One thing Georgia O’Keeffe fans enjoy about her work are the beautiful New Mexico landscapes – wide open vistas, close-ups of eroding cliffs, colorful and moody skies, all devoid of people. Looking out from her big picture window in her studio at Abiquiu, she sometimes said she felt the landscape was “hers.” But Tewa artist Jason Garcia (Okuu Pín) has long wondered – didn’t she forget something? Did she forget that her neighbors – Indigenous people from the half-dozen Tewa pueblos – still live there and have lived there from time immemorial?
Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum invited Garcia to co-curate an exhibition to answer that question.
2025 Welcome to Tewa Country by Jason Garcia/Okuu Pín (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo) made with traditional ceramic techniques and natural paint – a comment on deep ancestral roots with Northern New Mexico land – not a 20th century “discovery” by a New York painter. Courtesy: the artist.
The result is a loving, provocative, look at the land, legacy, and people in one of the largest special exhibitions ever mounted by the GOK Museum – Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country, on view through November 1, 2026.
2025 Tewa Country map showing the four sacred mountains, modern pueblos, and ancestral pueblos; created by the exhibition collaborators and museum graphic designer Kristian Breeze.
Take a look through some of the beautiful, throught-provoking, and spiritual work in our Flickr album.
Here’s a map to Tewa Country, home to just one group of Pueblo people who share the Tewa language, culture, and spiritual practices and symbols. Note that one of the four sacred Tewa mountains (indicating north, south, east, and west geographic markers for Tewa communities) is the single peak that Georgia painted over and over. She and others called it Cerro Pedernal; Tewa people call the sacred mountain Tsi’ Pin.
Stepping inside the expansive show, visitors are surrounded by spectacular O’Keeffe paintings, punctuated by contemporary works by twelve artists from six Tewa pueblos whose ancestors inhabited the Four Corners for millennia and migrated centuries ago toward the Rio Grande to build communities near Abiquiu, the historic village that Georgia called home.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1962-1963 painting Above the Clouds I surrounded by stone, ceramic, and earth pigment works by contemporary Tewa artists – Arlo Nahaminga (Ohkay Owingeh, Hopi), Eliza Naranjo Morse (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara Pueblo), Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo), and Martha Romero (Nambé Pueblo).
The bright space is filled with landscapes, contemporary installations, and sculptures – most utilizing clay from the very earth that both Georgia and contemporary artists trod and respected.
The museum inviteed the Tewa artists to look through Georgia’s collections and tour her Abiquiu home, and left them to create works for the show. Santa Clara’s John Garcia Sr. honors Georgia’s love of the land and sky. Randolph Silva read in Georgia’s letters her love of attending dances at the nearby pueblos, and it made him think about his own family’s travels across the Southwest performing dances at tourist locations. He discovered tourist postcards featuring his own family and decided to paint huge “postcard” paintings of dances that Georgia might have seen in the 1930s.
2025 mixed-media on board Nana’eaa Dance in Abiquiu Plaza by Randolph Silva (Kha’p’o Owingeh / Santa Clara Pueblo) – one of a postcard-style series of six Tewa Pueblo dances that O’Keeffe would have witnessed in the 1930. Courtesy: the artist.
Two 2025 acrylic paintings by John Garcia Sr. (Kha’p’o Owingeh / Santa Clara Pueblo): One Last Door and The Sentinels Have Always Been Watching, referencing the deity Morning Star, Tsi Pin (Pedernal), and other mountains. Courtesy: the artist.
After touring Georgia’s home, Tesuque’s Marita Swazo Hinds took a more personal approach, creating pieces that wonder about Georgia’s contemplative daily routines and creative processes.
2025 ceramic installation Did Georgia Pray? by Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo), reflecting on the extent Georgia honored the land in her creative process as Puebloans do; pot shards, red clay pot with cornmeal, broken pieces, and Ghost Ranch rocks and earth. Courtesy: the artist.Georgia O’Keeffe’s white porcelain Urbino Teapot with 2025 Let’s Have Tea, Tea Time with Georgia by Marita Swazo Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo) – a tea set made of hand-gathered clay, and teas that the artist imagines Georgia would enjoy. Courtesy: the artist.
Several Tewa pueblos are on the Parajito Plateau, where the US government appropriated land in the 20th century to build top-secret nuclear warheads in the Manhattan Project. Michael Nahaminga’s powerful work and several others reference the threats that began when Georgia lived there in the 1940s and the legacy of environmental contamination that persists today.
2025 Disaster #8 by Michael Namingha (Ohkay Owingeh, Hopi) – an image of a pyrocumulus cloud that results from an intense fire, volcanic eruption, or nuclear explosion; silkscreened and enamel on canvas using the high-alarm color from the Air Quality Index. Courtesy: the artist.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1945 oil painting Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow – a replacement of her favorite blue sky with a sky color associated with the Trinity Site nuclear test. Courtesy: private collection.
Meet the artists and hear them talk about their participation in this remarkable collaboration with the GOK Museum:
Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1940 oil painting Untitled (Red and Yellow Cliffs).
It’s 1680 and the Revolt has begun. Heavily armored Spanish forces guide their horses and armored attack dogs through a maze of Southwestern mesas in driving rain and a blinding storm to thwart the unexpected uprising of the Pueblo nations. The leader of the Revolt, Po’pay invokes the spirits and calls up his warriors and archers to meet the challenge of the assault. In the epic, 9-minute video installation Blindfall, there’s another twist – Pueblo warriors and starship pilots from the 2180 future use their superpowers to ensure a win.
The exiting epic is part of the exhibition Continuum: Blindfall, First Strike on the second floor of Vladem Contemporary in Santa Fe through October 18, 2026. See the highlights in our Flickr album
The Revolt is planned: Blindfall installation features 2024 glazed raku sculpture Sika, Than (Sun) by Virgil Ortiz with cinematic depiction of 1680 Revolt leader Po’pay. Courtesy: the artist.
Acclaimed ceramic artist Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo), who has developed this time-travel Pueblo superhero history/sci-fi adventure over the last twenty years, partnered with artist Eric F. Garcia to bring the Spanish story to life and provide visitors with a glimpse into the deep histories and belief systems of the clashing cultures.
The three-part exhibition space initially feels like a contemplation of traditional and contemporary ceramic artistry, but unfolds. Through the doors, it’s a fast-paced, other worldly presentation on the process of creating 19 tribes of superheroes (representing the 19 current Pueblos of New Mexico) and surrounding sculptures. Turn the corner, and you experience a no-holds-barred immersion into an action-packed past/future futuristic cinema experience.
Ortiz calls this exhibition a “three-dimensional storyboard” for the full-length epic he plans to make. The first section begins with a small case with traditional and contemporary Cochiti pottery. Ortiz showcases the ancient practices that he’s mastered in his contemporary work – and believes will be continued by future generations of Cochiti artists.
Mother and son Cochiti Pueblo ceramic legacy: 1985 owl figure by Serafina Ortiz and 2026 Blind Strike by Virgil Ortiz; both created in Cochiti red clay with black wild spinach plant paint. Courtesy: the artist.
Two enormous ceramic raku-fired heads dominate the main hall of the gallery. Both depict warriors from the future – Po’pay, the brave leader of the Revolt, and the leader of his female archer corps, Tahu the Blind Archer (“you are not blind if you can see through your fear”). Ortiz created these at the Cuernavaca studio of Juan de Dios Sánchez – an experience with a large-scale ceramic master that Ortiz says felt “like working with Prince and Madonna.”
Pueblo leader: 2026 glazed raku ceramic scultpure Po’pay 2180: Leader of the Pueblo Revolt by Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo). Courtesy: the artist.
Pueblo warrior: 2025 glazed raku scultpure Storm Sentinel: Tahu, Leader of the Blind Archers by Virgil Ortiz – the leader of a female warrior corps guided by instinct to move through the chaos of the strike. Courtesy: the artist.
These are flanked by his work with Garcia and his other ceramics collaborator, Tommy Lomeli. Garcia contributes two busts of the controversial La Malinche, the Indigenous Nahua woman who translated at Cortez’s side as he negotiated with neighboring city-states to vanquish Montezuma in 1520 and bore him a son. There’s no better symbol of New World cultural collision and legacy.
Eric F. Garcia’s 2026 Doña – a portrait of La Malinche, who symbolizes shifting identity, language, and empire. Courtesy: the artist.
Eric F. Garcia’s 2026 Shadow Guide – a portrait of La Malinche, the Nahua woman who served as intermediary for Cortez in his 1520 conquest. Courtesy: the artist.
Lomeli’s collaboration bedazzles Virgil’s ceramic busts of his twin aeronaut pilots with gorgeous layers of automotive paint, giving the 2180 characters some low-rider flash.
2180 pilots: Sculpture collaboration by Virgil Ortiz and Tommy Lomeli: 2026 Dya, Aeronaut and Muus, Aeronaut – twin pilots of the Survorship Armada, who steer the fleet through the deluge surrounding the Revolt, saving people, culture, and language and taking it into the future. Courtesy: the artists.
The second exhibition space features mannequins of the warriors themselves, bedecked in custom fabric, leather, and fierce masks and headgear. Several are superhero Recon Watchmen from 2180, who are seen in the back video advancing through the forbidding Bisti Badlands, preparing for an attack on the unsuspecting Spaniards. There are also video clips of the artists at work creating clay, costumes, and large-scale sculpture, interspersed with stylish clips showing his transformation of friends into superheroes.
Protectors from 2180: Ortiz’s 2026 The Last Sovereigns video and time-traveling Recon Watchman wearing fashion as armor –Talon and Matriarch Mitz with a ceramic Cochiti mask. Courtesy: the artist.
The third dark gallery is where fury is unleashed on a wrap-around screen. At the sides, ominous black profiles of Po’pay and his Spanish opponent loom. Garcia contributes large stand-alone sculptures of a charging Spanish conquistador and his vicious war dogs. Ortiz counters with a Recon Watchman and a gentle Sika Cochiti creature, who protects children but turns deadly when unleashed in battle.
The clash begins: ceramic protector sculptures by Virgil Ortiz – 2024 Sika, Than (Sun) and 2023 Kuu’ame (South) Recon Watchman –in front of Blindfall action sequence featuring charging Spanish dogs of war. Courtesy: the artist.
Blindfall, First Strike is an unforgettable experience – an assault of images, past and future, colliding, changing, morphing into unknown beings, worlds, and forces – a message about the blind whirlwind of war and strength required to ensure that culture will endure.
Listen in as Ortiz explains his process, Cochiti tradition, and collaboration with his community of multicultural artists:
And thanks to Ortiz, Garcia, their team for the reminder of the legacies and promise that guides them going forward.
Legacy: 2026 mixed-media collaboration by Eric F. Garcia and Virgil Ortiz – Castilian Christ signifying colonial devotion and dominance, and Po’pay, Face Off showing Puebloan defiant resolution. Courtesy: the artists.
The scale and scope of the contemporary art on display is tremendous, but how often do art-seekers also get an opportunity to travel across ancient streets and landscapes, to meet real and fictional historic characters, contemplate fables and real-life stories, and see art of the past and present side by side?
It can take days to experience and fully absorb all of the history and potential futues presented in the films, paintings, sculptures, and installations in Once Within a Time: 12th SITE Santa Fe International, on view across 15 art spaces across Santa Fe through January 12, 2026.
Exhibition banner in the courtyard of Palace of the Governors (1610) (New Mexico History Museum) – gateway to SITE installations by Daisy Quezada Ureña (Santa Fe) and Charisse Perlina Weston. (Harlem, New York)
Besides the expansive white galleries and screening rooms of SITE’s museum in Santa Fe’s always-popping Railyard District, visitors can choose to contemplate giant abstract murals in a church-like auditorium, an innovative historical-object installation in a 400-year-old seat of power, or enter an old foundry to see an evocative installation by a Silk Road artist across farm fields adjacent to the Old Spanish Trail.
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme: appears like real life and sensual free-thinkers. 2025 mixed-media sculpture “18-1-4-5-7-21-14-4” by Patricia Ayres; copper work by Santiago de Paoli; Katja Sieb’s 2025 “perpetual novice” painting; and 2020 grid painting “Atlas” by Penny Siopis (South Africa).
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme: in touch with light (spiritual) – Agnes Pelton’s paintings (1930s), Maja Ruznic’s mural (2025), and the 1895 healing rod of itinerant Southwestern mystic Francis Schlatter. Courtesy: Phoeix Art Museum; New Mexico Museum of Art; Oakland Museum of California; Maja Ruznic and Karma Gallery; and New Mexico History Museum.
In every space and art encounter, visitors may reflect upon whether history is repeating itself and whether inspiration can be drawn from futures that artists imagined nearly a century ago. Each space is designed for visitors to look, read, encounter, and reflect.
In the old foundry at Tesuque: 2024 video As We Fade by Saodat Ismailova (Uzbeckistan), showing visitors to one of Central Asia’s most sacred sites (Throne of Solomon) along the ancient Silk Road; projected across 24 suspended silk screens. Courtesy: the artist and Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca.
The theme for the show – Once Within a Time – is inspired by Godfrey Reggio’s most recent film – a suggestive and wordless mix of innocence, nostalgic images, visual poetry, and the future facing the next generation. The film screens continuously inside SITE, with visitors caught up in Godfrey’s dream-like images, which highlighted in this mesmerizing movie trailer:
Like Godfrey’s film, each space and gallery presents a theme, story, historic character, and provocative contemporary art that pulls back in time, creates an unforgettable experience, and asks the viewer to go inward to contemplate the future.
Joanna Keane Lopez’s 2024 Batter my heart, three person’d God – adobe, a handmade bed, colcha embroidery showing a radiation cloud, and creosote bush, referencing her family’s experience of living downwind of the Trinity detonation.
Cochiti pueblo ceramicist Helen Cordero’s storyteller figures are paired with Pablita Velardi’s storyteller illustrations (both are inspired by grandfathers and fathers) and Simone Leigh’s epic stone and raffia goddesses.
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme: storytelling. Simone Leigh’s 2025 untiled stoneware and raffia sculpture. At rear, 2025 oil The Solemn and Dignified Burial Befitting My Beloved for All Seasons by Dominique Knowles. Courtesy: Matthew Marks Gallery; the artist and Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles.
Gallery theme: storytelling. Helen Cordero’s 1970 painted clay Storyteller – the creator of the Cochiti Pueblo sculptural tradition, inspired by her grandfather’s stories; championed by patron Alexander Girard. Courtesy: School for Advanced Research.
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme: language Marilou Schultz’s 2024 weaving Integrated Circuit Chip & AI Diné Weaving – a reference to the controvercial 1970s Fairchild Semiconductor chip plant on Navajo Nation staffed primarily with Diné women. Courtesy: private foundation.
The story of the legendary WWII heroes, the Navajo Code Talkers, is featured in a gallery alongside Marilou Schultz’s weavings of chip technology using traditional Diné methods with Fred Hammersly’s ground-breaking IBM computer drawings at the University of New Mexico in 1968-1970.
Fred was given an opportunity to create the first mainframe-generated art in the form of drawings programmed by traditional IBM punch-card technology and the Art1 program. SIITE not only displays a selection of the 400 computer drawings that he generated over the course of 18 months, but some of the punch cards he used, which are now archived at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
Sensual free-thinkers are represented by the story of Santa Fe gambling mogul Doña Tules (Maria Gertrudis Barceló) and her actual 1840s money chest, witty contemporary porcelain playing cards and magical paintings by Katja Seib (UK), and jaw-dropping drawings by Shanghai’s Zhang Yunyao.
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme: sensual free-thinkers. Two of three 2025 Connector drawings by Zhang Yunyao (Shanghai); pencil on stretched felt. Courtesy: the artist, Don Gallery.
Around the corner from Agnes Pelton’s transcendental paintings are Diego Medina’s landscapes reflecting the Piro-Mansa-Tiwa spiritual power inhabiting ancestral lands of Southern New Mexico and also installations about a different type of New Mexico light – the impact of the nuclear energy tests on people living downwind and the legacy of uranium mining across native lands.
SITE Santa Fe gallery theme:In touch with light (nuclear energy): Will Wilson’s 2025 series Hubris on the Land – aerial photography of abandoned 1940s uranium mines on Navajo Nation paired with his documentation of Land Art sites created by Holt, Smithson, Heiser, and Turrell in the 1960s-1970s. Courtesy: the artist
New Mexico’s natural world is paid tribute in stories and artwork by travelers and residents – watercolors of Pueblo spirits and wildlife by Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal) in the 1930s, Vladimir Nabokov’s sketches of butterfly wing cells (1940s-1950s), and Eliot Porter’s spectacular photos of Tesuque jays in the 1960s.
But these examples are just snippets of Once Within a Time – the entire show deserves multiple visits, and time to visit the other locations in the city, such as the hidden basement natural wonderland epic at the Museum of Internatonal Folk Art created by Taiwan ‘s Zhang Xu Zhan. It’s not only an immersive environment, but a film, animal-spirit sculptures, and selections from the MoIFA’s paper funerary object collection. Don’t miss the Day of the Dead altar, the 18th-century Pere Lachaise Cemetary tribute initially collected by Mr. Girard himself, and paper funerary fantasies made by the artist’s own family. Truly unforgettable.
Museum of International Folk Art: Zhang Xu Zhan’s 2020-2022 paper-animation video Compound Eyes of Tropical (Animal story series), with a Southeastern Asian deer-mouse outwitting a group of predatory crocodiles. Courtesy: the artist and Project Fulfill Art Space, Taiwan.
The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian fills the Klah Gallery (in the shape of a traditional hogan) with a meditation on healing by Cristina Flores Pescorán, a wild organic sculpture by Nora Naranjo Morse, and a mini-retrospective of paintings by the incomparable Emmi Whitehorse.
Wheelwright Klah Gallery theme: journeys. Nora Naranjo Morse’s sculpture Into the Forever; on walls, Cristina Flores Pescorán’s 2025 installation Treinta y ocho. Ofrendas para reescribir historia medica y renacer Huaca. Courtesy: the artists
The Tesuque location also features rooms with installations by Mexico’s Guillermo Galindo incorporating burned wood from the recent New Mexico fires (crossed with Picasso’s Guernica), David Horvitz’s tribute to the men incarcerated in Santa Fe’s Japanese internment camp (and a hat from one them), and Thailand’s Korakrit Arunanondchai’s room-sized contemplation that incorporates the ashes from the burning of Zozobra.
Video of Korakrit Arunanondchai’s 2025 installation Unity for Nostalgia, with floor incorporating ashes from Santa Fe’s Zozobra’s burning and a prayer to the phoenix; layered soundtrack. Courtesy: the artist, Bangkok City Gallery, London’s Carlos/Ishikawa, CLEARNING NY-LA, Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Video of Max Hooper Schneider’s 2025 Written in Sand (Finquita Garden) installation; spheres mysteriously travel sand channels. Courtesy: the artist; Maureen Paley, London, Hove; Francois Ghebaley, Los Angeles, New York.
For more, take a walk through the main exhibit and five other sites in and around Santa in our Flickr album to see work by legendary New Mexican artists, and travel back and forth to see how contemporary art reflects epic histories and mystic systems of the Southwest.
View of historic St. Francis Auditorium (1917) with Maja Ruznic’s 2025 Kisa Pada, Trava Raste, Gora Zeleni installed atop Donald Beauregad’s painting The Conversion of St. Francis; to right, Beauregard’s The Renunciation of Santa Clara.
Decending into the ground-floor gallery of the University of New Mexico Art Museum, visitors find themselves in a transcendental chamber, filled with abstraction, color, and spiritual emanations.
Pelton & Jonson: The Transcendent 1930s, on view in Albuquerque through March 15, features the work, letters, and personal photographs documenting the professional and personal friendship between two artists that wanted people to see realities beyond the visible world. Artists Raymond Jonson, former UNM professor, and Agnes Pelton, the visionary New York artist who relocated to the Western desert, felt they were kindred spirits, and the exhibition shows us why.
Agnes Pelton’s 1930 painting The Voice – suggesting enlightened dialogue within human consciousness.
As a young artist, Jonson was thunderstruck by the modern art he witnessed in the 1913 Armory Show when it came to Chicago (which included a painting by his future friend, Agnes Pelton from her “imaginative” period of work). Jonson read Kandinsky’s influential The Art of Spiritual Harmony when it was published in English in 1914, and increasingly pushed his work toward pure shape and design that could evoke a deeper response from the viewer.
By 1930, he and his wife moved to Santa Fe. He began teaching, curating shows, and continuing to pursue abstraction. When concepts were simply too much for a single canvas, he conceived a triptych.
Raymond Jonson’s 1930 tryptich – Time Cycle: Morning, Noon, and Night
Around 1931, new-age/Jungian composer, author, and painter Dane Rudhyar told Jonson about Pelton’s abstractions, and put them in touch. For the next 30 years, Jonson and Pelton corresponded about art making, materials, abstraction, and spiritual connections.
By this time, Pelton had had 14 solo exhibitions and been in 20 group shows. Her interest in spiritual practices kept growing, and the lure of the new-age communities in southern California beckoned her. During a 1932 yoga-retreat trip to Cathedral City, she decided to stay put and paint in the peaceful desert for the rest of her life
Pelton’s 1930 White Fire – showing light radiating from the inner self – from Jonson’s 1933 exhibition
Pelton’s 1932 Mount of Flame – symbolizing the beauty in the abstract – from Jonson’s 1933 exhibition.
In 1933, Jonson invited Pelton to participate in a Santa Fe exhibition alongside himself and Cady Wells. This current exhibition at UNM commemorates this convergence by reuniting some of the original works by Pelton, Wells, and Jonson. See some of the pieces in our Flickr album.
From the 1933 exhibition: Jonson’s 1933 charcoal drawing Ascending Circle
Jonson and his wife took a road trip to visit Pelton in 1935 – their one and only meeting. Although they were at a distance, the letters kept coming, and when Jonson and others in New Mexico organized the Transcendental Painting Group in 1938, she was invited to participate and serve as the grand dame/president.
In recent years, Agnes Pelton’s work has been resurgent due to the traveling exhibition organized in 2019 by the Phoenix Art Museum, which traveled to the Whitney in 2020. Read our review here.
To hear how this Albuquerque exhibition came together, listen in on Christian Waguespack’s interview with curator Mary Statzer:
UNM is lucky to have over 600 works by Raymond Jonson in its collection, and all the letters, sketches, publications, and journals he kept. For more on Raymond Jonson’s life and work, visit his portal on the UNM website.
Jonson touching up work at his solo exhibition in Tulsa in a 1937 photo by F. Von James.
1935-1940 photo of Pelton reading the TPG brochure in her Cathedral City studio with Mount of Flame behind her.
Ascending the ramp inside the Guggenheim Museum to enjoy Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910-1930, European optimism and color abound. The exhibition, on view through March 9, 2025, showcases the exuberance and innovation of artists living in early 20th century Paris, who felt exhilarated by the profusion of modern forms of music, dance, and architecture and used abstraction and prismatic color to translated their enthusiasm.
Avant-garde power couple Robert and Sonia Delaunay broke from analytic cubism’s monochromatic approach and injected pulsing color into the art-scene conversation in Paris.
Robert Delaunay’s 1911-1912 Red Eiffel Tower – modern architecture and cubism with a twist of color.
Inspired by 19th century color theory (wheels demonstrating complimentary and dissonant colors), they painted swirling orbs pulsing with harmonies and contrasts to show optimism about the future.
Modern buildings like the Eiffel Tower, electrification of city streets, and the syncopation in dance-hall music created a pre-war energy in Paris that motivated these “orphists.” Everything seemed to be happening simultaneously. Harmonious and dissonant colors and whirling shapes on large canvases seemed a good way to represent it, as shown in the Guggenheim’s fun musical promo:
The style was named “orphism” by none other than Apollinaire himself. Robert Delaunay’s works in the exhibition include some of his early experimentation with abstract oval “windows,” his abstract riffs on the cosmos, and canvases still showing a hint of the real world. All convey the simultaneous push-pull of Paris, modern life, and larger scientific forces.
Robert Delaunay’s 1913 Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon. Courtesy: MoMA
Robert Delaunay’s 1913 The Cardiff Team, with Eiffel’s tower, aerial achievements, and sports dynamics. Courtesy: Van Abbemuseum, The Netherlands.
Many of Sonia’s orphist paintings are featured, including a gigantic horizontal color work inspired by the dynamic movement of tango dancers at a popular Parisian club. No doubt the massive 2024 Bard Graduate Center Gallery show about her forays into fashion and other creative fields (Sonia Delaunay: Living Art) influenced the Guggenheim curators to include her painted toy box and her celebrated super-tall accordion-book painting representing her collaboration with poet Blaise Cendrars.
Sonia Delaunay’s 1913 oil Bal Bullier inspired by dynamism of tango dancers at the popular Parisian club. Courtesy: Centre Pompidou
Innovations by the Delaunays are placed alongside other artists’ works that reflect the artistic breakthroughs of the early Twentieth Century – Kandinsky’s abstraction, the Blue Rider group’s symbolic use of color, and the synergies that artists felt between abstraction and music. In 1912, Leopold Survage intended to create the first fully abstract film, but the project was halted by World War I. Fortunately, we can envision his plan from his series of dynamic color drawings.
Colored Rhythms series of twelve 1912 ink drawings created by Léopold Survage for the first abstract film. Courtesy: La Cinémathèque Française
The music that inspired the Orphism is referenced throughout the exhibition – the improvisation and free structure of jazz, the dissonance of cutting-edge experimental music, and the staccato of the latest Parisian dance-hall craze – Argentine tango. The curators have even provided musical tracks to underscore this influence.
The Italian futurists Balla and Severini are also featured. Speed, modernity, and simultaneous city sensations were their bread and butter, too, even though they argued in the press and art journals that Futurism and Orphism were totallydifferent.
Italian futurist Giacomo Balla’s 1914 Mercury Passing before the Sun, an allusion to recent cosmic events. Milan’s Museo del Novocento.
Gino Severini’s 1915 Dancer–Propeller–Sea. Courtesy: The Metropolitan Museum
In pre-war Paris, American modernist painters Marsden Hartley, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and Morgan Russell picked up on Orphism, although the latter two rebranded their work Synchronism when they wrote their manifesto.
Marsden Hartley’s 1914 Abstraction Courtesy: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Even after the War, the Delaunays continued to represent orphism even if they occasionally incorporated real-world elements. Early orphism adopter Albert Gleizes also continued in this style throughout his career, and inspired students like Mairnie Jelett to explore color theory and its potential.
Albert Gleizes’s 1942 Painting for Contemplation, Dominant Rose and Green.
Irish artist Mairnie Jellett’s 1938 Painting. Courtesy: National Museum, NI, Ulster.
Take a look at our favorite works in our Flickr album here, and enjoy a syncpated strut through the colorful side of Modernism in this catalog preview:
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 Boxespodcast to hear Ginger and international artists talk about making art, building community, and meeting the challenge of the moment.
Take an epic tour through ancient Egyption iconography through the eyes of African-American artists and thinkers in Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876 – Now, on view at the Metropolitan Museum through February 17. It’s quite a ride with African-American artists and writers through decades of deep history.
The wonders never cease, from Cleopatra’s “throne” welcoming you into the galleries to Simone Leigh’s giant queen Sharifa, Henry Taylor’s vision of Michelle Obama as (maybe?) Queen Hapshetsut, epistles of the Harlem Renaissance, Afro-futurist super-heroines, and a neon Nefertiti taking her bow.
1930 bronze and silver Bride of the Nile (Arous El Nil), Bust by Egyptian sculptor Mahmoud Moktar. In the Heritage Studies gallery. Courtesy: HAR Collection.
The Met, home to the largest Egyptian art collection in the Western Hemisphere (followed by Brooklyn!), decided to create a contemporary counterpoint to its heralded wing and showcase all the ways African-American artists have looked to ancient histories of the Nile, contemplated their relationships to Egypt, and integrated Egyptian spirituality into the current narrative.
Henry O. Tanner’s 1923 painting Flight into Egypt, based on sketches made during his travels in Egypt.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting Kings of Egypt II. In the Kings and Queens gallery. Courtesy: Rotterdam’s Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen.
Over 200 paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations are presented in this massive show, which also includes performances produced by Met Live Arts. See some of our favorite works in our Flickr album.
1993 Grey Area (Brown Version) by Fred Wilson – busts of Nefertiti painted in varied skin shades, reflecting the unresolved opinions on the racial makeup of the ancient Egyptians. From the Kings and Queens gallery. Courtesy: Brooklyn Museum
Watch this video walk-through with the curator, who’s accompanied by two artist in the show – Fred Wilson, whose “Grey Area (Brown Version)” sculpture inspired the curator’s theme, and acclaimed abstractionist Julie Mehretu, who herself was born in Ethiopia and experienced the monuments of Egypt at a very young age:
There’s also a gallery devoted to contemporary work by Egyptian artists –a body of work that’s often overlooked in Western art museums. Here’s a closer look at how an Egyptian artist – who’s also a security guard at the Met – was invited by the curator to participate in this exhibition:
For learn more, here’s a link to the Met’s exhibition guide, and a curated playlist for the show. Take an exciting journey through these visual and musical revelations!
Renee Cox’s 1998 digital print (printed 2024) Rajé to the Rescue, featuring an Afrofuturist super-heroine. In the Space is the Place gallery. Courtesy: the artist.
In the early 1980s, socially minded artists living downtown in New York couldn’t handle the news coming out of Central America and did something about it. The United States government was intervening in the affairs of Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and everyone was worried that the situation was going to devolve into another Vietnam.
1981 pamphlet Mujer Revolución by Association of Nicaraguan Women. Private collection
1983 Print of Contra (after a drawing in Rock Comics, 1979) by Jerry Kearns, depicting communist fears stoked by the US government
In 1982, a group of New York artists collaborated with Latin American artists to create a show with contemporary art and cultural artifacts to draw attention to the escalating crises in Latin America. By 1984, organizers launched a national call to artists to raise money and awareness of what was happening.
Artists responded with performances, music concerts, films, poetry readings, and exhibition. In New York alone, over 1,100 artists participated in over 30 exhibitions.
Nationally, artists in 27 cities organized chapters and events and tried to build alliances in Latin America.
Videos, photographs, sculptures, paintings, and ephermera pulled from archives (like posters, buttons, mail art, and pamphlets) bring the story of artist-activists to life – their concerns about US government intervention, their efforts to organize artists across the United States, and their attempts to help artists living in oppressed Central American countries.
The Tufts University-organized show resurrects a largely forgotten story of artist activism, illuminates the tribulations of indigenous communities in Central America at the time, introduces us to contemporary works from artists inspired by their indigenous heritage, and gives us an idea of what’s happening in those countries now.
Two contributions to Solidarity Art by Mail project, a fast, cheap solution to boost Latin American and Caribbean participation in a 1984 New York exhibit at Judson Memorial Church. Private collection.
The three-floor show is packed with arresting images, works, and histories. The art work and documentation push and pull visitors between the international political crises of the 1980s and social-justice issues being addressed by artists today.
The installation features work by heavy hitters of the 1980s New York art scene – wall-size Vietnam-era work by Leon Golub, images documenting Ana Mendieta’s performance pieces, and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s sketches, maquettes, and exploding-banana image that branded the Artists Call Against US Intervention initiative.
The first-floor exhibition area includes Nancy Spero’s dramatic scroll-like drawing that calls attention to the oppression of Salvadorean women.
1984 Arts Magazine cover with Oldenburg’s image promoting Artists Call. Private collection
Downstairs, there’s another 1984 work that similarly unfurls the length of the gallery – an accordian-book project led by Sabra Moore that is a collaborative reconstruction of a rare 16th-century Mayan codex by 22 women. It’s the first time the codex has been displayed since 1984.
1984 “Reconstructed Codex,” a project organized by Sabra Moore with contributions from 22 diverse female Latin American and US artists. Courtesy: Barnard
The third floor packs a punch, installing revolutionary images and publications around the infamous (and censored) Hans Haacke piece that questions the aftermath of the 1983 US invasion of Grenada. Across the room, visitors pour over Carlos Motta’s 2005 wall-sized chalkboard installationBrief History of US Interventions in Latin America since 1946.
Although the 1980 artist-activists did not achieve all of their utopian goals, the contemporary selections show that social consciousness, pride in indigenous heritage, and artistic futures are still alive – including a beautiful feathered immigrant history dome by Batriz Cortez, stitched by a team of immigrant collaborators.
2021 sculpture 1984: Space-Time Capsule by Salvadorian artist Batriz Cortez and immigrant collaborators – a shelter for immigrant histories.
Learn more about how the curator Erina Duganne and her collaborator Abigail Satinsky created this remarkable show:
Art for the Future will be on display at Chicago’s DePaul Art Museum from March to August 2023.
Carlos Motta’s 2005 detailed chalkboard installation Brief History of US Interventions in Latin America since 1946. Courtesy: the artist
One of the most photographed artists of the 20th century, everyone is used to seeing Georgia O’Keeffe in her “formal” pose and gear – angular black hat, stark wrap dress, punctuated by her modernist Calder pin, standing against the New Mexico sky peering solemnly into the future.
2021 print of Varon’s 1977 photo of Georgia relaxing at Ghost Ranch. Courtesy: the artist
Georgia’s 1946 Part of the Cliff, a painting inspired by the view through her studio window.
The show features a smiling, at-ease 89-year-old surrounded by family, friends, companions, and pets – images quite apart from the GOK that we all admire and revere. How did this happen?
In the 1960s in New York, photographer Malcolm Varon established quite a reputation for documenting painters’ works in a way that captured a lot of their spirit. No wonder that in the mid-1970s, he was summoned out to Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu to document some of Georgia’s huge body of work.
While he was working with the artist during the summer of 1977, a journalist arrived to interview the icon for a feature in ARTnews.
No photographer had been attached to the story, so Georgia came up with hew own solution – ask her colleague Malcolm to shoot her in the setting of her Ghost Ranch home.
Since Malcolm was already familiar with the operations around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, he ended up taking about 300 photos of her homes, the landscapes that inspired her, and the people who kept things humming.
2021 prints of Varon’s 1977 portraits of Ida Archuleta, Candelaria Lopez, and Estiben Suazo, the people who managed Georgia’s homes and properties. Courtesy: the artist.
Despite Georgia’s reputation as a loner living out in the middle of nowhere, Malcolm appreciated that the day-to-day operations in the outback were quite fun, busy, natural, and happy at her two studio compounds.
ARTnews made a few selections from Varon’s photographs and ran them in the feature, but the majority of the 300 shots were never printed or seen…until now.
Visitors at the GOK museum pour over every detail of the portraits and landscapes, enjoying a new, different glimpse of the artist and her world – Varon’s portrait of Georgia’s sister, beautiful portraits of her property caretakers (whose families still take care of the GOK home for the museum), and her assistant Juan Hamilton.
The curators present several paintings from the 1940s showing the same cliffs, landscapes, and skies that Varon captured in the summer of 1977. Visitors have fun shifting back and forth between the oil paintngs and photos.
2021 print of Varon’s 1977 photograph of the tall ladder at Georgia’s Abiquiu home – a platform from which she surveyed the world. Courtesy: the artist
2021 print of Varon’s 1977 fun photograph of Georgia at Ghost Ranch with her friend and assistant, artist Juan Hamilton with the Pedernal as backdrop. Courtesy: the artist
Take a look at some of our favorites in our Flickr album.
Listen in as the curators of this delightful show draw back the curtain on the legendary O’Keeffe, her relationship with photography, and what happened when a trusted friend got her to smile for the camera:
As a young woman, Carla met and got to appreciate Mexico’s indigenous communities as she traveled with her father, a renowned anthropologist. She loved collecting hand-made indigenous garments reflecting the distinct local styles she saw.
As a student of art history and fashion design, the complex indigenous textile techniques in these out-of-the way communities seemed to stand in contrast to the ever-changing, always-disposable cycle of Western fashion.
Carla Fernández 2014 jacket collaboration with Juanez Lopez Santis (San Juan Chamula, Chiapas) over digital-printed silk top and leggings.
2003 wool poncho – a Carla Fernández collaboration San Juan Chamula (Chiapas) artisans – over a 2009 pantsuit. From the collection of photographer/model Luisa Sáenz
Why not use these indigenous “haute couture” techniques for a high-fashion collection? Why not create a mix-and-match aesthetic using traditional, geometric shapes? Why not credit the artists?
As presented in her first-ever museum retrospective, the results are dramatic, detailed, intriguing, and one-of-a-kind – a completely different kind of fashion system that incorporates indigenous work, pays and credits community makers, and gives artisans the time to create pieces that collectors cherish.
Carla travels to mountain and desert communities to collaborate with textile artists.
With her fame growing, communities now invite her to drive over, see what they’re doing and brainstorm about potential collaborations. It’s an approach that involves time, dialogue, and mutual respect between the artisans and Carla-as-fashion-facilitator.
In her mobile studio (Taller Flora), they create hand-woven, dyed, and painted works of wearable art that Carla brings to the runway, but always with an eye toward collectors who value innovative, indigenous craft traditions.
The exhibition features runway looks, accessories, and videos of performance art that showcase different facets of her fashion manifesto – that artisan-made is the true “luxury” in a “fast fashion,” throw-away world.
2021 hand-painted coverall and digital-printed jumper and coat with Leonardo Linares (Mexico City); embroidered jumper with Antonia Vasquez (San Pedro Chenalhó, Chiapas).
Fiesta masks, leather caballero fretwork, whimsical basket-purses, and fuzzy handmade pom-poms provide home-grown Mexican flair to the cinched, draped, easy ensembles.
Take a look through our Flickr album, and enjoy this video of the installation at Denver Art Museum:
Every section of the exhibition demonstrates her commitment to stimulating innovation and creativity among indigenous makers.
Inspired by decorative fretwork on rodeo apparel, a 2022 wool poncho and pants done in collaboration with calado master Fidel Martínez (Chimalhuacán, State of Mexico).
As of 2022, Carla’s collaborated with more than 164 artisans in 39 communities in 15 Mexican states, with more to come. The show presents a map and identifies all of her collaborators.
To see and hear more about Carla’s collaborative process, watch the Denver Art Museum’s 2019 seminar on culture, cultural appropriation, and fashion in this YouTube video.
And join in on Carla’s beautiful, expressive fashion revolution by checking out her current and past collections on her website.
