brought curious travelers, East Coast dandies, and traveling showpeople out to the Western badlands.

David Rock’s mural with early Native-made collectibles – early 1900s pottery and 1920s drum.

Turn-of-the-century tom-toms, curios, and older pots are displayed near the rail-top mural; Navajo rugs and beaded moccasins from the period are arrayed across the way. It’s an arrangement that evokes what might be displayed in an old trading post, or at least in the early 1920s Santa Fe markets.

Many of these makers in New Mexico were still living on their ancestral lands, but across the United States, the majority of Indigenous populations had either been relocated to reservations or boarding schools.

The inter-generational mastery of New Mexico’s Pueblo artists is featured in several vitrines holding examples of black-on-black (and other) masterworks by the Martinez family at San Ildefonso (go, Maria!) and the Tafoyas of Santa Clara, with Margaret’s famous bear-paw imprints.

Work by famed San Ildefonso artist Maria Martinez: 1922 polychrome, large 1942 black pot (award-winner painted by Julian Martinez); and 1928 jar. Courtesy: MICA, SAR

The surrounding gallery features dazzling painted pottery works by Zuni and Acoma from the 1920s – all drawn from the School for Advanced Research (SAR) collection, which began in 1922 to preserve classic works, SAR is the source of the acclaimed exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum, Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery. Sometimes the artists who made the pot is known; but often the maker is lost to history.

1928 Acoma jar. Courtesy: SAR

In the 1930s and 1940s across the United States, tribal mortality rates increased and their other economic lifelines decreased. But these conditions in the Southwest made the Market an even more important source of family revenue. Throughout the 1940s, the Santa Fe Market boomed.

1920-1930 Navajo hand-spun wool rug with figures representing the fire dance. Courtesy: Historic Toadlena Trading Post Museum.

By the 1950s, Federal government instituted policies to encourage Indians to leave their land and move into cities. Unfortunately, Santa Fe Indian Market policies had the same depressing effect – the organizers reduced both the number of artists allowed to show and amount of prize money that could be won.

By 1959, the SF Indian Market was on life support, with a few private donors stepping in with funding just to let it survive.

But during the 1960s, changes were afoot. The Institute for American Indian Arts began in Santa Fe, where Lloyd Kiva New gave Native artists “permission” to throw off traditional conventions and make contemporary art. Across the United States, social-justice movements focused on indigenous people’s rights demanded policy changes to reverse the impact of oppression. By 1968, Congress had passed the Indian Civil Rights Act.

What did that mean for the Market? The majority of works on display in the museum gallery are from the post-1970s period, when the scope, range, voice, virtuosity, and experimentation reflected the times.

1974 pottery canteen with turquoise and silver by San Ildefonso artists Rose Gonzales and Tse Pe. Courtesy: private collection.

Here are some examples – the glorious, gleaming, turquoise-inlaied 1980s vessel by by Zia/Jemez/San Ildefonso artist Dora Tse Pe and the virtuoso painting on a jar by by Acoma artist Dorothy Toriio.

1980s pottery jar by Zia/Jemez/San Ildefonso artist Dora Tse Pe. Courtesy: private collection.
1990 pottery jar by Acoma artist Dorothy Toriio. Courtesy: King Galleries.

Or, consider the virtuoso silverwork and inlaid belt by Aleutian master Denise Wallace; edgy, theatrical 1990s Cochiti figurines by Virgil Ortiz; and a 1999 horsehair basket woven by Tohono O’odham artist Leona Antone. See more in our Flickr album.

Silver 1986 “Aleut Dancer Belt” by Aleut artist Denise Wallace with abalone, fossil ivory, and lapis; Best in Non-traditional Jewelry Award. Courtesy: private collection.

The show’s finale catapults the story of Indian Market into the future.  First, there’s a cluster of sculptural and video works by Virgil Ortiz, featuring his sci-fi, super-powered, time-traveling warriors from the future who travel back to 1680 to fortify the success of the Pueblo Revolt and save Pueblo culture.

“Kootz (Runner-twin brother of Tahu)” 2018 high-fire clay sculpture with “warning” LED lights by Cochiti artist Virgil Ortiz. – a character from his sci-fi 2180 ReVOltage Series. Courtesy: the artist
“Tahu (Blind Archer)” 2018 sculpture with LED lights by Cochiti artist Virgil Ortiz.. Courtesy: the artist

Second, there’s a photo wall of families and their young children, who create work to enter in to the children’s division. It leaves visitors with the strong feeling that not only will forward-looking artists keep innovating and creating, but that the kids will be all right.

Still of 2022 “Made in Native America” video by Cochiti artist Virgil Ortiz, featuring sci-fi costumes. Courtesy: the artist

Pedro Reyes Takes Direct Action in Santa Fe

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You first see a group of anonymous protestors – statues that appear to be taking it to the streets with placards and bullhorns. Elevated at different levels, they present a monument to non-violent protest – a fitting opening to Pedro Reyes: DIRECT ACTION, on view at SITE Santa Fe through May 1.

Reyes believes in participatory art projects that transform art-making into social action.

The Protesters, Reyes’ 2016-2017 monument to unified voices that bring about change from non-violent protest. Courtesy: the artist, private collectors.
Memento, 2022 – vases made from gun parts by Albuquerque and Santa Fe students. All for sale.

The products of his 2022 Memento are right behind you – an array of fun flowers popping out of tall vases. Look closer.

The airy containers are transformed guns from a New Mexico buyback program that incentivized people to exchange their guns for grocery or home-store gift cards. The vases, made by welding-class students from Albuquerque and Santa Fe, are all for sale, with proceeds going to fund activities by New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence.

Turning the corner into the next installation, you encounter a wall of videos and shovels in a similar transformation – Palas por Pistoles – that Reyes organized in a particularly violence-prone community in western Mexico.

Reyes’ Palas por Pistoles (2006-present) – shovels made from melted-down gun parts, which were used by schools and museums to plant trees.

Reyes asked people to donate guns to be melted down for an art project promoting environmental peace. He received 1,527 weapons, crushed them in a public-art event, and commissioned a foundry to make shovels. Schools and museums used the shovels to plant 1,527 trees.

Every turn in the gallery reveals a different type of installation and project – libraries for “the people,” sculptures referencing language systems, posters protesting nuclear arms, and musical instruments and contraptions created from weapons.

You can’t miss the artist’s large volcanic-rock hand with pencil – an emblem of Reyes’ Amendment project that held community meetings where rewrites to the Second Amendment were proposed and discussed. The idea is that with so much discussion on policies these days, it’s better to write down the “amendments to the Amendment” in pencil! A list of suggestions is prominently posted nearby.

2002 Amendment volcanic stone hand writes the Second Amendment in pencil to facilitate changes in wording as necessary. On wall, multiple drafts of the Second Amendment generated in a Tampa, Florida community project.
Reyes’ 2022 marble sculpture, Colloquium (Parafrasis) depicting the architecture of speech; in background, icons of solutions to social problems from The People’s United Nations (pUN) project – food insecurity, population, gun control, mass incarceration.

Visitors tend to linger in the Disarm gallery, closely examining the various automated musical instruments created from firearms. Every few minutes, one of the pieces awakens to pluck a string or tap out a slow sequence. It’s a bit startling, not knowing which of the seven is going to activate next.

Harpanet and Cañonófono in Disarm Mechanized, mechanized instruments made from recycled gun and rifle parts. Courtesy: Enrique Rojas.
Reyes’ 2012 Disarm (Violin) from destroyed weapons, played in SITE Santa Fe concerts in 2023. Courtesy: the artist.

Take a look at our Flickr album to see more of the exhibition and to hear the sounds made by the Disarm instruments.

SITE Santa Fe provides “activators” for Reyes’ Music Machine installation – an experience that demonstrates how one artist’s imagination can make you stop and think, even if it’s toward the end of a deep, contemplative show.  Reyes features iconic firearms from three European countries – Austrian Glocks, Swiss Carbines, and Italian Barettas – that have been transformed into classy music boxes. When activated, each plays a musical composition by a famous composer from that country.

Gallery educator Red Hart about to activate Reyes’ Machine Music – crank-operated music boxes made of Swiss Carbine rifles, Italian Barettas, and Austrian Glock pistols.

Hear the artist talk about each of these works in the SITE Santa Fe audio guide, and take time to ponder taking direct action as you visit this beautifully installed, socially relevant, and thought-provoking show.

No Nukes installation with series of 2022 hand-painted Zero Nukes posters in different languages, representing many countries. Courtesy: the artist.

Contemporary Artists Talk with Thomas Cole

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There’s a big conversation going on about epic landscapes, people’s impact upon the wilderness, and personal connections to nature. It involves four contemporary artists and American master Thomas Cole, mid-19th century landscape painter and visionary, through February 12 at the Albuquerque Museum.

Plus, visitors are able to step back in time to visit Cole’s studio, arranged much as it was at the moment of his untimely death at the age of 47 – an unfinished canvas, paint palettes, his paint box, plaster casts, and mementos of his wilderness walks and trips abroad.

1835-1845 paint box, palette, and tools in Cole’s studio. Courtesy: Greene County Historical Society’s Bronck Museum.

This section of the four-in-one exhibition is Thomas Cole’s Studio: Memory and Inspiration. The curators have also surrounded the studio recreation with a wide range of Cole’s studies and finished works, including his last completed commissioned work. Take a closer look in our Flickr album.

Unfinished Landscape with Clouds, paints, plaster casts, and furniture in Cole’s studio when he died in 1848. Courtesy: Thomas Cole National Historic Site.

Cole redefined American landscape painting in the 1830s and 1840s by merging the style of romantic European landscapes with the dramatic skies, vistas, and mountains of New York’s Adirondack wilderness. His work kick-started the Hudson River School of landscape painting, and by the time of his untimely death at age 47, he was America’s best known and best loved artist.

Cole’s 1848 Gothic Ruins at Sunset, an unfinished work from his studio. Private collection.
Cole’s 1846 Schroon Lake, showing a civilized landscape at the edge of mountain wilderness. Courtesy: Adirondack Experience

During his life (1801-1848), Cole witnessed how pristine American wilderness was changed by proliferating settlements, roads, bridges, mills, and commerce along the rivers. Sometimes he chose to paint sights, like Niagara Falls, minus human intrusion; other times he gently inserted “civilization” into magnificent landscapes, as in Schroon Lake.

Cole had been a mentor to innovative landscape painters like Durand, Church, Kensett, and Cropsey. When Cole passed away suddenly, they were devastated. His wife left his studio just as it was, and for the next ten years she welcomed painters to make the pilgrimage to visit it, spend time, and gain inspiration.

Visitors enter this exhibition and confront Cole’s large 1838 work, Dream of Arcadia, showing a mythical time when civilization existed in harmony with nature.  Can this ideal state truly exist?

Thomas Cole’s 1938 Dream of Arcadia. Courtesy: Denver Art Museum.

The Thomas Cole National Historic site, which organized three of the four shows, answers this question through the eyes of two well-known contemporary artists – Kiki Smith, who owned a house along a creek a short distance from where Cole lived, and Shi Guori, who created camera obscura images at Hudson Valley sites where Cole stood and painted.

Kiki Smith: From the Creek is an immersive exhibition populated by the birds, beasts, insects, and plants along Catskill Creek – an area that Cole walked and knew well.

Kiki Smith’s 2016 bronze Eagle in the Pines in gallery with 2012-2014 jacquard tapestries

Visitors look up, down, and around to see owls, eagles, wolves, and pheasant peering back at them from perches, tapestries, frames, and vitrines…observing and being observed. Take a look at here.

2019 bronze Coxsackie sculpture of owl at the exhibition entrance.
Detail of Kiki Smith’s 2012 Cathedral jacquard tapestry (published by Magnolia Editions).

Kiki’s work always brings an air of other-worldly mystery. Here, it’s easy to enjoy all of her varied creations, which display her deep connection to nature and ask us to contemplate the cycles of life that busy people sometimes forget to notice. Cole’s paintings had the same impact.

Shi Guori’s Katerskill Falls, New York, July 26-28, 2019 – a 72-hour exposure made where Thomas Cole sketched in 1824. Courtesy: private collection.

Shi Guori: Ab/Sense – Pre/Sense presents monumental camera obscura images of landscapes Cole painted in the Hudson Valley 180 years ago. When he was growing up in China, Guori experienced the shock of rapid environmental disruption as Mao’s Cultural Revolution transformed the countryside.

Guori studied Cole’s documentation of similar 19th-century transformation in the Northeast, and traveled back to sites that Cole documented to bear witness to natural settings – somewhat still undisturbed – that resonated with Cole.

Guori built large camera-obscura tents, sat inside for up to 72 hours, and exposed light-sensitive paper to create his images. Images of Cole’s oil paintings at the same site are mounted nearby with Guori’s meditations on the experience.

Shi Guori’s camera obscura image The Clove, Catskill Mountains, New York, April 25, 2019. Courtesy: the artist
Basis for camera obscura work by Shi Guori: Thomas Cole’s 1827 oil The Clove. Image: Connecticut’s New Britain Museum of American Art.

In one case, Guori turned Cole’s own sitting room into a camera, capturing not only furniture that he would have used, but showing the image of nature that Cole surely would have spent hours gazing upon. View more of Guori’s work here.

Shi Guori’s camera obscura image View of the Catskill Mountains from Thomas Cole’s House, August 12, 2019 – which turned Cole’s sitting room into a camera. Courtesy: the artist

The fourth exhibition, Nicola López and Paula Wilson: Becoming Land, present large-scale environmental meditations on Southwestern desert landscapes. The Albuquerque curators selected these two popular New Mexico artists to get a bit of cross-cultural discussion going with Mr. Cole.

Glimpse some of the work in their gallery here.

Wilson, who works in Carrizozo, creates gigantic, mixed-media installations that prompt viewers to consider the interconnection among different people, desert landscapes, agricultural technologies, and even the debris left by civilization.

Paula Wilson’s 2021 monumental printed and painted installation, Yucca Rising. From the artist.

López, who works and teaches in New York, presents a large-scale cyanotype. Unlike Guori, who traveled to the Catskills to create his ghostly images with light, López was unable to travel during the pandemic and made this monumental work at home with the materials around her – a driveway, nearby desert plants, and the blazing New Mexico sun.

Detail of 2021 NeverWild cyanotype by Nicola López – ghostly images of New Mexico plants dwarfing mysterious architectural structures in the desert.

Congratulations to the Albuquerque Museum for inviting Thomas Cole’s team to collaborate in mounting such a beautiful, thought-provoking show.

Wit, Humor & Satire in Albuquerque

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If you want to have a good laugh or contemplate a biting piece of social satire, head over to Wit, Humor & Satire at the Albuquerque Museum, on view through January 29.

Pulled from the museum’s permanent collection, themed sections of the show present artists’ side-glance takes on Western mythology, art jokes, image puns, and politics.

Right in the entry, you see the huge wall of Warhol Mao Tse-Tungs in blazing Pop Art colors, alongside Thomas J. Lane’s satirical ceramics – Bart Simpson impersonating Jesus and Homer as Buddha. Irreverant satire mixed with social commentary in impeccable execution.

Art history “jokes” and political portraits: Thomas J. Lane’s satirical Simpson ceramics with Warhol’s monumental 1972 Mao Tse Tung silkscreens.

There’s a dark 18th-century Goya etching in the first gallery and a funny Sloan print skewering 1920s tourists, but most of the offerings are more recent vintage, particularly whimsical sculptures and social commentary of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. 

Comments on Commodification: John Sloane’s 1927 Indian Detour etching, a satire showing hoards of souvenir-buying tourists descending upon Indian pueblos on their Fred Harvey packaged excursions.

It’s nice to encounter clever Sixties and Seventies Warhol, Rauchenberg, and Red Grooms prints in other humorous sections of the show, and to revisit Southwestern superstars like the T.C. Canon and Scholder, who like challenging stereotypes of what people think of Western people and cultures.

Political commentary: Red Grooms’ 1976 silkscreen Bicentennial Bandwagon,”which references America’s troubled past versus all-out patriotic celebration of American history.

Most of the anti-War and social commentary are in the back half of the gallery, with strong pieces by Bob Haozous, John L. Doyle, and Sue Coe. Diego Romero lays it out with a lithograph that resembles his normal medium of politics-on-a-plate.

War: 1990 steel-plated sculpture El Piloto by Bob Haozous, depicting a skeleton pilot whose nose is a plane with a bomb trailing.
Political commentary: Diego Romero’s 2011 Apocalypto lithograph.

Another stand-out is the first poster ever designed by Keith Haring – a combination of images that came to define subterranean visual protest in the dark, scary times of 1980s New York. He debuted it for an anti-nuclear rally in Central Park, but his unforgettable images and icons soon became ubiquitous on City streets and subways, on T-shirts, and downtown art galleries.

Indigenous humor and commentary are well represented by Jason Garcia’s water-carrying pueblo gals in a contemporary landscape and Wendy Red Star’s Native seasons studio-portraiture spoof.

War commentary: Keith Haring’s first poster – his 1982 Anti-Nuclear Weapons Poster, featuring his iconic “radiant baby”.
Western mythologies: Subversive autumnal studio self-portrait from Wendy Red Star’s 2006 digital print series Four Seasons, which highlights artificial elements.

Too bad that no one knows who made the 1960s traditional Zuni pop-culture Disney necklace. But it’s fun to contemplate the Nike-sneaker sculpture/neckpiece by Sean Paul Gallegos.

Exploring wit: 1960s silver Zuni necklace by unknown artist featuring Disney characters inlaid with shell, coral, turquoise, and jet.
Commodification commentary: 2015 satiric “high fashion” neckpiece by Sean Paul Gallegos, created from recycled Nike sneakers and gold thread.

There’s a lot to think about and enjoy in this provocative show. Visit our Flickr album to enjoy more of our favorite works.