THE magazine May 2009

Santa Fe’s Monthly

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of and for the Arts • May 2009

Brion Gysin

gone but not forgotten

9 0 0 2 E T I S N O te: AUCTI Save the Da

0 2 & 9 June 1

Terry Allen Darren Almond Richard Avedon Lutz Bacher Barry X Ball Rina Banerjee Tanyth Berkeley Gay Block Barbara Bloom Kathy Butterly Jim Campbell Suzanne Caporael Antonia Contro Louise Dahl-Wolfe Jim Dine James Drake Tim Eitel Teresita Fernández

Dana Frankfort Gloria Graham Angelina Gualdoni Douglas Kent Hall Harmony Hammond Kevin Hanley Mona Hatoum Jenny Holzer Colette Hosmer James Howell Kenro Izu Robert W. Kelly Nikki S. Lee David Leigh Sze Tsung Leong David Levinthal Donald Lipski Vera Lutter Nick Mangan David Marshall

Jason Middlebrook Andrew Millner Marilyn Minter Franco Mondini-Ruiz Bruce Nauman Nic Nicosia Roxy Paine Jaume Plensa Orit Raff Alan Rath Neo Rauch Matthew Ritchie Don Ritter Michal Rovner Meridel Rubenstein Ed Ruscha Peter Sarkisian Judith Schaechter David Schnell Dana Schutz Kiki Seror Susan Silton

Gary Simmons John F. Simon, Jr. Federico Solmi Sebastian Spreng Steina Alison Elizabeth Taylor Toadhouse Fred Tomaselli Matthias Weischer ‘Line Drive’ Portfolio [Includes works by] Terry Allen John Baldessari Greg Colson Robbie Conal Gajin Fujita Victor Gastelum Joe Goode R.B. Kitaj Mark Licari Paul McCarthy Michael C. McMillen Raymond Pettibon Ed Ruscha

Through MAY 10, 2009

PRETTY IS AS PRETTY DOES

Featuring important works by leading contemporary artists for sale to benefit SITE Santa Fe. Honoring Marlene Nathan Meyerson, Honored Artist: Jenny Holzer, Honorary Chairman: Todd Oldham, Auctioneer, Jamie Niven, Vice Chairman, Sotheby’s.

For tickets or catalogue information, please visit www.sitesantafe.org TUESDAY, MAY 5, 6 pm

Artist Talk by Judith Schaechter Featured in Pretty, Schaechter’s work is figurative, possibly narrative, and sometimes difficult—she will address these issues in a way that seems to answer everything yet dispels none of the mystery.

Co-sponsored by William Shearburn Gallery

1606 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 87501 | 505.989.1199 | www.sitesantafe.org Funding for this exhibition is generously provided by: LLWW Foundation, EVO Gallery, and Zane Bennett Family Foundation, with additional support from Claire Oliver Gallery and Salon 94. The Arts & Culture series is made possible by a generous endowment from the Marlene Nathan Meyerson Family Foundation. Support for SITE Santa Fe’s exhibitions and programs is generously provided by the Board of Directors, many individuals, and the following major contributors: The Brown Foundation, Inc., Houston; The Burnett Foundation; The City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax; New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts; Lannan Foundation; McCune Charitable Foundation; and the Thaw Charitable Trust. This announcement is funded in part by the Santa Fe Arts Commission and the 1% Lodgers’ Tax. Special thanks to THE magazine.

contents Letters

37

National Spotlight: Kim McCarty at Kim Light Lightbox, Los Angeles

12

Universe of artist Katrina Lasko

39

Person of Interest: Brion Gysin

17

Studio Visits: Nicolas Gadbois, Marcia Muth, and Michele Tisdale

43

19

Food for Thought: The Sunday Dinner

21

One Bottle: The Nicolas Feuillatte Non-Vintage Champagne Brut Rosé,

by Joshua Baer

23

Dining Guide: Amavi Restaurant and Trattoria Nostrani

27

Openings & Receptions

Critical Reflections: Chicana Bad Girls at 516 Arts (Alb.); Dark Memory Lecture at the Santa Fe Art Institute; Erika Wanenmacher at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; Jacklyn St. Aubyn at Zane Bennett Contemporary; Larry Fodor at the Lannan Foundation; Louise Bourgeois at MoCa (Los Angeles); Pretty is as Pretty Does at SITE Santa Fe; Roger Shimomura at Eight Modern; and Superstars 2009 at Goldleaf Gallery

28

Out & About

53

Architectural Details: Abandoned Business, photograph by Guy Cross

34

Previews: Herbert Bayer at Peyton Wright; Douglas Johnson at Parks Gallery (Taos); and John Randall Nelson at Gebert Contemporary

54

Writings: “For Him,” by Liza A. Lucero

5

John Saladino was born in Kansas City, graduated from the Yale School of Art and Architecture, and then worked in Italy with architect Piero Sartogo before opening his own design practice in New York City. Saladino is considered by those in the trade to be “the designer’s designer”—a master of scale. His approach to design is to mix light with dark and smooth with rough. Villa (Francis Lincoln Publishers, $95) is a look at the Villa di Lemma—the hillside Tuscan farmhouse in California that Saladino renovated over a four-year period. The book is divided into four components: architecture, interiors, landscape, and entertaining. The section on architecture includes a two-page spread of architectural drawings showing the complexity of the construction required to remodel the villa, and a cutaway drawing that illustrates how the site descends into a series of terraces. A genuine love of history permeates all of Saladino’s design work, which is ultimately about beauty, comfort, and human scale. In talking about architecture Saladino has said, “Beyond being shelter and keeping the rain off your head, architecture is an emotional experience.” About garden design, “The landscape is a created reality, an improvement on the real world. The garden may become a quest or seeking of paradise. We transform nature so that we may spiritually embrace it.” Included with the book is a DVD of a virtual tour of the house and garden with commentary by Saladino. Above photograph—Foot of Mercury—is by Ethan Boehme.

This book is an absolute must for anyone with a love of interior and exterior design.

R EADI NGS & CON V E R SAT I O N S

Marge Piercy with Martín Espada Wednesday 20 May 2009 7 pm Tickets on Sale Now! “We tend to think of writers according to categories: a novelist, poet, essayist; and find it hard to imagine a writer who excels in more than one medium. But Piercy has written many wonderful novels (e.g., Braided Lives; Vida) and an equal number of deeply moving and exquisitely crafted books of poetry (e.g., What Are Big Girls Made Of? ). Her newest volume of poetry is in many ways the best yet. It brings together poems written to celebrate Piercy's Jewishness, reflecting and expressing the joy, pain, passion, and elegance of this rich culture.”

—Library Journal on The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme

Eduardo Galeano with Michael Silverblatt Wednesday 10 June 2009 7 pm Tickets on sale Saturday May 2 nd "Galeano's pages are full of empathy, candor, unsettling connections, and fresh through more than 30 years, affront at the suffering of his country—for Uruguay itself was in exile from its long traditions of tolerance. He writes in defense of his countrymen and others: the embattled Mexican Indians in Chiapas, Brazil's street children, the more than eight million children abandoned across Latin America . . . from the Internet to Interpol, from the vapidity of television to auto-itis, nothing is safe from Galeano's committed deconstructions."

—New York Times Book Review on Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

All tickets for all events are sold at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. Tickets can be purchased in person, by telephone, or online at: Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Box Office hours: Monday – Friday 10am – 4 pm; Saturday – Sunday Noon to show time Telephone 505.988.1234. www.lensic.com s

All tickets are for reserved seating. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

s

General Admission $6 and Senior/Student with ID $3. Ticket purchases are limited to four per person.

Proceeds will be donated to the Lensic Performing Arts Center.

www.lannan.org

Lannan is podcasting Readings & Conversations! Please visit our website, www.lannan.org, to learn more, listen, read author biographies and subscribe to have the events automatically downloaded to your computer.

LETTERS

magazine

VOLUME XVI, NUMBER VIII WINNER 1994 Best Consumer Tabloid SELECTED 1997 Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids SELECTED 2005-06 Top-5 Best Consumer Tabloids P U B L I S h e R / C R e AT I V e D I R e C T O R Guy Cross PUBLISheR / FOOD eDITOR Judith Cross ART DIReCTOR Chris Myers CONTRIBUTING eDITOR diane arMitaGe COPy eDITOR edGar sCully PROOFReADeRS JaMes rodewald KenJi Barrett S TA F F P h O T O G R A P h e R dana waldon PReVIeW eDITOR rinChen lhaMo CALeNDAR eDITOR liz napieralsKi

Recent Paintings by Jerry West will be on view at Phil Space, 1410 2nd Street, Santa Fe. Opening reception: Saturday, May 23, from 6 to 9 pm. Artist’s talk on Tuesday, May 26, at 7 pm. Show runs through June 20. Information: 983-7945.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jan adlMann M , diane arM rMitaG ita e, Joshua Baer, susanna Carlisle, Jon Carver, ira Cohen, Kathryn M davis, Kathelin Gray, harM ar ony haMM a ond, rinChen lhaM ha o, liza a. a luCero, alex ross, and riChard toBin COVeR

Photograph by Ira Cohen

ADVeRTISING SALeS

rose darland: 505-577-8728 (MoBile) Kathryn M davis: 505-424-6868 (MoBile) sheri Mann: 505-989-1214 or 501-2948 (MoBile) reBeCCa o’day: 505-699-1915 (MoBile) Jennifer esperaza: 505-982-3587 the MaGazine: 505-424-7641 DISTRIBUTION

JiMMyy Montoya: 470-0258 (MoBile) THE magazine is published ten times a year by THE magazine Inc., 1208A Mercantile Road, Santa Fe, NM 87507. Corporate address: 44 Bishop LamyRoad,Lamy,NM87540.Phone(505)424-7641.Fax:(505)424-7642, E-mail:THEmag1@aol.com. Website: www.TheMagazineOnLine. com. All material copyright 2008 by THE magazine. All rights are reserved by THE magazine. Reproduction of contents within are prohibied without written permission from THE magazine. All submissions must be accompnied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

THE magazine is in no way responsible for the loss of any unsolicited materials. THE magazine is not responsible or liable for any misspellings, incorrect dates, or incorrect information in its captions, calendar, or other listings. The opinions expressed within the fair confines of THE magazine do not necessarily represent the views or policies of THE magazine, its owners, or any of its agents, staff, employees, members, interns, volunteers, or distribution venues. Bylined articles and editorials represent the views of their authors. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters may be edited for style and libel, and are subject to condensation. THE magazine accepts advertisements from advertisers believed to be of good reputation, but cannot guarantee the autheticity or quality of objects and/or services advertised. As well, THE magazine is not responsible for any claims made by its advertisers; for copyright infringement by its adve tisers; and is not responsible or liable for any mistakes in any advertisement.

| may 2009

TO THE EDITOR:

The arts pose a threat to those fragile sandcastles of narcissistic

Through engaging our environment, we develop a sense of

identity constructed in relation to consumer culture. We seek to

reality, whether our environment is virtual or physical, local

live in ever more impressive places, and need larger spaces to

or international. Engagement involves empathy, imagination,

store what we own, so there’s less room for art in our homes, and

expression, and action. The arts have always helped this along

less money to spend on it after paying a high rent or mortgage.

by suggesting meaningful relationships: the rhythms of visual or

The tyranny of housing developments, zoning regulations, and

musical elements, and the metaphysical play of ideas they evoke.

expensive building codes: artists have a tough time building or

Consumer culture, on the other hand, has encouraged us to derive

finding affordable and suitable space in their chosen communities.

meaningful existence through acquisition and display (desire,

In a world ravaged by the tragedies of war, illness, and poverty,

possession, illusion, and the resultant disillusion and irony).

the arts don’t seem to be worthy of support.

The arts—viewed through the green-tinted glasses of

Lost in the process: constructive imagination, as opposed

consumerism—enhance status when they are absorbed or

to fearful imaginings; the ability to integrate all elements of reality

acquired (“I have already been to that exhibit everyone’s talking

into one constantly changing picture; creative engagement in

about” or “I own something by that famous artist”)—but only

the worlds of work, play, politics, and community; sensitivity

when the label is loud. Visiting the studio, or owning the work,

to—and acts of caring for—friends and strangers, elders and

of an unknown artist won’t lend any cachet no matter how strong

children, community and environment.

the art itself may be. If the art is unusually forceful, it might even cause embarrassment.

And then we face these dire results: ever narrowing view of one’s own role and capabilities; lower expectations of systems

Despite appearances to the contrary, the arts have become

of government and education; lower expectations of children,

marginalized in consumer culture. Never mind the spectacular

friends, lovers, and strangers; we become incapable of expressing

attendance at blockbuster museum shows, multi-million dollar

ourselves beyond a monosyllabic grunt (even small animals and

movie productions, and concert crowds big enough to fill

birds have a more extensive range); eventually, the inability

sports arenas. The communities that support artists, and the

to relate leads to a state where emotional intimacy becomes

arts communities themselves, break down under the weight of

painful and the experience of spiritual closeness is frightening.

financial difficulties and obscurity. Just like the saying “it takes a

We communicate through acts of violence; and fear of art. The

village to raise a child,” it takes hundreds of artists to make a few

powerful presence of art becomes too painfully intimate to bear.

good ones. And it takes community support to encourage the work of hundreds of artists.

Slow down, turn off the electronic entertainment. Suffer the silence and welcome the unfamiliar. Involve local artists in the

Here are some of the reasons why the arts become

events that shape the lives of individuals, family, and community.

marginalized: Visual and musical pollution: we are inundated with

Like the rings on the water when that first stone is lobbed into

advertising devoid of the commanding structure and profoundly

the lake, the circles of influence spread far beyond what seems at

associative content of great art. There’s less psychic room for art;

first possible. Artists, remember the words of one of the world’s

less of the space and silence that inspire hunger for art. Lack of

greatest living directors, Zhang Yimou, “To survive is to win.”

visual and musical education: arts budgets are cut in schools, small arts programs can’t compete for the dwindling consumer dollar.

—Tina Dickey, British Columbia

The result is widespread insensitivity and ignorance. Conformism: we must play into the popular culture for fear of not belonging.

Letters: themag1@aol.com or 1208-A Mercantile Rd., SF87507

THE

MAGAZINE

| 5

RonnieLandfield FORTY YEARS OF COLOR ABSTRACTION

david HENDERSON

May 22-June 21.2009 OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, May 22, 5:30 -7:30 PM

David Henderson, Colossus. Carbon fiber, epoxy, paint. 40 x 32 x 60 inches

Gulf Wind, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 85" x 118"

The Inaugural Show at LewAllen Galleries’ Spectacular New Space in Santa Fe’s Railyard District Catalog Available with Essay by Klaus Kertess

paula ROLAND

Paula Roland, Connecting Dots 136. Encaustic monotype, 40 x 26 inches

May 15 – June 12, 2009 opening | Friday, May 15 5 to 7 pm

Big Trane (for John Coltrane), 1998, acrylic on canvas, 93" x 81"

LewAllenGalleries AT THE RAILYARD

1613 Paseo de Peralta Santa Fe, NM 87501 tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com info@lewallengalleries.com

WILLIAM SIEGAL GALLERY ANCIENT

CONTEMPORARY

Railyard District 540 S. Guadalupe St. Santa Fe NM 87501 505.820.3300 WILLIAMSIEGAL.COM

April 11 - June 5

artist reception: Friday June 5, 6:00 - 8:00

William Betts Simpatia é Quase Amor

Richard Levy Gallery

•

Albuquerque

•

www.levygallery.com

•

505.766.9888

THE TREASURE TROVE OF SANTA FE

ORIGINAL ART CUSTOM-MADE FRAMES

Photo: Jamie Hart

ONE OF A KIND JEWELRY

BY APPOINTMENT: 505-983-7523

OnPaper

On pAper: drAwings by sixty Artists

May 1 through June 24, 2009 reCeptiOn Friday, May 1 5-7pm thomas Ashcraft, donald baechler, Jean-Michel basquiat,

ross bleckner, Louise bourgeois, James brown, peter Cain,

ingrid Calame, will Cotton, Leslie dill, Jim dine, graham dolphin, sue eisler, t.r. ericsson, Howard Finster tony Fitzpatrick, Caio Fonseca, suzan Frecon, ellen gallagher, robert gaylor, Andrew gellatly, teo gonzalez, gloria graham, Joseph Havel, roni Horn, Jerald ieans, tim Jag, Jennifer Joseph, Alex Katz, Kit Keith, Jay Kelly, david Kramer, tim Liddy, suzanne McClelland, robert Medvedz, Andrew Millner, robert Motherwell, Antonio Murado, J.b. Murray, Craig norton, thomas nozkowski, gary passanise, enoc perez, Judy pfaff , Lucas samaras Fred sandback, peter schuyff, James siena, tom slaughter, Joe sola, peter soriano, erik spehn, donald sultan, philip

taaffe, toadhouse, richard tuttle, Jack tworkov, Jacques Villon, Andy warhol, Christopher warrington, william

wegman, Amy westphal and terry winters.

129 west san Francisco, 2nd Floor, santa Fe 505 989.8020, info@shearburngallery.com shearburngallery.com Antonio Murado, detail, Untitled (#873) , 2001, Oil on paper, 30 x 22 inches

THEmay09.qxd:Layout 1

4/20/09

10:09 PM

Page 1

Santa Fe Art Institute MEMORY: Shadow & Light – Art as individual/ collective memory

Photographer David Maisel 5/11 Lecture, 6pm Tipton Hall 5/12 Portfolio Review/ Workshop,10 - 4pm SFAI

________________________

60s SURVIVOR I: DOUGLAS JOHNSON Paintings & Prints: 1969-2009 May 9 to June 2, 2009 Reception Saturday, May 9, 4-6 pm

This exhibition is part of the Taos-wide Summer of Love celebration.

See taossummeroflove.com for full schedule of events.

5/4 SFAI Artist-in-Residence, Issa Nyaphaga Talk & Performance, 6pm Tipton Hall 5/12 Birds in the Park Installation by Christy Hengst, 9am - 5pm SFAI 5/14 ‘Memory Preserved: Crypto -Jewish Roots of New Mexico’ Readings & Performance, 6pm Tipton Hall 5/21 Artists & Writers Open Studio 5:30pm SFAI

Pueblo Revolt, 2009, gouache, 5 x 6 inches

PARKS GALLERY 127 A Bent Street, Taos, New Mexico 87571 575 751-0343 parksgallery.com

WWW.SFAI.ORG, 505- 424 5050, INFO@SFAI.ORG, SANTA FE ART INSTITUTE, 1600 ST.MICHAELS DRIVE, SANTA FE NM 87505 | THE SANTA FE ART INSTITUTE EXPLORES THE INTERCONNECTIONS OF COMTEMPORARY ART AND SOCIETY THROUGH ARTIST AND WRITER RESIDENCIES, PUBLIC LECTURES AND WORKSHOPS, EXHIBITIONS, & EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH THIS PROGRAM PARTIALLY FUNDED BY THE CITY OF SANTA FE ARTS COMMISION AND THE 1% LODGER’S TAX AND BY NEW MEXICO ARTS, A DIVISION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS

Photograph by Dana Waldon

UNIVERSE OF

KATRINA LASKO KATRINA LASKO’S work is

about the concealing, tangling, and untangling of visual language. The wrapping or covering of her artworks are interactive, as they force both Lasko and the viewer to untangle the meaning of the work. Lasko’s hope is that the viewer will look behind the beauty in the work, for that is where the message, which is often not so beautiful, is to be found. Lasko recently exhibited at the Matrix Gallery, The Cradle Project, and the Outpost—all in Albuquerque. On May 12, a solo show—Don’t Look—will be on view at the Matrix Gallery, Albuquerque.

Look WheRe eGO FITS There is always ego involved in the making of art. As a young artist, I was more demanding of attention—call it the urgency of youth.

Older now, I am still as committed, but not as recklessly or insistently. The message is still there, but I am now accepting of the terms.

There is a lot of good and meaningful art in the world and I cannot delude myself into thinking that what I do is too important. I also know that the ego in what I do pushes boundaries that I say I won’t cross.

The WORLD We LIVe IN This world is sad for many—so hopeless, so frightening. As a “sixties child” I had much hope for a better world—didn’t we all? The disillusionment I feel today is almost unbearable. Horrors confront us daily. I pray for peace and humanity for all those who suffer. My work is about the despair I feel.

The NeW WORk—FIGURATIVe AND NON-OBjeCTIVe The figurative work I do is about distancing ourselves, and the disengagement that we practice because we feel helpless. We hide, are blinded, and run from the terrors and sadness of the world. Some of my sculptural pieces depict an ideological split. My non-objective work, such as in the series Cocoon, refers to the cocoon we surround ourselves with as means of protection from the world. In my last series—Hurts—I referred to the many injuries every person experiences in life—emotional, physical, psychological, societal, and political. These “hurts” damage, change, bruise, wound, and injure us—but then teach, strengthen, build, and alwa always in some way alter us with each experience. D

| may 2009

The magazine | 13

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1. ROGER PRESTON BLATZ - Photography ROXANNE BEBEE BLATZ - Photography

May 9 & 10 Mother’s Day Weekend 10 am to 5 pm Free Self-Guided Tour

2. SHIRLEY ANN SLOOP - Jewelry 3. ADRIANA SCASSELLATI - Pastel 4. ANDI CALLAHAN - Jewelry 5. DIANNA SHOMAKER - Mixed media 6. DAVID CRAMER - Photography 7. SUSAN JORDAN - Gourd art 8. MEG LEONARD - Painting 9. WAYNE MIKOSZ - Mixed media RIHA ROTHBERG - Mixed media 10. BUNNY BOWEN - Wax resist 11. LYNN HARTENBERGER - Painting 12. SHARON PEROTTI - Ceramics 13. NAN BARBEAU - Mixed media 14. CAROLYN VAN HOUSEN - Jewelry GAIL GERING - Metal media SARENA MANN - Paper maché

Michael Prokos #19

Dianna Shomaker #5

David Cramer #6

15. MARY BOATRIGHT - Gourd art 16. FERNANDO DELGADO - Photography 17. MARCE RACKSTRAW -Linocut/charcoals 18. BARRY McCORMICK - Photography 19. MICHAEL PROKOS - Ceramics 20. RALPH CHURCHILL - Wood bas relief 21. KARL, MARY HOFMANN - Ceramics PEACHES MALMAUD - Direct print attire 22. MARY DAVIS HAMLIN - Painting 23. GREG REICHE - Sculpture LAURA TELANDER - Painting

Cate Clark #35

Susan Gutt #40

Barry McCormick #18

24. ROGER EVANS - Mixed media 25. JUDITH RODERICK - Silk painting 26. PAT HARRISON - Painting 27. JIM FISH - Wood sculpture BETTY TEMPLE - Pastels/mixed media KAREN MELODY SHATAR - Ceramics 28. LENORE GOODELL - Photography 29. KATHERINE IRISH HENRY - Pastel 30. BUCK LAWTON - Wood turning 31. DANA PATTERSON ROTH - Photography

Sarena Mann #14

Meg Leonard #8

Gail Gering #14

32. LISA CHERNOFF - Glass 33. JON & NANCY COUCH - Water prisms 34. JOAN A. FENICLE - Painting 35. CATE CLARK - Mosaics 36. ANGEL ROSE - Mixed media 37. VICKI VAN VYNCKT - Painting 38. MEG JOHNSON - Silk painting 39. GERI VERBLE - Jewelry 40. SUSAN GUTT - Basketry 41. NANCY HAWKS - Pastels

Adriana Scassellati #3

Riha Rothberg #9

Andi Callahan #4

Twelfth Annual Placitas Studio Tour

50 artists and artisans invite you to visit 42 studios in the rolling hills of Placitas.

DIRECTIONS: Take I-25 to Exit 242. Follow the signs to the Welcome Center. Our doors are open!

42. WILLIAM SKEES - Watercolor inks

Sponsored by the Placitas MountainCrafts Soiree Society

FOR MORE INFORMATION: PLACITASSTUDIOTOUR.COM 505-771-1006

STUDIO

VISITS

Memories are constructions made in accordance with present needs, desires, and influences, and are often accompanied by feelings and emotions.

Memory usually involves awareness of the memory. What is the place of memory in the art you are presently making? Three artists respond. photographs by

Dana Waldon

Memory is an integral part of the art that I do. I am frequently called a “Memory Painter.” Memories, with their attendant feelings and emotions are the fires that flame into creativity. Experience produces memory. Most of my work has been done to recreate in art the times and the moods of the 1930s, and the paintings have become a kind of visual history of that particular era. Memory, at least for me, is like having an ever-ready film library in my head—a mental click and scenes spring into life.

—Marcia Muth Muth’s paintings are in many corporate and private collections. Two books are available about her work: A World Set Apart: Memory Paintings (2007) and Words and Images (2004).

In 2008, a biography by Teddy Jones—Left Early, Arrived Late: Scenes from the Life of Marcia Muth, Memory Painter—was published.

All of my paintings begin from a place of deep feeling and strong emotions. When I paint the landscape I preserve a feeling of that special place and create a memory. The wind, a fleeting change in light, the sparkle of copper, the warmth of someone’s home or the eeriness of a city park at night all create a strong feeling and an urgency to paint. The past and the present constantly mix, whether the influence is the rendering of ancient mandalas in the hallway of a Santa Fe school, or childhood memories of Michigan woods and fields.

I want my art to make people pause, see with fresher eyes so they notice the beauty in everyday places and objects. I paint with joy and purpose. My art preserves the memories.

—Michele Tisdale Tisdale will be having a show on Friday, May 22, with a reception from 5 to 7 pm at the Eli Levin Studio, 830 Canyon Road. In Albuquerque, she is represented by the Alumenart Gallery.

To see more of Tisdale’s work, tisdale-art.com

My current paintings are concerned with the memory of places I have visited during the last three years. I take my lead from places that have a particular emotional resonance for me. The initial experience of a place or landscape is altered as it is filtered through memory and my feelings.

I use overlays of color to enhance, blur and distort the image of the place I am recalling. The filters of color I use address the somewhat unreal quality of memory. Looking at scenes through the filter of emotions is a way for me to speak to the fleeting or ephemeral quality of place and memory.

—Nicolas Gadbois In 2008, Gadbois showed work at the Public Art Project for Tri Cities Cancer Center, Kennewick,Washington, and was in a group etching exhibition at the Eli Levin Studios, Santa Fe. Upcoming shows in 2009 include the Wood Gallery, Montpelier Vermont, Mesa College in San Diego, and the Argos Gallery, Santa Fe. Contact Gadbois at nicolasgadbois@yahoo.com

| may 2009

THE magazine | 17

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FOOD FOR THOUGHT

THE SUNDAY DINNER The Sunday Dinner was once an American institution—the main event of the week and a dinner that no person in his right mind would miss except for the gravest reason. Sunday dinners were usually served at noon and it was understood that by four o’clock everyone would leave for home. The dinners were a time of learning to put away childish things and learn adulthood etiquette—those manners that were conventionally acceptable and required by society. It was also a time of family stories, yarns, and tall tales. Sadly, this once-weekly gathering that brought people together in a celebration of food and family has all but disappeared. When most people in the world lived on farms and grew their own food, they also ate most of their meals together. With industrialization, came jobs in the city and meals away from home.

Thus Sunday dinners became the only day that the whole family could share a meal together—one of the last remaining ways our culture has to strengthen ties with family and friends and to reconnect to our heritage. D | may 2009

THE

MAGAZINE

| 19

lunch - monday thru saturday sunday brunch dinner - nightly

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231 washington avenue - reservations 505 984 1788 gift certificates, menus & special events online

www.santacafe.com

Lunch

Dinner

Nightlife

The Heart Of Santa Fe. Afternoon, Dinner and Late Night Menus ~ Lunch Delivery & Patio Dining Coming Soon ~ Downtown Santa Fe’s Most Diverse Nightly Entertainment

Corazón

401 S. Guadalupe

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505.983.4559

For menus and entertainment listings, visit us online at corazonsantafe.com or myspace.com/corazonsantafe

ONE BOTTLE

One Bottle:

The Nicolas Feuillatte Non-Vintage Champagne Brut Rosé

by Joshua Baer

A cooking fire is one of those things everyone should know how to make.

Here is an old family recipe for a cooking fire.

How can you tell when the coals are ready? There is no magic moment.

What you want is to grill over high heat but not over flames. If you are grilling

One newspaper. Two kitchen matches. Six pieces of dry kindling. (If you

steaks, lamb chops, rack of lamb, chicken thighs, or salmon fillets, the dripping

live in New Mexico, dry branches from either a juniper or a piñon tree make

fat will ignite a few flames. A few flames are all right. Lots of flames are bad.

good kindling. If there are needles on the branches, expect a series of small

The best way to learn is to make mistakes. After one or two cooking fires that

explosions ten seconds after you light the fire.) Nine pieces of dry firewood.

are too hot, you will have no trouble recognizing when the coals are ready.

(Each piece of firewood should be no more than three inches in diameter. Split

The secret to cooking over live coals is to cook your food unevenly.

pieces of juniper will work. So will split pieces of oak, piñon, or Ponderosa

When you cook on a stove, you apply equalized amounts of heat to food.

pine. The best woods for a cooking fire are fruitwood cuttings. Some people

This creates a homogeneity of flavor and texture in the food you eat. When you

like apricot cuttings. I like apple cuttings. If you experiment with cuttings from

cook over live coals, you want there to be variegation in the heat you apply to

different fruit trees, the smoke will tell you which wood is your favorite.)

the food. Think of the grill stripes that appear on a rib steak cooked over live

You can build a cooking fire in a fire pit, a hibachi, or an outdoor grill.

Of the commercially available grills, the Weber One-Touch® is the easiest to

coals and you will know what I mean.

Here is another secret. Undercook everything. Aim for rare. As soon as

use. Ideally, you want a bed of coals that is between twelve and sixteen inches

you think your steak, lamb chop, halibut fillet, or tofu burger might be ready,

in diameter and a grill that sits four to six inches above the coals. The One-

take it off the grill and put it in a warm oven. Fifteen minutes later, it will not

Touch® has an 18.5-inch diameter grill that sits six inches above the coals.

Thirty minutes before you want to cook, make loose balls out of the newspaper and place the balls at the base of the grill. Arrange the kindling on top of the newspaper. I prefer the log cabin configuration

only be ready, it will be delicious.

Which brings us to the Nicolas Feuillatte Non-Vintage Champagne Brut Rosé.

In the glass, the Feuillatte Brut Rosé is copper alloyed with gold.

to the tipi configuration but either one will work. Place three of the

The bead is delicate and playful. At first, the flavors run in different

pieces of firewood on top of the kindling. Light the newspaper in

directions. By the second glass, those directions resolve themselves

four places.

After the fire catches, lay the rest of the pieces of firewood

into a sensual narrative. The finish is neat and quick but also emphatic.

on top of the burning fire. Again, I like the log cabin configuration

Many people drink Champagne before they sit down to dinner.

but any configuration will work as long as the fire consumes

They pour it as an apéritif. A good Champagne is not an apéritif.

everything. What you want to avoid is the stray piece of

A good Champagne will lead you into a dinner, entertain you,

smoldering wood.

listen to your stories, offer advice, and lead you out of the dinner

Five minutes after you light it, you should have a roaring fire.

with charm, panache, and restraint. Champagne is bottled joy.

At this point, the most important thing you can do is nothing.

If you have never enjoyed the benefits of an all-Champagne meal,

Let the fire burn but keep an eye on it. Ten minutes later, the

do yourself a favor and have one for your family and friends.

flames should be dying down and the nine pieces of firewood

The Feuillatte Brut Rosé works beautifully with steaks,

should be well on their way to becoming live coals. (If you

lamb, chicken, fish, or vegetables cooked over live coals. There

are burning oak or fruitwood, it will take longer to reach this

is something simultaneously disciplined and savage about this

stage.) After the flames subside, use a stick or a metal poker to

Champagne. Serve it very cold. Fifteen minutes in your freezer

even out the coals. Arrange them into something approaching

will have a profound effect on its flavors. At some point during

a circle, then take the grill and put it over the coals. You want

the dinner, raise your glass and drink to the art of the cooking

the heat from the coals to burn off any traces of meat, fish,

fire. Cooking fires have been around for a long time. They lie

chicken, or vegetables left over from prior grillings. You also

close to the heart of what it means to be human.

want a searing hot grill for your food.

In Santa Fe, you can buy the Feuillatte Brut Rosé at Whole

The worst thing you can do at this stage is get distracted.

Foods for $56 a bottle and at Liquor Barn for $53 a bottle.

If you go inside and watch the last two minutes of a ball

On the Web, you can buy it from B-21 Wines in Tarpon Springs,

game, you will come back to coals that are past their prime.

Florida (www.b-21.com), for $30 a bottle. D

At that point, if you are like me, you will panic and attempt to revive your coals with twigs or pieces of kindling. That never works. If your coals are weak, do the right thing and rebuild your fire. Use at least six pieces of split firewood, let them come to a blaze, watch the flames die down, and be there—with whatever it is that you want to grill—when the coals are ready.

| may 2009

One Bottle is dedicated to the appreciation of good wine and good times, one bottle at a time. The name One Bottle, and the contents of this column, are © 2009 by onebottle.com.

Write to Joshua Baer at jb@onebottle.com

THE magazine | 21

DINING GUIDE

Pollo Mattone at

Amavi Restaurant 221 Shelby Street Reservations: 988-2355

$ KEY

INEXPENSIVE

$

up to $14

MODERATE

$$

$15—$23

EXPENSIVE

$$$

VERY EXPENSIVE

$24—$33

$$$$

Prices are for one dinner entrée. If a restaurant serves only lunch, then a lunch entrée price is reflected.

Alcoholic beverages, appetizers, and desserts are not included in these price keys. Call restaurants for hours.

$34 plus

EAT OUT MORE OFTEN!

Photo: Guy Cross

...a guide to the very best restaurants in santa fe and surrounding areas...

315 Bistro & Wine Bar 315 Old Santa Fe Trail. 986-9190.

Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free inside. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: French. Atmosphere: Three intimate rooms—reminiscent of a small inn in the French countryside. Patio dining. House specialties: Earthy French onion soup made with a duck stock; squash blossom beignets; smooth and rich foie gras terrine with poached cranberries; crispy duck; and one of the most flavorful steaks in town. Comments: Teriffic wine selection. ¡A La Mesa!

428 Agua Fria St. 988-2836 Dinner/Brunch (Sat./Sun) Beer/Wine. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Eclectic. Atmosphere: Bustling and friendly. House specialties: Start with the Calamari Jardiniere in a fennel sauce or the Tataki of beef. For your main course, we suggest the flavorful Steak Frites, the perfectly cooked Salmon Osso Bucco, or the Honey and Almond Duck. Finish your meal with Profiteroles with raspberry ice cream, chocolate sauce, and minted chantilly cream. Comments: Good wine list and attentive service.

Amavi Restaurant 221 Shelby St. 988-2355.

Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Mediterranean.

Atmosphere: Intimate and attractive. House specialties: Menu changes depending on what is fresh at the market. The tapas are sensational. For your main, we recommend the Pollo Mattone. the tiger shrimp with garlic, shallots, smoked pimenton, and sherry, and the pan-roasted ribeye chop. Recommendations: The bouillabaisse is not to be missed. Comments: The bar is much fun for dinner and drinks.

Anasazi Restaurant Inn of the Anasazi 113 Washington Ave. 988-3236 .

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Smoke-free. Valet parking.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Contemporary American cuisine.

Atmosphere: A casual and elegant room evoking the feeling of an Anasazi cliff dwelling. House specialties: To start, try the enticing Buffalo carpaccio with thinly-sliced black truffle and frisee or the sublime lavendarglazed squab with mission figs and an aged Porto reduction. For your entree, we suggest the perfectly-prepared rare chipolte-crusted lamb rack or the herb-crusted tenderloin of beef served with whipped poblano potatoes and cipollini onions. Comments: Attentive service, superbly-presented plates, and an excellent wine list, all under the deft hand and guidance of executive chef Oliver Ridgeway.

Andiamo!

322 Garfield St. 995-9595.

Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Cozy interior with Tuscan yellows and reds. House specialties: The chicken parmesan; baked risotto with mushroom ragout; and any fish

special. Comments: Consistently good food and a sharp wait staff makes Andiamo! one of the places in Santa Fe to eat Italian.

Bobcat Bite Restaurant Old Las Vegas Hwy. 983-5319.

Lunch/Dinner No alcohol. Smoking.

Cash. $$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: This is the real deal—a neon bobcat sign sits above a small, low-slung building. Inside are five tables and nine seats at a counter made out of real logs. House specialties: The enormous inch-and-a-half thick green chile cheeseburger is sensational.

The 13-ounce rib eye steak is juicy and flavorful.

Comments: No desserts.

Bumble Bee’s Baja Grill 301 Jefferson St. 820-2862.

Breakfast Daily Lunch/Dinner. Patio and drive-up window.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Mexican Atmosphere: Casual, friendly and bright with handy drive-up for those on the go. House specialties: Soft corn Baja-style fish tacos, featuring mahi mahi; steak burrito grande; and rotisserie chickens. Homemade salsa (bowls of it at the salsa bar) and chips are super.

Cafe Cafe Italian Grill 500 Sandoval St. 466-1391 Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: For lunch, start with the classic Caesar salad; the tasty speciality pizzas; the baked lunch cannelloni; or the grilled eggplant sandwich. At dinner, we loved the perfectly grilled swordfish salmorglio; the fresh linguini and clams; and the herb breaded veal cutlet.

Comments: Very friendly waitstaff.

Café Loka Las Placitas and Ledoux Courtyard. Taos.

575-758-4204 Breakfast/Lunch Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American—fresh, organic, and local produce. Atmosphere: Casual.

House specialties: In the am, try the organic egg, cheddar, and ham panini or the housemade organic granola with yougurt and local honey. We love the salad specials and the Turkey and havarti panini.

Comments: Nice selection of teas and coffee drinks.

Café Pasqual’s 121 Don Gaspar. 983-9340.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner/Sunday Brunch Beer/Wine. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Multi-ethnic. Atmosphere: The café is adorned with lots of Mexican streamers, Indian maiden posters, and rustic wooden furniture.

House specialties: Hot cakes get a nod from Gourmet magazine. Huevos motuleños, a Yucatán breakfast, is one you’ll never forget. For lunch, try the grilled chicken breast sandwich with Manchego cheese.

The Compound 653 Canyon Road. 982-4353.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Contemporary American . Atmosphere: 150-year-old adobe with pale, polished plaster walls and white linen on the table.

House specialties: Jumbo crab and lobster salad.The chicken schnitzel is flawless.

Recommendations: Deserts are absolutely perfect. Comments: Seasonal menu. Chef/ owner Mark Kiffin didn’t win the James Beard Foundation’s “Best Chef of the Southwest” award for goofing off in the kitchen. Recent wrtie-up in the New York Times.

Copa de Oro Agora Center at Eldorado. 466-8668.

Lunch/Dinner. & days. Take-out.

Wine/Beer. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: International. Atmosphere: Casual.

House specialties: Start with the mussels in a Mexican beer and salsa reduction.

Entrees include the succulent roasted duck leg quarters, Moroccan lamb stew with polenta, savory palliard of chicken, and the slow-cooked twelve-hour pot roast. Great spicy French Fries. For dessert, go for the lemon mousse or the kahlua macadmia nut brownie. Comments: Well worth the ten-minute drive from downtown Santa Fe. Corazón 401 S. Guadalupe St. 424-7390 Dinner to late Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Pub grub. Atmosphere: Casual.

House specialties: You cannot go wrong with the not-to-be-believed thin-cut grilled ribeye steak topped with blue cheese, and served on a bed of spinach, or the flash fried calamari with sweet chili dipping sauce, or the amazing Corazón hamburger trio.

Comments: Love music and an easygoing atmostphere? Corazón is definitely your place.

Good pour at the bar. Great prices. Jazz on Sunday. Lunch coming soon.

Counter Culture 930 Baca St. 995-1105.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Wine/Beer. Smoke-free. Patio. Cash. $$ Cuisine: All-American. Atmosphere: Informal.

House specialties: Breakfast: burritos and frittata. Lunch: sandwiches and salads. Dinner: flash-fried calamari; grilled salmon with leek and pernod cream sauce; and a delicious hanger steak. Comments: Boutique wine list .

Cowgirl Hall of Fame 319 S. Guadalupe St. 982-2565 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoking/non-smoking. Patio Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: All American. Atmosphere: Popular patio shaded with big cottonwoods. Cozy bar.

House specialties: Very “Atkins-friendly.” The smoked brisket and ribs are fantastic. Dynamite buffalo burgers; potato salad (with skins); a knockout Texas onion loaf; and strawberry shortcake. Comments: Beers, beers, and more beers—from Bud to the fancy stuff.

Coyote Café 132 W. Water St. 983-1615.

Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Nouville Southwestern. Atmosphere:

Fun. House specialties: For your main course, try the Syrah braised beef short risbs; the grilled Maine lobster tails; or Eric’s Southwestern Rotisserie—rock hen, basted butternut squash, Shelby’s sharp chedder greeen chile “mac and cheese” roasted chicken glace. Dessert favorite is the Bernadines coconut pumpkin pie.

Downtown Subscription 376 Garcia St. 983-3085.

Breakfast/Lunch No alcohol. Smoke-free. Patio.

Cash. $ Cuisine: American coffeehouse and newsstand.

Atmosphere: Café society. Over 1,600 magazine titles to buy or peruse. Big room with small tables and a nice patio outside where inside where you can sit and schmooze. House specialties: Espresso, cappuccino, and lattes.

El Farol 808 Canyon Rd. 983-9912.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoking/non-smoking. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Spanish. Atmosphere: Wood plank floors, thick adobe walls, and a postagestamp-size dance floor for cheek-to-cheek dancing. Wall murals by Alfred Morang.

House specialties: Tapas and paella.

El Mesón 213 Washington Ave. 983-6756.

Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Spanish. Atmosphere: Spain could be just around the corner. Music nightly: House specialties: Tapas reign supreme, with classics like Manchego cheese marinated in extra virgin olive oil; sautéed spinach with garlic and golden raisins; and flash-fried baby calamari with two sauces.

Geronimo 724 Canyon Rd. 982-1500.

Dinner/Lunch-Brunch (Friday-Sunday) Full bar. Smoke-free dining room. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Fusion/eclectic Atmosphere: Two-hundred-year-old building with kiva fireplaces, a portal, and a lovely garden room. House specialties: Entrées include the sauteed Atlantic salmon; the perfectly grilled Amish-raised pork shop; and the delicious New York strip, with a gratin of crushed golden potato, carrot confit, pearl onions, and sauce Bordelaise. Comments: Impeccable service.

Il Piatto 95 W. Marcy St. 984-1091.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Italian Atmosphere: Bustling.

House specialties: Grilled hanger steak with three cheeses, pancetta and onions; and the lemon and rosemary grilled chicken.

Comments: A reasonably priced wine list and attentive service.

Jinja 510 North Guadalupe St. 982-4321.

Lunch/Dinner

Full Bar. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Pan-Asian. Atmosphere: Dark wood booths and subdued lighting deliver romance and nostalgia. House specialties: Yin Yang tiger shrimp dusted in salt and pepper with a plum ginger sauce, and the classic Pad Thai. Jinja’s drink menu: Mai-Tai, Singapore Sling, Zombie, Kava Bowl, and Volcano drinks. Comments: Great savory soups and a friendly and efficient waitstaff.

Joseph’s Table 108-A South Taos Plaza Lunch/Dinner Full bar Visa & Mastercard $$$ Cuisine: Modern American / New Mexicoinspired. Atmosphere: Casual. House specialties: Vodka-cured Wild Salmon served on Corn Blinis.

Josh’s Barbecue 3486 Zafarano Drive, Suite A 474-6466 Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Barbecue. Atmosphere: Casual, House specialties: Cuts of meats special-ordered by Josh and then woodsmoked low and slow—are king here.

Recommendations: Besides the excellent red-chile, honey-glazed ribs and tender brisket, other standouts include the barbecue chicken wings, the smoked chicken tacquitos, and the spicy queso.

Comments: Everything is made in-house.

Seasonal barbecue sauces range from peach to cherry to apple brown sugar, and will wow your taste buds.

Kohnami Restaurant 313 S. Guadalupe. 984-2002.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine/Sake. Smoke-free. Patio.

Visa & Mastercard. $$ Cuisine: Japanese. Atmosphere: Casual.

House specialties: Miso soup; soft shell crab; dragon roll; chicken katsu; noodle dishes; and Bento box specials. Comments: Sushi is always perfect. Try the Ruiaku Sake— it is clear, smooth, and very dry, Some say that it is like drinking from a magic spring admist a bamboo forest. They’re right!

Lamy Station Café Lamy Train Station. Lamy. 466-1904 Lunch/Dinner/Sunday Brunch Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: 1950’s dining car. House specialties: Fantastic green chile stew, crab cakes, omlettes, salads, bacon and eggs, and do not forget the fabulous Reuben sandwich. Sunday brunch is marvelous. Comments: For your dessert, order the apple crisp.

Los Mayas 409 W. Water St. 986-9930.

Dinner Full bar. Non-smoking. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Both new and old Mexican.

Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: Try the marvelous Ceviche or the turbo fish in fresh lemon and orange juice.

continued on page 25

| mayl 2009

THE magazine | 23

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DINING GUIDE

New York Strip steak, served with chipotle herb butter, or the Idaho Ruby Red Trout served with grilled pineapple salsa. Comments: Visit their sister restaurant at Devargas Center.

S antacafé 231 Washington Ave. 984-1788.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoking/non-smoking. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Contemporary Southwestern.

Atmosphere: Minimal, subdued, and elegant. House specialties: For starters, the crispy calamari with lime dipping sauce will never disappoint.

Favorite dinner entrées include the perfectly cooked grilled rack of lamb; pan-seared salmon with olive oil crushed new potatoes and creamed sorrell; miso marinated halibut with lemongrass. Comments: If available, you must order the tempura shrimp.

Appetizers at cocktail hour is always a lot of fun.

A restaurant for the true food and wine lover.

Northern Italian Cuisine at

Trattoria Nostrani 304 Johnson Street - 983-3800 Luminaria Restaurant & Patio at the Inn of Loretto 211 Old Santa Fe Trail 984-7915.

Breakfast, lunch, dinner Smoke-free. Valet parking.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: American/Southwest. Atmosphere: Elegant and romantic. Recommendations: Start with the award-winning tortilla soup or the scrumptious crab enchiladas. For your main course, we suggest the flavorful Cowboy rib-eye, the chile-crusted pork tenderloin, the mountain ruby trout, or the ancho-braised beef short ribs. Dessert: Choose the rustic lemonalmond tart or the artisan cheeses with truffle honey and roasted almonds. Comments: Local, farm fresh foods when available.

A sophisticated wine list. Chef Brian Cooper is a steady hand at the helm in the kitchen.

Mangiamo Pronto!

312 Read St. 989-1904 Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Beer/Wine. Smoke-free.

Outdoor seating.

Visa/MC. $$ Cuisine: Italian. Atmosphere: Intimate, light, and hip counter service. House specialties: Paninis and soups are great.

Recommendations: Minestrone soup, Muffuletta panini, and an espresso to finish.

Comments: The help-yourself hand grater to add a grind of parmesan on your soup or salad is a nice touch.

Maria’s New Mexican Kitchen 555 W. Cordova Rd. 983-7929.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoking/non-smoking. Patio.

Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: Rough wooden floors, hand-carved chairs and tables, and kiva fireplaces set the historical tone. House specialties: Freshly-made tortillas and green chile stew. Pork spareribs in a red chile sauce are a fifty-year-old tradition. Flan with burnt-sugar caramel sauce is the perfect ending. Comments: For Margaritas, Maria’s is the place.

Mu Du Noodles 1494 Cerrillos Rd. 983-1411.

Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Noodle House Atmosphere: Casual and friendly. House specialties: We love the salmon dumplings drizzledwith oyster sauce and the Malaysian Laksa—wild rice noodles in a red coconut curry sauce with baby bok choy.

Museum Hill Café 710 Camino Lejo. 820-1776.

Lunch/Sunday Brunch Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: All-American. Atmosphere:

| may 2009

Cafeteria-style.

House specialties: A wonderful and hearty soup selection, righteous salads, and sandwiches. We also liked the chicken enchiladas. Comments: Healthy, fresh food.

O’Keeffe Café 217 Johnson St. 946-1065.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Contemporary Southwest with a French flair. Atmosphere: The walls are dressed with photos of Ms. O’Keeffe herself. House specialties: A silky smooth foie gras served with orange muscat is an inviting appetizer. For your main, try the Northern New Mexico organic poquitero rack of lamb with black olive tapenade. Comments: Very nice wine selection. Ó Eating House Highway 84/285 Pojoaque. 455-5065 Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Patio Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Mexican, Native American, Spanish, French, and New Mexican.

Atmosphere: Cozy and friendly. House specialties: Pueblo style Guacamole with two salsas; Pomegranate BBQ duck taquitos with sweet potato fries; and the tender rib-eye steak.

Old House at the Eldorado Hotel 309 W. San Francisco St. 988-4455.

Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American meets Southwestern.

Atmosphere: Clubby and comfortable.

House specialties: we suggest without reservation the Pan-seared Alaskan halibut with Yukon gold potato and lobster cake and pepper-tomato jam.

For dessert, the warm liquid center chocolate cake with crème anglaise.

PD Bean 2411 Cerrillos Rd. 473-9092.

Breakfast/Lunch Smoke-free. $ Cuisine: American.

Atmosphere: Coffee-house casual. House specialties: Smothered breakfast burrito, an array of sandwiches (our favorite is the “To Die for Tuna Salad”), a variety of wraps, and fresh, fresh salads.

Comments: Wonderful Texas chili and a fantastic cafe latte. Wi-fi in the cafe and take-out are available. Drive-up window.

Railyard Restaurant & Saloon 530 S. Guadalupe St. 989-3300.

Lunch: Monday-Saturday Dinner daily Bar Menu daily Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: American Classics Revisited.

Atmosphere: Open, spacious, and bustling. House specialties: Appetizers include southern fried buttermilk chicken strips with Creole remoulade dipping sauce. Steaks and chops with choices of compound butters.

Recommendations: Most flavorful burgers in town, bar none Comments: Generous pour at the bar.

Red Sage Restaurant and Bar 20 Buffalo Thunder Trail, at the Buffalo Thunder Resort & Casino. 819-2056.

Dinner/Bar menu.

Full Bar. Smoke-free dining room.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Modern fare with Native American, European, and Latin American influences. Atmosphere: An elegant and contemporary room. House specialties: To start, we recommend the roasted butternut squash soup or any of the beautifully prepared salads. For your main course, we suggest the succulent beef tenderloin; the perfectly cooked panroasted Chilean sea bass, or the Pueblo Garden vegetarian plate: red quinoa and wild rice stuffed ancho. Try a side order of the out-of-this-world bacon mashed potatoes. For dessert, go for the ovenfired blackberry cobbler with maple cream. Comments: Excellent selection of wine and imported beers. Mark Miller has done it again!

Rio Chama Steakhouse 414 Old Santa Fe Trail. 955-0765.

Sunday Brunch/Lunch/Dinner/Bar menu.

Full Bar. Smoke-free dining rooms.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American Steakhouse/New Mexican. Atmosphere: Pueblo-style adobe with vigas and plank floors.

House specialities: USDA Prime steaks and prime rib. Haystack fries and corn bread with honey butter. Other recommendations: For dessert, we love the chocolate pot.

Ristra 548 Agua Fria St.. 982-8608.

Dinner/Bar Menu Full Bar. Smoke-free. Patio Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Southwestern with French flair.

Atmosphere: Elegant new bar with an extensive bar menu, sophisticated and comfortable dining rooms, a charming outdoor patio. House specialties: Mediterranean mussels in chipotle and mint broth; ahi tuna tartare; squash blossom tempura; pistachio-crusted Alaskan halibut; and achiote grilled Elk tenderloin. Comments: Ristra offers an extensive wine list, and won the Wine Spectator Award of Excellence in 2006.

S an F rancisco S t . B ar & G rill 50 E. San Francisco St. 982-2044.

Lunch/Dinner Full bar.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: As American as apple pie.

Atmosphere: Casual with art on the walls. House specialties: At lunch, do try the San Francisco St. hamburger on a sourdough bun; the grilled salmon filet with black olive tapenade and arugula on a ciabatta roll; or the grilled yellowfin tuna nicoise salad with baby red potatoes. At dinner, we like the tender and flavorful twelve-ounce

S aveur 204 Montezuma St. 989-4200.

Breakfast/Lunch No alcohol. Smoke-free. Patio.

Visa/MasterCard. $ Cuisine: A mix of French and American.

Atmosphere: Cafeteria-style service for salad bar and soups. Deli case with meats and desserts. Sit down at small tables in very casual rooms, elbow to elbow. Bustling with locals every day.

House specialties: Excellent salad bar and sandwiches.

S econd S treet B rewery 1814 Second Street. 982-3030.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free inside. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Simple pub grub and brewery.

Atmosphere: Casual and very friendly.

House specialties: The beers, which are brewed on the premise are outstanding, especially when paired with beer-steamed mussels; beer-battered calamari; burgers; perfectly crunchy fish and chips; spicey green chile stew or the truly great grilled bratwurst.

Comments: A kid-friendly place.

T he S hed 113 1/ 2 E. Palace Ave. 982-9030.

Lunch/Dinner Beer/wine. Smoke-free. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: The Shed—a local institution; some say a local habit)—is housed in an adobe hacienda. House specialties: Try the stacked red or green chile cheese enchiladas with blue corn tortillas.

Comments: Check out their sister restaurant, La Choza, for the same classic New Mexican food.

S hohko C afé 321 Johnson St. 982-9708.

Lunch/Dinner Sake/Beer. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Authentic Japanese Cuisine.

Atmosphere: Sushi bar as well as table dining. House specialties: Softshell crab tempura; hamachi kama; sesame seafood salad, and Kobe beef with Japanese salsa.

Comments: Chat with the knowledgeable and friendly sushi chefs.

S teaksmith at E l G ancho Old Las Vegas Highway. 988-3333.

Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free dining room.

Major credit cards $$$ Cuisine: American.

Atmosphere: Family restaurant with full bar and lounge. House specialties: Aged steaks and lobster. Try the great pepper steak with Dijon cream sauce.

Comments: They know steak here.

Good pour at the bar.

T he T eahouse 821 Canyon Rd. 992-0972.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Wine/Beer Fireplace. 7 days. 8:30 am-9 pm.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Farm-to-table. Atmosphere: House specialties: Salmon Benedict w/poached eggs, Gourmet Cheeser sandwich, Polenta plate,soups with vegan base, fresh salads, and many organic teas and other drinks. Comments: Organic ingredients—from farm to fork.

T ia S oph i a ’ s 210 W. San Francisco St. 983-9880.

Breakfast/Lunch No alcohol. Smoking/non-smoking.

Major credit cards. $ Cuisine: New Mexican. Atmosphere: The “real deal.” Old wooden booths or tables. House specialties: Green chile stew (known to cure the common cold). Enormous breakfast burritos stuffed with bacon, potatoes, chile, and cheese.

T rat t o ri a N o s t r a n i 304 Johnson Street. 983-3800.

Dinner Wine/Beer. Smoke-free. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$$ Cuisine: Regional dishesfromNorthern Italy. Atmosphere: A 1887 renovated adobe with a great bar. House specialties: Begin with the chickpea soup with sweet Italian sausage or the radicchio salad with blue goat cheese dressing and candied pistachios, or the foie gras. For your main course, we recommend the braised duck with pappardelle or the saffron cannelloni with beef ragu and asiago. Comments: A comprehensive European wine list with over four-hundred selections.

Winner of Gourmet magazine’s “ Top 50 U.S. Restaurants.” And in 2009, Frommer ’s Guide included Trattoria Nostrani as one of the “ Top 500 Restaurants in the World.”

T re e H o us e C af é & P as t ry S h op 1600 Lena St. 474-5543.

Breakfast and lunch Closed Monday Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Using only organic ingredients.

Atmosphere: Light, bright, and cozy.

House Specialties: Fresh Farmer ’s Market salad; soup and sandwich of the day; quiche, and the vegetable quesadilla.

Comments: Try the mile-high quiche with a flaky whole wheat crust.

T ul i p s 222 N. Guadalupe St. 989-7340 Dinner Wine/Beer. Smoke-free. Patio.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: Whimsical gourmet.

Atmosphere: Intimate. Two small rooms with beautiful art on the walls.

House specialties: Lobster spring rolls, organic chicken liver pate, and marinated venison tenderloin.

Comments: For dessert, go for the award-winning airy Grand Marnier infused chocolate mousse “tulip.”

V a n e s s i e o f S a n ta F e 434 W. San Francisco St. 982-9966.

Dinner Full bar. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$$ Cuisine: American. Atmosphere: Piano bar and oversize everything, thanks to architect Ron Robles.

House specialties: New York steak and Australian rock lobster tail. Comments: Great appetizers, generous drinks.

Vinaigrette 709 Don Cubero Alley. 820-9205 Lunch/Dinner Beer and Wine. Smoke-free.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: Farm-to-table. Atmosphere: Light, sunny, cheerful, and welcoming.

House specialties: The Nutty Pear-fessor salad with grilled bosc pears, bacon, toasted pecans, and Gorgonzola, served over a bed of greens, and the Chop Chop salad are utterly fantastic. Wonderful soups, sanwiches, and sides round out the menu. Try the apple pie for dessert—it will not disappoint.

Comments: Owner Erin Wade grows organic greens at her Nambe farm, delivering the freshness and quality that farm-to -table slow food promises.

Zia Diner 326 S. Guadalupe St. 988-7008.

Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Full bar. Smoking/non-smoking. Pato.

Major credit cards. $$ Cuisine: As American as Mom’s apple pie. Atmosphere: Down home and casual. House specialties: Absolutely the best meat loaf in town, served with real mashed potatoes and gravy; a variety of of hamburgers and cheeseburgers; and the “real deal” chickenfried chicken. Comments: If you like ice cream, you will love the hot fudge sundae. And, there are great pasteries are available for take- out.

THE

MAGAZINE

| 25

Join us for the premiere of SOFA WEST: Santa Fe

Opening Night Wednesday, June 10 A benefit for the New Mexico Museum of Art

SOFA WEST Celebrates at the Santa Fe Opera!

Join glass maestro Lino Tagliapietra for an evening of food, wine, and music at the Santa Fe Opera, surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez Mountains. Highlights from operas La Traviata and The Elixir of Love will be performed. Saturday evening, June 13, $50/per person. Tickets on sale in April at www.sofaexpo.com

Christine McHorse, represented by CLARK+DELVECCHIO

Sculpture Objects & Functional Art Fair June 11-14, 2009 Santa Fe Convention Center

ART OPENINGS

M AY

ART OPENINGS

Friday, May 1 Bali & BeyO ey nd, 218 Galisteo St., Santa Fe. 989-1415. Sunrise in Bali: contemporary and traditional art from the Island of the Gods.

4-7 pm.

Blue rain Gallery, 130 Lincoln Ave., Santa Fe. 954-9902. Tony Abeyta and Richard Zane Smith: new work. 5-7 pm.

Smith BriGht rain Gallery, 206 ½ San Felipe, Alb. 505-843-9176. What We Left Behind: new work by David Polka. 6-9 pm. charlO harl tte jacksOn fine art, 200 W. Marcy St., Santa Fe. 989-8688. Full Circle: new sculptural works by Elliot Norquist.

5-7:30 pm.

Gallery chartreuse, 216 Washington Ave., Santa Fe. 992-3391. Grand Opening: sculpture, painting, and photography.

5:30-8:30 pm.

GeBert cOnteMPOrary, 550 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 992-1100. John Randall Nelson: paintings, drawings, sculpture, and video.

5-7 pm. handsel Gallery, 616½ Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 455-2393. Hilario: new paintings. 5-7 pm. ki kiMO theater lOBBy OBB art Gallery, 423 Central Ave. NW, Alb. 505-768-3522. Natural Transformations: group show. 6-8 pm.

Transformations ManitOu Galleries, 123 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 986-0440. Jerry Jordan & Brent Lawrence: Southwestern landscapes by Lawrence Jordan. Sculptural wall-reliefs by Lawrence.

5-7:30 pm.

M AY 1 — M AY 2 9

PeytO eyt n WriGht, 237 E. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 989-9888. Herbert Bayer (1900-1985): Fifty Years of Prints: 1930-1980 1930-1980: prints and posters.

5-8 pm.

OPen sPace P visitOr center, 6500 Coors Blvd. NW, Alb. 505-897-8831. Gatherings: installation by Linda Holland and Becky Holtzman. 1-4 pm.

MariGOld arts, 424 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 982-4142. Keeping It Real: paintings

by Ruth Tatter. Paintings and monoprints

by Christine Seubert-Bourque. 5-8 pm.

rOBin Gray desiGn, 511 Agua Fria St., Santa Fe. 995-8411. Faces of Freedom: The RugMark Foundation Artists Artists: photography by U. Roberto Romano. 5-8 pm.

WedneSday, May 6 Wedne

selBy fleetWOOd Gallery, 600 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-8877. Spring Forth: Small Works Works: spring show. 5-7 pm.

suMner ner & dene, 517 Central Ave. NW, Alb. 505-842-1400. New Mexico Skies: acrylic paintings by Angus Macpherson. Pastels by Katherine Irish Henry. Oil paintings by Jeannie Sellmer. 5-9 pm. tOuchinG stO t ne, 539 Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe. 988-8072. Forms Unbound: contemporary Japanese ceramics by Yukiya Izumita. 5-7 pm. ventana fine art, 400 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-8815. Open Windows: All Artists Exhibition: new work by gallery artists. 5-7 pm.

Weyrich Gallery, 2935-D Louisiana Blvd.

NE, Alb. Fresh Ink: Zen paintings by Susan Linnell. 5-9 pm.

WilliaM shearBurn Gallery, 129 W. San Francisco St., 2nd Floor, Santa Fe. 989-8020.

On Paper Paper: group exhibition of works on paper.

5-7 pm.

Saturday, May 2 203 fine art, 203 Ledoux St., Taos. 575751-1262. Platones, Aplastados y Dichos: new works by Ron Cooper. 5-7 pm.

center fOr cOnteMPOrary arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 982-1338. Go For Launch: installation by Gardner Post and Launch Brian Kane. 6-8 pm.

Friday, May 8 casa cOnteMPOrary fine art, 300 E. Marcy St., Santa Fe. 660-2001. Group Show: featuring local artists. 5-8 pm. center fOr cOnteMPOrary arts, Spector Ripps Project Space, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. 982-1338. Schoolgirls and Schoolboys: new work by Erin Currier. 5-7 pm. chiarOscurO cOnteMPOrary art, 702 1/2 Canyon Rd. (Gypsy Alley). Santa Fe. 992-0711. At This Point in Time: paintings

by Susan Sales. Casting About: work by Gretchen Wachs. 5-7 pm.

verve Gallery Of PhOtOGraPhy, 219 E. Marcy St., Santa Fe. 982-5009. Intimate Landscape: fashion and photography Landscape

by Pascal Demeester. Photography by Lorena G. Vaschetti. 5-7 pm. Artist talk at 2 pm.

Saturday, May 9 Parks Gallery, 127 Bent St., Taos. 575751-0343. Douglas Johnson: Paintings and Prints, 1969 to 2009 2009. 4-6 pm.

GhOst POny Gallery, 1634 State Road 76, Truchas. 505-927-8070. Myth and Memory: Icons of the American West West: mixed-media paintings by Trish Booth.

4-7 pm.

Friday, May 15 GOldleaf Gallery, 627 W. Alameda St., Santa Fe. 988-5005. Heart Project: new work by Meg Hachmann. 5:30-7:30 pm.

BOx Gallery, BO

institute Of aMerican indian arts MuseuM, 108 Cathedral Pl., Santa Fe. 983-8900. Second Annual IAIA New Media Arts Spring Graduate Film Premiere Premiere. 6-8 pm.

dr fine art, 123 Galisteo St., Santa Fe. 642-4981. Grand Opening: landscape paintings by David Rothermel. 5-8 pm.

1611-A Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 989-4897. Voyage: paintings by Kathleen Morris. 5-7 pm.

ja aMes kelly cOnteMPOrary, 1601 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 989-1601. Qnuru: sculptural solar landscape lighting fixtures designed by Tom Joyce. 5-7 pm.

MariPOsa sa Gallery, Nob Hill, 3500 Central Ave. SE, Alb. 505-268-6828. Lauren Tobey: metal work. Eric McCollon: mixed media. Memory Cloths: work by Leslee Nelson. 5-8 pm.

Cloths

MuseuM Of internatiOnal fOlk art, 706 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe. 476-1200.

Writing with Thread: Traditional Textiles of Southwest Chinese Minorities Minorities. 5-7:30 pm.

Matrix fine art, 3812 Central Ave. SE, Suite 100-B, Alb. 505-268-8952. Don’t Look: paintings and sculptures by Katrina Lasko.

5-8 pm.

Palette cOnteMPOrary art and craft, 7400 Montgomery NE, Suite 22, Alb. 505-855-7777. Past Perfect: photography

by Steve Lewis. 5-8 pm.

neW W GrOunds Print WOrkshOP & Gallery, 3812 Central Ave. SE, Suite 100-B, Alb. 505-268-8952. Peep Show: gravure by Diane Alire. 5-8 pm.

sca cOnteMPOrary art, 524 Haines NW, Alb. 505-351-4067. the world is flat (driving in my car I think of you) you): group show. 5:30-7:30 pm.

Patina Gallery, 131 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe. 986-1879. Homage to Sandro: mobiles, assemblages, and garden sculptures by Ivan Barnett. 5:30-7:30 pm.

WilliaM sieGal Gallery, 540 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 820-3300. David Henderson: sculptures. Paula Roland: Henderson encaustics. 5-7 pm.

Qnuru: solar powered landscape lighting fixtures designed by Tom Joyce at James Kelly Contemporary, 1601 Paseo de Peralta. Reception: Friday, May 15, 5-7 pm.

continued on page 30

| may 2009

The magazine | 27

WHO SAID THIS?

“If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we are not really living. ” A: Nelson Mandela B: Gail Sheehy C: Margaret Mead D: Aldous Huxley E: Carl Jung

HERE’S THE DEAL! $500 full-page ads in the June issue for artists without gallery representation in New Mexico.

Deadline: Friday, May 15. 505-424-7641

OUT & ABOUT Photos: Mr. Clix, Dana Waldon,

and Jennifer Esperanza

ART OPENINGS

Saturday, May 16 suMner ner & dene, 517 Central Ave. NW, Alb. 505-842-1400. Capture New Mexico: photography by Woody Galloway.

Mexico Watercolors by Mary Hoeksema. 5-8 pm.

Show members of the Ryder Studio Show: School show portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. 5-7 pm. eli levin studiO, 830 Canyon Rd, Santa Fe. 986-8071. New Work: realist landscape and still lifes by Michele Tisdale. 5-7 pm.

Sunday, May 17 el farOl, 808 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 9839912. Mitos (Myths): paintings by Marghreta Cordero. 5-7 pm.

WheelW heel riGht ht MuseuM Of the aMerican indian, 704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe. 9824636. Through Their Eyes: Paintings from the Santa Fe Indian School School: paintings by students who attended the Santa Fe Indian School between 1919 and 1945. 1-5 pm.

GeBert cOnteMPOrary, 558 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-1100. Ron Slowinski: new paintings. 5-7 pm. hunter kirkland cOnteMPOrary, 200-B Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 984-2111. Kensho: mixed media on wood panels by Jennifer J. L. Jones. 5-7 pm. inart santa fe Gallery, 219 Delgado St., Santa Fe. 983-6537. Afterglow: paintings

by Nancy Reyner. 5-8 pm.

Friday, May 22 canyO any n rOad O cOnteMPOrary art, 403 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-0433. Group

karan ruhlen Gallery, 225 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 820-0807. Pressed and Layered: chine-collé monotypes and Layered

Schoolgirls and Schoolboys,, new work by Erin Currier at the Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail.

Reception on Friday, May 8, 5 to 7 pm.

collage/mixed media on canvas by Janet Lippincott. 5-7 pm. leW Wallen Galleries, 1613 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 988-8997. Grand Opening Reception: paintings by Ronnie Landfield.

Reception 5:30-7:30 pm.

Meyer east Gallery, 225 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 983-1657. Brian Kershisnik: New Works: paintings. 5-7 pm. selBy B fleetWOO By leet d Gallery, 600 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 992-8877. Edge of Color: abstract landscapes by Sandra Pratt. 5-7 pm. turner carrOll ll Gallery, 725 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 986-9800. Contemporary Tapestries: Belgian-woven, Jacquard tapestries by major American artists. 5-7 pm.

Saturday, May 23 POP Gallery santa fe, 133 W. Water St., Santa Fe. 820-0788. POP Femme Sugar Coated Strange: work in 2D and 3D. Silent art auction Strange to benefit Southwest C.A.R.E. Center. 6 pm.

Wilder niGhtinGale fine art, 119-A Kit Carson Rd., Taos. 575-758-3255. Far Out: work by Kemper Coley, Peggy Immel, and Judith Stroh-Miller. 5-7 pm.

Sunday, May 24 taO aOs center fOr the arts encOre Gallery, 145 Paseo del Pueblo Norte, Taos. 575-7582052. Summer of Love to Woodstock: Behind the Lens With Lisa Law Law: photographer and documentary artist Lisa Law. 4:30-6:30 pm.

Film screening of “Flashing on the Sixties” at 6:45 pm.

Friday, May 29 GeBert cOnteMPOrary, 544 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 983-3838. Little Islands: new paintings by Udo Nöger. 5-7 pm.

Solo show by Lucy Maki at Linda Durham Contemporary, 1101 Paseo de Peralta. Reception: Saturday, May 16, 5-7 pm.

GeBert cOnteMPOrary, 550 S. Guadalupe St. Santa Fe. 983-5444. Painted: work by Katrin Möller. 5-7 pm.

institute Of aMerican indian arts MuseuM, 108 Cathedral Pl., Santa Fe. 983-8900. Dennis Esquivel: new paintings.

4-7 pm. klaudia Marr Gallery, 668 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 988-2100. All On Paper: group show. Flight: paintings by Isabelle du Toit.

5-7 pm.

Special intereSt 516 arts, 516 Central Ave. SW, Alb. 505-242-1445. 516 WORDS: reading with memoirist, poet, journalist, and critic Michael Datcher. Sat., May 9, 7:30 pm. adOBe Gallery, 221 Canyon Road, Santa Fe. 955-0550. Pueblo Pottery of Santo Domingo and Cochiti Cochiti. Through July 15.

Garcia street BOOks, 376 Garcia St., Santa Fe. 986-0151. What We Eat When We Eat Alone: book signing with Deborah Madison Alone and Patrick McFarlin. Fri., May 8, 5 pm.

GeOrG r ia O’keeffe MuseuM, 217 Johnson St., rG Santa Fe. 946-1000. Modernists in New Mexico: works from a private collector. Through Thurs., May 10. Debating Modern Photography: The Triumph of Group f/64 f/64: photography. Fri., May 22 through Sat. Sept. 12.

Girls inc. Of santa fe, Girls Inc. Hillside Center, 301 Hillside Ave., Santa Fe. 9822042. Growing Together Workshop: open to the public, for a girl and a trusted adult.

Sat., May 2 and Sat., May 9, 10 am-5 pm. To register: willis@girlsincofsantafe.or willis@girlsincofsantafe.org harWOO ar d MuseuM Of art, 238 Ledoux St., Taos. 575-758-9826. Hopper Curates: work

by Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Ronald Davis, Ken Price, and Robert Dean Stockwell.

Through Sun., Sept. 20. iaia caMPus, 83 Avan Nu Po Rd., Santa Fe. 424-2387. The Four Seasons of Wellness: Cultivating Mind, Body and Spirit Spirit: conference on the emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health of people of all ages. Thurs., May 21 and Fri., May 22, 8 am-5 pm.

continued on page 32

30 | The magazine

| may 2009

SAM SCOTT

Albuquerque • Santa Fe • Mountainair 60+ artists • 25+ organizations • exhibitions • site-specific projects lectures • performances • tours • poetry & more

Blog: www.smudgestudio.org Coordinated by 516 ARTS • Downtown Albuquerque • 505-242-1445

Dennis DennisHopper, Hopper,Biker BikerCouple, Couple,1961, 1961,silver silvergelatin gelatinprint, print,16" 16"xx24" 24"

Formal Critique for Painters

H O P P E R AT T H E H A R W O O D L.A. TO TAOS: 40 YEARS OF FRIENDSHIP Larry Bell Dennis Hopper

Ron Cooper Ken Price

Ronald Davis

Robert Dean Stockwell

May 8 – September 20, 2009 Artists Reunion Dinner, May 3 of The The University University of of New New Mexico Mexico of

575.758.9826 Taos, New Mexico www.harwoodmuseum.org visit www.newmexico.org

Opening Reception, May 9, 3 pm Douglas Dreisphoon Lecture, May 5, 5 pm Panel discussion with Dave Hickey, August 1, 6 pm Catalog available

984-0039 for appointment

ART OPENINGS

Marty sanchez links de santa fe GOlf cOurse, 205 Caja del Rio Rd., Santa Fe. 4282346. Duffers & Divas Kids Golf Tournament: proceeds benefit Open Hands. Sat., May 9.

Info: openhands.org MuseuM Of indian arts and culture, Milner Plaza on Museum Hill, Santa Fe. 4765105. A River Apart: The Pottery of Cochiti and Santo Domingo Pueblos Pueblos: an examination of the pottery traditions of the two Pueblos.

Collage and Chine-Colle by Janet Lippincott at Karan Ruhlen Gallery, 225 Canyon Rd. Reception: Friday, May 22, 5-7 pm.

institute Of aMerican indian arts MuseuM, 108 Cathedral Pl., Santa Fe. 9838900. Museum Collection Tours: take a guided tour with the IAIA Museum’s Curator of Collections, Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer.

Wed., May 6, 11 am, Thurs., May 14, 2 pm, and Fri., May 22, 11 am. Info: iaia.edu judy yOuens Gallery, 826 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe. 466-3357. Feminine Essence: group show focused on femininity. To Sun., May 31.

12th Annual Placitas Studio Tour on May 9-10, 10-5 pm.

Above painting by Wayne Mikosz and Riha Rothberg. placitasstudiotour.com

lannan fOundatiOn, Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe. 988-1234. Lannan Readings & Conversations Series Series: Marge Piercy with Martín Espada. Wed., May 20, 7 pm. Info: lannan.org llO lOyd Oyd kiva neW W Gallery, iaia MuseuM, 108 Cathedral Pl., Santa Fe. 424-2351.

Art with Heart Heart: silent and live art auction to benefit New Mexico Community AIDS Partnership. Fine art, festivities, party, raffle, wine, hors d’oeuvres, and live music. Art show: May 19-29. Party and auction on Fri., May 29, 6-9 pm. Info: nmcap@yahoo.com nmcap@yahoo.co

30 | The magazine

neW W MexicO histOry ry MuseuM, 113 Lincoln Ave., Santa Fe. 476-1141. Grand Opening: various grand opening events Sun., May 24.

Offcenter cOMMunity arts PrOject O O Oject , 808 Park Ave. SW, Alb. 505-247-1172. 4th Annual Albuquirky House Tour Tour: tour of three unusual houses. Sat., May 2, 1-4 pm. Call for info.

Placitas, nM, I-25 to exit 242, just east of I-25 on Hwy 165. Placitas Studio Tour: a free, self-guided tour of artwork at 42 sites and galleries. Sat. and Sun., May 9 and 10, 10 am-5 pm. Info: placitasstudiotour.com PrevieW W Gallery, Eldorado Community School, corner of Avenida Vista Grand and Avenida Torreon, Eldorado. 670-6649. 18th Annual Eldorado Studio Tour Tour: artwork by 72 studios and galleries in Eldorado. Sat. and Sun, May 16 and 17, 10 am-5 pm. santa fe art institute, 1600 St. Michael’s Drive, Santa Fe. 424-5050. Talk and Performance: Issa Nyaphaga, painter and political cartoonist at Tipton Hall, May 4, 6 pm. Lecture: photographer and activist David Maisel at Tipton Hall, May 11, 6 pm.

Workshop/Portfolio Review Review: David Maisel. May 12, 10 am-4 pm. Birds in the Park Installation:

by Christy Hengst. SFAI (exterior, front entrance). May 12, 9 am-5 pm. Memory Preserved: The Crypto-Jewish Roots of New Mexico: concert, readings & panel discussion Mexico at Tipton Hall. May 14, 6 pm. Info: sfai.org

santa fe cOMPlex, 632 Agua Fria, Santa Fe 216-7562. Manipulated Image: Potter-Belmar Labs will present short experimental videos, followed by Live Cinema Performance and discussion. Fri., May 29, 8-10 pm. santa fe cOuncil fOr the arts, inc., Cathedral Park, the corner of Palace Ave. and Cathedral Pl., next to St. Francis Cathedral. 424-1878. New Mexico Arts Market: juried arts and crafts shows Market featuring Southwest artists. Sat. and Sun, May 30 to 31, August 15 to 16 and October 3 to 4, 2009. 10 am-5 pm. Info: artscounsf@aol.com

Season 2009 2009: weekly musical performances throughout May. Info: outpostspace.org st. jOhn’s cOlleGe, Peterson Student Center, 1160 Camino Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe. 984-6000. Brahms: The Complete Sonatas for Piano and Violin Violin: Stefan Jackiw, violinist, and Max Levinson, pianist. Fri., May 1, 8 pm. Info: stjohnscollege.edu

perForMing artS p riO Grande theatre, 11 N. Downtown Mall, Las Cruces. 575-523-6403. Dancing On Air Air: aerialists, dance, music, and poetry. sat., May 23, 2009. Call for details.

shy raBBit cOnteMPOrary arts, 333 Bastille Dr., Pagosa Springs, CO. 970731-2766. The Contemporary Photograph: national juried exhibition of 33 artists from USA and Canada. Closing reception Sat., June 6, 5-8 pm.

santa fe PlayhOuse, 142 E. De Vargas St., Santa Fe. 988-4262. Greater Tuna: a comedic play. Thurs., May 14 to Sun., May 31. Info: santafeplayhouse.org

WeBster cOllectiOn, 52 1/2 Lincoln Ave., Santa Fe. 954-9500. Vivid: photography

by Zoe Danae Falliers and Robert Stivers with works by Michael Eastman, David Levinthal, and Chuck Ramirez. Through Fri., June 5.

The santa fe renaissance fair is seeking original poster designs for the 2009 event, which will be held Sat. and Sun., Sept. 19 and 20 at El Rancho de las Golondrinas.

Deadline for submissions: midnight, Fri., May 15, 2009. Info: Charles Veilleux, 9821117, charles@veilleuxfineart.com

WilliaM sieGal Gallery, 540 S. Guadalupe, Santa Fe. 820-3300. Parkinson’s: A Journey Through Time and Space Space: paintings and digital composite images by Bunny Conlon and Eddie Dayan. Through May. zane Bennett cOnteMPOrary art, 435 S. Guadalupe St., Santa Fe. 982-8111.

Nineties ‘Til Now Now: work by Peter Lodato.

Through Sat., June 6.

MuSic Mu OutPOst PerfOrMance sPa Pace ace, 210 Yale SE, Alb. 505-268-0044. 20th Anniversary Spring

ccall For artiStS

center fOr fine art PhOt OtOG Ot tOGraPhy, 400 North College Ave. Fort Collins, CO. 970-2241010. Accepting submissions for documentary photography. Entries due by midnight, Tues., May 12. Juror: Ed Kashi. Info: http://c4fap.org/ cfe/2009Documentary/documentary.asp The 13th annual nO dead artists juried exhiBitiOn is now accepting submissions. Submission deadline is Fri., July 17. The exhibition will be on view from Wed. to Sat., Sept. 2-26 at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans. Info: jonathanferraragallery.com

santa fe arts cOMMissiOn cOMMunity Gallery, 201 W. Marcy St., Santa Fe. 9556705. What Seeds Have Borne: Current Monotypes from Local Artists Artists: a juried exhibition of new works. Sat., May 9. santa fe clay, 1615 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe. 984-1122. In House: work made by faculty. Through Sat., May 30. santa fe cOMMunity cOlleGe, 6401 Richards Ave., Santa Fe. 428-1501. Project Known Quantity Quantity: installation by Isabella Gonzales. Each piece can be sponsored for $300; proceeds go toward providing a service dog for a veteran. Fri., May 29. Info: assistancedogsofthewest.org

Douglas Johnson: Paintings and Prints, 1969 to 2009 opens Saturday, May 9 at Parks Gallery, 127 Bent St., Taos. Reception: 4-6 pm.

| may 2009

PREVIEWS

Herbert Bayer (1900-1985): Fifty Years of Prints, 1930-1980 May 1 to June 2 Peyton Wright Gallery, 237 East Palace Avenue, Santa Fe. 989-9888 Opening reception: Friday, May 1, 5 to 8 pm.

The exhibition includes a number of rare 1930s posters and an extensive selection of monoprints, lithographs, and silkscreen prints created up until just a few years before Herbert Bayer’s death. Born in Austria, this renowned Bauhaus master’s first exposure to the world of print and posters was as an apprentice to architect and designer Georg Smidthammer. Bayer learned drawing, painting, and architectural drafting while creating posters and advertisements for his mentor. Later on at the Bauhaus school, Bayer was influenced by its focus on simplified forms, rationality and functionality, and the integration of art and industry. Four years later Bayer was appointed director of the new Bauhaus printing and advertising workshop in Dessau. In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine’s Berlin office, as well as the Director of the Dorland Studio in Berlin. In 1938, Bayer e*/*migrated to the United States where he eventually served as a chairman of the design department at the Container Corporation where he created a series of advertisements called “Great Ideas of Western Man.” Bayer eventually became a significant artistic and cultural force in Aspen, where he worked as a design consultant for the Aspen Institute, the Atlantic Richfield Company, the Aspen Music Festival, and the town of Aspen itself.

In 1968, Bayer designed an articulated wall construction for the Olympics in Mexico City. This exhibition will be the most comprehensive viewing of Herbert Bayer’s works on paper in the United States since 1982.

John Randall Nelson: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture, and Video May 1 to May 23 Gebert Contemporary, 550 South Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe. 992-1100 Opening reception: Friday, May 1, 5 to 7 pm.

Known for using simple, bold, instantly recognizable images of everyday symbols, John Randall Nelson imbibes all forms of expression with a sense of theater. Well versed in semiotic theory, Nelson causes images to function like words in a sentence: the meaning of each image is dependent on how it is paired with another image—each one infused with a changing, subjective symbolism. Influenced by American folk artists such as Bill Traylor and Simon Rodia, Nelson adds a cogent postmodern twist that transforms an outsider sensibility into conceptual, text-influenced works. His paintings, drawings, sculptures, and videos all provoke a zany delight and deliver a punch with their playful pictorials, thus leading the viewer into Nelson’s own paradoxically jokey view of the universe.

John Randall Nelson, Face of a Man from Saturna, mixed media, 52” x 36”, 2009

34 | THE magazine

Herbert Bayer, Four Warped Squares, silkscreen, 30” x 30”, 1971

Douglas Johnson: Paintings and Prints, 1969 to 2009 May 9 to June 2 Parks Gallery, 127 Bent Street, Taos. 575-751-0343 Opening reception: Saturday, May 9, 4 to 6 pm.

In collaboration with Taos’s town-wide celebration, Summer of Love, Parks Gallery will offer several exhibitions of what gallery owner Steve Parks calls 60s Survivors. Douglas Johnson’s paintings and prints will be the first in the series. “The 60s in Taos… were the beginning of a new era of art in northern New Mexico,” says Parks. “Young artists were coming here to escape the war, of course, but also to work as their forbears had, in an environment relatively unaffected by the aesthetic dictates of both East and West coasts. As the poet Robinson Jeffers described an earlier wave of artists in Taos, they were ‘pilgrims from civilization, anxiously seeking beauty, religion, poetry; pilgrims from the vacuum.’ Some moved on, some died or burned out, a few like Douglas prevailed.” A self-taught painter, Johnson created miniature gouache paintings with jewel-like color, many inspired by the ceremonies and symbolism of Pueblo, Navajo, and Hopi people. Johnson’s work took off in the early 70s when there was a huge surge in interest in the Southwest with its dramatic landscapes and ancient, still authentic, cultures. Johnson’s art, with its quality of almost mystical beauty, became emblematic of the glories of the region. This show will include these early works, as well as works inspired by travels to exotic locales in South America and Asia, along what used to be known as the Hippie Trail. Some of his newest paintings are collage-like amalgams of times and cultures that reveal his deep interest in the history of the region.

Douglas Johnson, 1932 Cadillac Phaeton V-16, gouache, 5” x 7¼”, nd

| may 2009

V I T K O V S K I architect . artist second street studios rdstdesgin@aol.com 616.262.8111

N AT I O N A L S P O T L I G H T

Kim McCarty Watercolor on Arches paper, 2009 Los Angeles artist Kim McCarty makes diaphanous watercolor portraits, whose embellishment of the figure suggests adolescent androgyny.

McCarty’s method makes good use of watercolor as a liquid medium. Her finely honed treatments of a wet-in-wet process depict the bodies with thin, broad washes and short dashes of color, which bleed at their edges. These are lush and sensuous paintings. Leah Ollman writes: “McCarty uses watercolor’s fluidity to portray identities that are themselves fluid.” McCarty’s work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, UCLA Hammer Museum, and the Honolulu Academy of Art. The exhibition is on view through May 16 at Kim Light/LightBox, 2656 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles. D | may 2009

THE magazine |37

MONROE GALLERY of photography

Elliott B. Oppenheim, MD, JD, LLM. Health Law Literary Agent

MARK SHAW Retrospective exhibition concurrent with the new book Charmed By Audrey

Formal Literary Review and Representation Screenplay, novel, gut-wrenching first person Serious, skilled, well-trained writers

Photographed for LIFE in 1953, Audrey Hepburn, under the hair dryer

Exhibition continues through June 28 112 DON GASPAR SANTA FE NM 87501 992.0800 F: 992.0810 e: info@monroegallery.com www.monroegallery.com

800-416-1192 Intellitek@aol.com for Appointment

ANDREW SMITH GALLERY, INC. Masterpieces of Photography

We have moved!

We have consolidated at our new location at 122 Grant Ave. On the corner of Grant and Johnson next to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

The House of Photography 122 Grant Ave., Santa Fe, NM 87501 • 505.984.1234 • www.AndrewSmithGallery.com

PERSON OF INTEREST

Question: Who is the most influential radical cultural visionary of the 20th century?

Answer: Brion Gysin—

painter, performance artist, and sound poet.

Brion Gysin

gone but not forgotten By

Question: Who? Answer: You know, the guy who ushered in the multimedia age, whose work with William S. Burroughs is considered to be the most important collaboration in modern literature...

Question: Brian?

Answer: No. Brion, like the wine, Château HautBrion Bordeaux.

Self-portrait by Brion Gysin

Kathelin Gray

Brion Gysin called himself “the man from nowhere,” though he was also the man from everywhere, considering himself variously Swiss, British, Canadian, American, Moroccan, and French. He had lived on multiple continents by the time he was sixteen.

When he arrived in Paris at the Sorbonne, he began to paint and associated with Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Dora Maar, and Picasso.

At nineteen, Gysin was invited to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition, but the night before the opening, Paul Eluard, on orders from André Breton, ejected him from the Surrealist movement for “incorrect politics.”

In protest, Gysin set up his painting on the sidewalk outside. Shortly after that he sailed to New York, designed costumes for Irene Sharaff on Broadway, worked as a shipyard welder, danced the Lindy Hop at the Savoy, befriended composer/author Paul Bowles, and shared a studio with Chilean painter Roberto Matta. Billie Holiday gave him the keys to her apartment. He enlisted in the Canadian army during World War II and was assigned to the intelligence unit, where a study of Japanese calligraphy ignited a lifelong passion for the matrix of image and word. On airborne spy missions between Miami and Havana, he saw fiery cosmic calligraphy in red-gold clouds. continued on page 40

| may 2009

The magazine | 39

By 1950, By

Bowles had become the center of an artistic circle in

power structures such as organized religion, they devised new techniques—new

Tangier. He invited Gysin to visit, and Gysin moved in.

magic—to deconstruct the exploitative social systems which wreak havoc on the

Entranced by the local Master Musicians of Jajouka during an ancient Rite of Pan, Gysin

planet’s ecology and people’s innate savvy.

shouted, “I want to hear that music for the rest of my life!” With Jajouka as his house

Gysin found revolutionary inspiration in the legendary eleventh-century

band, he opened the 1001 Nights club in Tangier, a magnet for artists, eccentrics, royalty,

Old Man of the Mountain, Hassan i Sabbah—mystic founder of the Ismaeli

diplomats, expats, and spies. He avoided Burroughs, who was holed up in a cold-water

band of Hashashins, or Assassins, whose mendicants/secret agents infiltrated

flat near the Casbah alternately staring at his toes and attacking the typewriter for hours

Europe from a legendary fortress atop Persia’s Mount Alamut. Today, the Aga

on end, producing a thousand unnumbered pages, which carpeted the floor. Now a

Khan is its wealthy inheritor. Gysin replaced the Assassin’s dagger and sword

denizen of North Africa, Gysin painted the desert and evolved a personal calligraphic

with scissors, and transformed a Surrealist technique: “While cutting a mount

style inspired by both Asian and Arabic forms. The 1001 Nights’ glamorous clientele

for a drawing, I sliced through a pile of newspapers with my Stanley blade....

vanished in the 1956 dissolution of Tangier as an International Zone, and he closed

I picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts that later appeared

the club. As he left he discovered a

as “First Cutups: Minutes to Go.”

potent Berber charm of mirror shards

Fueled by three to four grams of

and a cabbalistic grid that had been

hashish a day, they systematically

anonymously placed in the kitchen’s

cut-up words and images, often

stovepipe inscribed, “May Massa

from

Brahim leave this place like smoke

them to reveal hidden meanings.

leaves fire.”

Burroughs sprinkled his novels

In the cold Paris spring of

1958,

Gysin

bumped

newspapers,

rearranging

with “See, see the Silent Writing

into

of Brion Gysin, Hassan i Sabbah!”

Burroughs on the Place St. Michel,

—both amusing and embarrassing

and their lifelong collaboration

Gysin. The two investigated ways

began. They lodged in a bohemian

to expose the monumental fraud

flophouse that Gregory Corso

of cause-and-effect thinking.

christened The Beat Hotel. Its feisty

proprietress

Gysin

nurtured

altered

his

cut-up

technique to produce what he

wayward habits of artists, creating

called

an ideal testing-ground for new

which a single phrase was repeated

forms of art and identity. Gysin

with the words rearranged in

meditated on the meaning of the

a

Tangier charm: he played with

iteration: “I don’t work you dig/

grid patterns in his art until they

You work I don’t dig.” He derived

metamorphosed into x and y

permutations

coordinates of psychic location

sequence

and teleportation, architectured

early computer program written

hyperspace, or quantum particles.

by

He

apparent

Ian Sommerville, with whom he

constancy of identity in sustained

also built the Dreamachine—a

mirror-gazing

For

sculpture and flicker device in

Burroughs, the final edit of his

the eight to twelve per second

book was an issue—outtakes were

range,

once again scattered underfoot,

spontaneous hallucinations. Gysin

material for later novels. Gysin

called the Dreamachine a drugless

challenged

the

sessions.

observed that Burroughs “was more intent on Scotch-taping his

Gysin and Burroughs in Geneva, 1975. Photograph by Francois Lagarde

permutation

different

order

using

generator

Cambridge

which

poems,

with

a

in

each

random from

an

mathematician

can

stimulate

psychedelic, the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed,

photos together into one great

“giving an extended vision of one’s

continuum on the wall, where

own interior capacities which

scenes faded and slipped into one

could also be overwhelming.”

another.” Gysin helped Burroughs

He thought that those interior

order the final galleys of his novel, which Jack Kerouac had named Naked Lunch,

capacities were the next art form, superceding painting. Biographer Terry Wilson

and Olympia Press published in 1959.

wryly observes that avant-garde art was a cover for their esoteric activities.

While other dwellers of the Left Bank’s Beat Hotel assumed that putting LSD

Gysin and Burroughs experimented in sound and image, using collage, tape

in water supplies would change the world, to our duo such a Garden of Delights

recorder, light-painting, writing, and film, and co-authored “Third Mind,” the

was yet another control system. Burroughs had studied anthropology at Harvard

term they used for the symbiotic fusion of two creative minds, creating a third

and medicine in Vienna and was also interested in word/image, specifically Mayan

and superior virtual mind. Their work has had a pervasive influence on popular

and Egyptian hieroglyphics. He brought science to the partnership. Post-Morocco,

and underground cultures, inspiring David Bowie, Patti Smith, J.G. Ballard, Bill

Gysin considered magic a fact of everyday existence. To both,

Laswell, Keith Haring, D.J. Spooky, Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey), Michael

magic was unquantified technique that facilitates action. Steadfastly opposed to

Stipe, and legions of young cultural explorers.

PERSON OF INTEREST

Gysin spent his last decade living opposite the entrance to the Centre

club. The work is a homage to the inferno and to the creative flame—a trance-

Georges Pompidou in Paris. He documented the construction of the museum in

inducing shaman’s fire, dancing sunlight, a romp in a field of dandelions, the

photographs. Later, from his balcony, he peered through binoculars to inspect

interior of a giant spinning Dreamachine. He called it “The Makimono,” a

the comings and goings of painters and their widows on deal-making missions

Japanese folding book, though he did not construct its ten panels to be folded—

within. Most midnights, he catted out for an appearance at the Palace club—

thus an always-open book. Ian MacFadyen points out this gives particular

people-watching, inspecting travelos (transvestites), and drinking whiskey with

meaning to “I am The Artist when I am open. When closed, I am Brion Gysin.”

Bianca Jagger. He painted watercolors, collaborated on recordings with jazz musician Steve Lacy, exhibited his art, performed, and wrote his final novel,

At the 1985 fall vernissage in Paris’s Galerie Samy Kinge, Gysin was too

The Last Museum. Passionate about history and ecology, Gysin attended annual

weak to stand up (the mark of his whiskey glass is still visible on the marble

Institute of Ecotechnics conferences on ecology and humanity’s role in nature:

floor). Unable to leave Paris, he declared he did not want to live beyond Bastille

“Man is the only bad animal,” he would say.

Day—July 14,1986—because “Tout Paris” vacated the city for the summer.

His apartment barely contained the Amazon River of Fellini-esque

Burroughs stated, “Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected.”

characters pouring through from every variety of earthly existence. One of the

This steadfast friend made a last visit to Gysin in early 1986, eliciting hysterical

world’s great raconteurs, Gysin gracefully entertained all with astounding stories

laughter from his ailing friend as Burroughs mimed wielding swords, spears,

and commentaries on history, anthropology, and mysticism. He never trusted

daggers, arrows, and firearms. On July 13, 1986, Steve Lacy and the author of

convenient explanations and would mine veins of gossip until he extracted a

this article met in a jazz club in New York and spoke about Gysin’s Bastille Day

tragicomic jewel. One representative evening was spent drinking Ayahuasca with

wish. At the same moment in Paris, his friends served Gysin a gorgeous feast and

a friend while dissecting the lineage of Sufi ecstatic poetry and the intertwined

fine wine, after which he slowly walked to his bedroom, as always, with the erect

history of Asia and Europe. About Gysin, musician Genesis P. Orridge said,

posture of a wild man. Gysin died in his sleep that evening.

“Once you met him, everyone else seemed dull.”

The ripple effect from his radical concepts continues to affect independent

Surviving cancer in the seventies, Gysin said he remained on the planet in

thinkers. Countless references abound on the Internet, and in the last year, Paris’s

order to paint a final big work. During his last years in Paris, financial constraints

Palais de Tokyo, London’s October Gallery and New York’s Guggenheim Museum

forced him to work in small formats until in 1985—with a windfall from the

have honored his art and ideas. Flicker, an acclaimed feature documentary about

Akademia Foundation—Gysin executed his magnum opus Calligraffiti of Fire.

his creation of the Dreamachine was released this year. For Gysin, art began in

Burroughs said that Gysin painted with life-or-death urgency and this was literally

magic where paintings catalyze an act in the “real” world. Calligraffiti of Fire was

true in this last great work. Although on oxygen, Gysin executed Calligraffiti of

Gysin’s last magical transmission before “Massa Brahim disappeared like smoke

Fire’s fifty feet of calligraphy in just one day, in just one take. Gysin knew what he

from a fire.” Brion Gysin is gone but not forgotten—smoke-signaling to dreamers

wanted and worked like lightning, even trimming bouquets of white flowers for

who live their dreams. D

his sitting room with Edward Scissorhands–like alacrity.

The painting’s unique proportions dictate that it cannot be seen in a single gaze; one must move to take it in. It contains an extended permutation of Gysin’s signature glyph, (the graffiti tag, sho), a momentous wave of calligraphy/ graffiti with a grid pattern derived from the magical charm of the 1001 Nights

Kathelin Gray is a theater director, curator, and writer based in Santa Fe and London. She met Gysin in 1977, and they remained friends until his death. A survey of Gysin’s works— Bryon Gysin: Dreammachine—will be on view at The New Museum, New York City, from June 30 to October 3, 2010. Anniversary events in Paris, and London will occur in July, 2009. For more on Gysin: briongysin.com or octobergallery.co.uk or flickerflicker.com

Brion Gysin, Calligraffiti of Fire, oil on canvas, 4’ x 50’, 1985. Photograph courtesy: Academy of Everything is Possible

| may 2009

The magazine | 41

PCAC_spring09_themag_1-4.qxd:Layout 1

3/10/09

1:32 PM

Page 1

Stacey Huddleston

2009 Spring Exhibition & The Nylon Show April 10–June 28, 2009

Art Center Hours: Wed–Friday: 1–5 p.m.

Saturday: 11 a.m.–5 p.m.

Sunday: 1 p.m.–5 p.m.

h u m a n

p a i n t i n g s

l i n e

m o n o p r i n t s

s t u d i o

s c u l p t u r e

127 D Bent Street Taos NM OPEN 11 - 5pm or by appt. 575-751-3033 humanlinestudio@newmex.com

!"#$!%&'()*&+*,

OP@JFB@N%PQ@GECHR%%.2%S%0=

BDT@HCTGBIHU%/%2==3

'GHIJIK%&HDHGLJEIM%<@J?BN:%+BN%5-:%-/4

!"#$%&'( -.-/012/1345%!%526%7",$8(*'%8(9:%8";("%<*:%;+%4.-=5%!%>>>9?@AB/CA9DEF

All other times by appointment.

1755 Avenida de Mercado Mesilla, NM 88046 575-523-8713

Artists Dan Burkholder, Jeff Curto, Elizabeth Galvin, Jed Schlegel, Richard Warrington Jason Brown, Karen Bucher, Flo Hosa Dougherty, Amanda Gordon Dunn, Arielle Falk, Amy M. Ho, Glenn Holgersen, Amanda Marcott, Svala Olafsdottir, Elizabeth Scof ield, Peter Snadik, Cecelia Thorner, Laura Young, Susan Young

www.prestoncontemporaryart.com

T

Louise Bourgeois

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

The MuseuM of ConTeMporary arT 250 souTh grand avenue, Los angeLes

The Museum of Contemporary Art

in Los Angeles is the fourth venue for an exhibition of more than one hundred and fifty works representing Louise Bourgeois’s prolific and versatile seven-decade-long career. Included in this retrospective are sculptures, installations, drawings, and prints, all of them created between 1938 and 2008. Born in 1911 into a family of weavers and tapestry restorers, Bourgeois has been aptly inspired by the spider, a principal motif in her work since the 1990s. Both predator and protector, a threatening presence and an obsessive repairer, the spider is, for Bourgeois, intended as a representation of “mother,” and one immediately encounters one of those hideously elegant, huge spiders in the first room of the exhibition. The nearly twenty-two-foot-high twenty-two-foot steel spider hovers over a large cage with voracious possessiveness, as protectress, prison guard, or hoarder—take your pick. Bits of tapestry and bone are enmeshed in the sides of the cage, the cage being an example of one of Bourgeois’s enclosed structures (another recurring theme in her work) that may suggest a protective nest or a private space to cultivate one’s ideas, or a sinister trap.

Walking through the exhibition rooms, you realize that the fact that Bourgeois’s work has intersected with most of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century is an almost incidental coincidence.

Though early on she absorbed the influences of Fernand Léger, Brancusi, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon, and later, after her move to New York, thrived on friendships with Le Corbusier and Robert Motherwell, Bourgeois quickly subsumed and personalized these influences and went on to make confident use of her own extremely fertile intellectual resources. She has plugged those resources into her drive to express the physicality of (often abused) emotional states and has thus, over the years, generated an abundance of explosions of form, all articulated in tantalizingly reckless ways that may be uncomfortable for the viewer.

A collection of her Personages, on display in the next room, are Bourgeois’s earliest sculptures. They were constructed in part out of bits of leftover wood from construction sites, found on the streets of Manhattan when the artist lived there with her husband and family in the 1940s and used the roof above their apartment as an open-air studio. Though the sculptures reflect the verticality of the surrounding skyscrapers, they were conceived as quasi-anthropomorphic, animistic expressions of people she has known, liked, or disliked, some of them left behind in France. Measuring mostly five to six feet tall, they stand upright as succinct and totemic expressions of individual personalities.

The Personages are arranged on a kind of stage, making the work appear even more theatrical: a cast of eccentric personalities holding themselves according to their distinctly neurotic expressions. Such is the artist’s incisive wit that you keep checking back with the wall text to learn the individual figure’s descriptive name. Persistent Antagonism, Listening One, Femme Voltage (Fickle Woman) are some examples.

Nature Study, a headless feline creature sitting on its haunches with three sets of breasts, is an example of Bourgeois’s singular vision, which expresses the voluptuousness obscenity of form itself. Cast in pink Louise Bourgeois, Couple IV, fabric, leather, stainless steel, plastic, wood, and glass Victorian vitrine, 72” x 82” x 43” overall, 1997 marble, this humanoid figure—from its top heavy, too narrow torso and Courtesy: Cheim & Read, Galerie Karsten Greve, and Galerie Hauser & Wirth. Photo by Christopher Burke. © Louise Bourgeois ribcage right down to the pristinely manicured nails of its paws that are rendered as tenacious grabbing instruments—is at once bizarre, streamlined, elegant, and menacing.

The title of Cumul I, a pure white marble sculpture mounted on a rugged wooden plinth, is based on its supposed resemblance to cumulus clouds, but this close grouping of rounded, vaguely sexual forms more likely suggests a cluster of nipples or breasts, penises, eyeballs—beautiful, tender, vulnerable surfaces, softly draped, that have a surging, insistent presence.

Bourgeois’s Cell installations, room-sized enclosures built out of old doors and fences, are inhabited with assemblages that are sometimes unmistakably autobiographical and convey psychological portraits of the artist’s anguished past. Elements of the rooms include both found and personal objects, sculptures of clasped hands that are cut off at the wrists, spools of thread, perfume bottles, hourglasses, old clothes, bedroom furniture. The narrative aspect of these installations is sometimes prodded by the manner in which one is obliged to explore them: difficult entries into the sanctums, partial views through windows that block comprehension of the whole space, and unexpected mirror reflections of yourself or some stranger, either one catching you by surprise. The Destruction of the Father is a cave-like installation—a giant mouth, really—composed of bulbous latex forms that surround a table, all bathed in a grim red light against a background of red velvet. The forms represent Bourgeois’s family members, meant to be feasting on the remains of her father’s organs (cast animal bones). This installation, made in 1974 when the artist was sixty-three years old, somehow didn’t provoke horrific or intense emotions of any kind, perhaps because it was too literal and on-the-nose. While Bourgeois is not a woman known to make art whose meaning is meant to be delicately extracted or tentatively inferred, at the same time her use of nontraditional materials to create disturbing sculptures usually yields a more whacky, thoughtful, and sophisticated result than this depiction of cannibalism.

rinchen lhaMO

| may 2009

The magazine | 43

S

Kōan Boxes: painTings B y L aW ren Ce f odor

Lannan foundaTion 309 read sTreeTT, sanTa T fe Ta

Since the beginning of the enlightenment, in the eighteenth century, Western man has elevated reason over intuition and sensory experience.

In this century we are becoming more and more a culture of floating heads, disconnected from our bodies—and the body of the earth. Perception and sensation—the rich physicality of experience—often take a back seat to the intellectual and virtual worlds.

Lawrence Fodor’s poetic and serene installation of Kōa Kōa ōann Boxes at the Lannan Foundation carries us beyond reason, reconnecting us to intuition, memory, emotion, sensation, and mystery. Drawing on the Buddhist practice of training the mind, these small paintings push us towards a precipice where all methods of rational or linear thought no longer function. Fodor urges us to jump into empty space, into an atmosphere where we may open our minds, our pulses, our beings.

How does he do this? Old wooden cigar boxes (from the collection he began during childhood) filled with memorabilia, invitations, and other flotsam of his life become drop cloths for his larger paintings. The boxes initially present tactile histories of the larger works—memories of the artist’s mind, hand, and mood. Yet Fodor works the paint-laden boxes, taking them to richer realms, laminating their pasts to an ever-evolving present.

Siennas dance with yellows and oranges, sea blues merge with greens and peeks of violet, and aquamarines and cobalts churn up dark purples streaked with light. These layered, scraped, dripped, and textured pigments pulsate with paradox–the dark fecundity of earth blends with the vibrant luminosity of sea and sky. Worlds within worlds erupt like volcanos, spewing embers of darkness and light, conjuring the elements, yet merging to permit a transformation from substance to spirit.

Turner described Rembrandt as “piercing the mystic shell of color.” Simon Schama wrote that Turner achieved this as well. By capturing the fugitive nature of sensual, intuitive experience, Fodor follows in this great tradition of penetrating color and “dissolving solid surfaces into a numinous radiance.”

This sublime transformation is reinforced by Fodor’s use of gold leaf along the sides of each box. The gold responds to the artist’s masterful lighting, casting a soft, ethereal glow around each painting. The glow floats the surface of the paintings off the wall, suspending them in space, yet paradoxically grounding them with drenching light. Time also takes on the nature of paradox. Past, present, and future become one suspended moment—a luminous moment—quivering with possibility. Fodor brings us a challenging poetry—rich visual kkōans that breathe introspective pauses between the hurried and troubled moments of our times.

susanna carlisle

I

supersTars T 2009

goLdLeaf gaLLery 627 WesT aLaMeda, sanTa T fe Ta

It’s difficult to form a concrete opinion

of an invitational.

Though such shows’ inclusions are vastly differentiated, they prove—almost invariably— Though tto o be over-accommodating mosaics pieced together from all-too-obviously exhaustible ssupplies upplies of local talent. In fact, it’s much easier to judge them on the basis of their organizers’ o rganizers’ motivations than on the wildly wavering terms of their constituent works’ accomplishments. And, if that fails to divert, one can always discuss their openings: accomplishments. crowded and self-congratulatory affairs whose highlights include such entertaining pastimes as watching the precarious choreography staged in parking lots as space-starved as the salon-hung walls within and the guilty pleasure of noting sartorial anachronisms as outmoded as the art exhibited.

On the other hand, it’s hard to condemn acts of charity, especially given the precarious state of an art market that holds little hope of resurrection until well after we’ve learned the results of Sotheby’s May 12 Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Indeed, one absolutely cannot fault Goldleaf Gallery’s generosity in marketing and installing seventy-five works from which 90% of proceeds return directly to a selection of artists who have spent a good portion of the year donating to the benefit of other institutions. In that sense, I can’t help but think of Superstars 2009 as a sort of tax return rewarded to artists who file their talents expertly.

And, to be fair, between hordes of unintentionally Surrealist canvases pulled from dusty back stocks, a few works do stand out; some, moreover, have fully earned their adjacent red dots. While artists like Michael Bently suggest what might happen were a James Hayward hung in unfortunate proximity to an improperly stored Piero Manzoni, Eugene Newmann’s Study 2007—despite its diminutive proportions—boasts the same blend of adroit gesturalism and subtly anthropomorphic references that substantiate his deserved influence on the vernacular of New Mexican abstraction. An untitled wall relief

by Stacey Neff also manifests a mature artist’s signature aesthetic; here, tapering pods of blown and delicately frosted glass capture the fecundity of nature as they reify the frangibility of human breath. Despite being sandwiched between sliding doors and an acute corner of the gallery space, the work’s dominating presence on an otherwise blank wall proves a boon.

Incidentally, the show’s organizer may deserve the place of its most accomplished exhibitor. A departure from the immaculately gilded political assemblages for which he is better known, Marty Carey Horowitz’s text-punctuated Italian Study embodies how contemporary artists continue to invoke their precedents, yet suggests that the way we experience the art of the past is anything but stable or predictable. Quoting an Italian Pop Art aesthetic developed by the infamously miscreant Mimmo Rotella and Mario Schiffano, Horowitz employs an additive process incorporating precious, handmade Italian papers to strip the sardonicism from the colorful décollages that his predecessors used to critique mid-century mass media; eschewing their aggressive procedures and politics, yet having deftly incorporated the punch of their psychedelic colorharmonies, Italian Study reinterprets these artists’ vitriol as a source of simple pleasure. If the totality of his invitational doesn’t leave you optimistic, his work just might.

alex rOss Lawrence Fodor, Installation view, 2009

Martin Cary Horowitz, Italian Collage, 2008

A

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

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jan adlMann

| may 2009

The magazine | 45

© Angelo Filomeno. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York

forgotten for the way it captures a rare and intriguing phenomenon, i.e. a woman who is “pretty-ugly,” a woman, usually “of a certain age,” who is, paradoxically, both homely, yet undeniably beautiful. A few classic, striking jolies laides that come to mind include the Duchess of Windsor, the fashion legend Diana Vreeland, and the artist Louise Nevelson.

That curious concept kept floating in and out of my consciousness as I picked my path through the perverse garden of earthly delights conjured up by SITE Santa Fe’s art historian/director, Laura Steward Heon. As the first exhibition conceived and mounted by Heon herself—as opposed to SITE Biennials, always productions of noteworthy guest curators—Pretty Is As Pretty Does illuminates Heon’s insights as an art historian and a contemporary art authority.

In essence, the phrase “pretty is as pretty does” is meant to suggest that any young lady’s supposed attractiveness must always be qualified by her acts, as well as her demeanor. As Heon describes the lass in question, she is “a pretty girl with a nasty disposition.” All of the works Heon has plucked for her jolie laide bouquet conflate “an effervescent prettiness and sneering nastiness that circle around each other,” as the press release observed. “Both qualities are magnified by their combination.”

Among the nine artists represented, this viewer was most convinced that the phenomenon “pretty-ugly” is a palpable truth by the widely diverse, yet undeniably gorgeous works of young artists who have intensified painterly imagery by translating it to craft media. Kathy Butterly’s ceramics, Judith Schaechter’s stained glass, and Angelo Filomeno’s apparitions in textile all commingled beautiful materials with disturbing thoughts.

The great Paul Klee maintained that beauty, “inseparable from art, relates not to the object but to the pictorial representation. That is why art overcomes ugliness without evading it.” This paradox is certainly evident in the dumbfounding ceramics of Kathy Butterly. Tours de force in clay, her glittering little pieces represent collisions of the precious with the uncanny. Butterly’s coy piece on tiny feet, Above Normal, creeps along like an alien lab-specimen; her Golden could be a freakish Judith Leiber minaudiere.

Butterly’s accomplished ceramic works are at once repellent and alluring—they overcome ugliness without evading it.

Arrayed around the walls of a darkened room, the stained glass, light-box pictures of Judith Schaechter initially beckon to the viewer with glowing, jewel-like color. Upon closer inspection, her charming tableaux, Neo-Gothic, in their aura and execution turn out to be rather gruesome exorcisms of private demons. All the protagonists in her images—resolutely glum and sad-eyed—appear to be in extremis indeed. Medieval stained glass windows function to instruct the illiterate in the mysteries of the faith; Schaechter’s windows, however, tend to reveal only the dark night of the soul. And…they are unforgettable.

Angelo Filomeno’s macabre imagery—as in Philosopher’s Women—becomes darkly seductive through his use of shimmering silks and beadwork. Coming from a background as a costume maker, the artist uses complex textile skills to summon up the spectral. Many of his motifs—skeletons, goblins, and contorted rock formations—seem to be drawn from nineteenth-century Japanese prints of ghosts and demons. One would like to see an entire chapel lined with Filomeno’s dusky, sinister apparitions.

Additional works in this alternately enchanting and creepy show merit attention because each of the artists has discovered his or her most satisfying medium in which to cloak unsettling subject manner in come-hither compositions.

Marilyn Minter’s photographs, and her photo-realist paintings based on them, offer up Glamour with a capital “G,” until, on closer inspection, they reveal revolting details. The painting Spike, for example, offers a close-up of a bejeweled, high-heeled shoe encasing an appallingly scruffy, naked heel.

Minter’s Soiled blows up a detail of two filthy feet with lurid, metallic nail polish. Pages from Vogue or W these images definitely ain’t, but the technique and the intent are unquestionably drawn from the world of fashion photography.

Heon aptly describes Chiho Aoshima’s hypnotic five-screen video projection City Glow as a work of “scintillating and unnerving beauty.” Even from afar, it is immediately clear that we are looking at a “Kai Kai Kiki” masterpiece; that is, as a disciple of the superstar Japanese artist Takashi Murakami (whose ateliers are all dubbed “Kai Kai Kiki”), Aoshima also has a penchant for inventing strange, new worlds peopled with even stranger inhabitants. City Glow offers up a candy-colored dystopia, simultaneously awash in whimsical flowers and butterflies, yet filled with encroaching menace in the underbrush.

Pretty Is proves to be a very successful investigation of ever-present phenomena in the history of art re-asserted in contemporary art. The works on view testify to both the undying compulsion to ornament and the eternal resurgence of the uncanny.

Angelo Filomeno, Philosopher’s Woman, embroidery on silk shantung stretched over linen with crystals, hematite, and stainless steel. 117¾” x 42½”, 2007

A jolie laide is one of those exquisitely turned French conceits that once learned is never

C

ChiCana Badgir adgirLs

516 arTs 516 CenTraL avenue sW, aLBuquerque

Chingada! Is the co-curator an ethnicist or a racist? Laura E. Perez, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies

at U.C. Berkeley, opens her catalogue essay for Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas at 516 Arts in Albuquerque with the following: “Badgirl hociconas don’t behave in a world of double standards, whether these be men over women, heterosexuals over queer folk, haves over have nots, ‘white’ people over those ‘of color,’ and so on. They shouldn’t.”

Here’s some schoolin’ for the Ethnic Studies teacher. Pleasant as it sounds, “people of color” is an exclusionary racist term. It’s meant to exclude only those whose ethnic backgrounds result in being born pink. The phrase is premised on generalizations about the excluded group of “others” as defined by skin tone. That’s about as tight a definition of racism as they come. Does Hocicona (Latina for loudmouth) Perez just want to replace the old double standards with new ones? Is she seeking scapegoats and/or a sense of revenge? As a professor in Ethnic Studies, has she become what she hates? Does she hate “white, have, hetero males”? Why these specific examples of double standards when our world has so many?

She might have a point about the haves. Class is America’s true double standard.

This is for you, and you, and you. Just celebrate yourself and your camaradas as Chicana women who are proud of who you are. Like you do in the rest of the essay and as your co-curator Delilah Montoya does in her shorter but more eloquent contribution. Fight specific injustices where you find them, but abandon your cliché, inaccurate, and over-determined master-narratives.

Modernism is what’s really “over.” Stop trashing the “other,” whose cultures or ethnicities you haven’t really got a clue about. And stop playing the victim.

It serves to alienate those who would be your allies and in the end it just drags us all down. Que pinche hueva.

So, no more double standards, cuz we shouldn’t. The show was muy disappointing all in all. Maybe the hype was too much. Opening night was packed for a bizarre performance that needed far more resolution. Santa Fe’s own Elisa Jimenez presented her “couture fashion performance, and we thank her for trying. The place wasn’t set up for performance and it ain’t 1972 anymore. A short woman (who got her place in the corner early) complained throughout that she couldn’t see. It took numerous admonishments by those around her before she would trade the joys of whining for a place up front. The professional dancers delivered, as they should, but it only made the amateurs look that much more so. The mock striptease by all ages of Eve was a sign-of-the-times reminder that in 1972 we all would’ve probably been nude, and it wouldn’t have been half as perversely awkward as going from scantily clad to scantier, but who’s complaining? Just me—and the short woman in the corner.

Every artist minus one in this eighteen-woman show incorporated the human figure predominantly in her art. Latina loudmouths are humanists apparently. None of the most interesting work involved the numerous images of the Lady of Guadalupe or the somewhat fewer of her boy, Mr. Christ, but I’ve saved the best for last.

Maya Gonzalez of San Francisco, the visually quietest of the hociconas popped up with her mysteriously detailed pen-and-ink drawings (based on the painted books of Mexico) in which a strange iconography functions as a visual linguistic system in a way that recalls the recent paintings of artist Andrea Carlson. Both bodies of work are well worth looking at.

And speaking again of bodies, the large-scale photographs of masked nudes

by Cecilia Portal, while technically not as well realized as they could be, are also worth watching. Derived from her dreams and mythology, these masked figures have an archetypal magic quality as they confront the viewer. They are by turns eerie, sly, monstrous, and nearly comic, striking a chord of animism that leaves one spellbound.

Marie Romero-Cash’s santos-inspired sculpture of Catwoman Rising tussles with similarly shamanic themes, but in a much lighter way.

And that’s about it.

Maybe the idea makes more sense in Northern California. In New Mexico, Chicana is quite arguably the dominant culture, if you’re looking for such. It’s not exactly a huge exaggeration to say that the government, law enforcement, school boards, business, academic settings, and family life here are all run in large part by Badgrrl/Hocicona types. It’s like having David Duke curate a Fucked up Maya Gonzalez, Flying Fur Gown Expanding Throat Black Gloves Falling, pen and ink on archival paper, 2008 Crackers art show somewhere in Louisiana. Not exactly enlightening.

At least there aren’t any white, have, hetero-male oppressors in the large group of donors helping finance 516 Arts. And this critic identifies himself as a pink, middle class, omni-sexual, non-female—so no worries.

jOn carver

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roger shiMoMura: Minidoka

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

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The time is the early 1940s and Roger Shimomura is a toddler living behind bars and barbed wire. World War II

is underway, Pearl Harbor has been bombed, and being a Japanese-American from the western part of the United States carries with it a particularly negative weight. It means something—something frightening and threatening to America. Something to be contained and scrutinized carefully for further threats of terrorism—notwithstanding the fact that the people who come under scrutiny are American citizens.

It wasn’t that long ago that I first heard about the Japanese internment camps in the West, and I had a hard time believing that it was true. But can we compare the internment of the Japanese-Americans to the concentration camps in Europe? Yes and no. When you are a prisoner behind bars and barbed wire, having done nothing wrong but now are living your life being watched by armed guards who hate you and who peer at you from high towers with rifles in their hands, and the future looks dim, there is an obvious relationship between the camps in America and those that were in Europe.

There is a phrase that was coined by the philosopher Hannah Arendt in writing about the systematic decimation of the Jews by Hitler and the mainly complicit Germans: the banality of evil. Perhaps this phrase could be rewritten slightly for the purposes of this review and be called the banality within evil.

This is what Shimomura captures in the work from the series Minidoka on My Mind—the striving for the ordinary, the normal, and the commonplace within Mind the pressures of false imprisonment, the failure of citizenship, and perhaps impending death.

In one large work, Night Watch, it’s as if we are gazing at the windows of an urban high rise. We look into each window in turn and see cropped vignettes of lives that could be anywhere in America—Peoria, Providence, Poughkeepsie: A mother feeds her baby, a father explains baseball to young boys in baseball caps, a person exercises, a nurse checks the blood pressure of a seated man, children frolic in the midst of a pillow fight. In this work, as in all the paintings in the Minidoka series, no detail is gratuitous. Everything is rendered in a severe and stylized manner that focuses not on painterly traditions of, for example, the need to create illusionistic space, but on the ultra-flat visual narratives of most graphic novels and much of Pop Art. Think Adrian Tomine meets John Wesley within overlapping conceptual spaces washed over with the acid colors from Ukiyo-e prints. Shimomura filters his source material, stripping it of non-essentials, and then puts everything to work in a spirit of ironic recollection and cool, detached, and synthesized outrage.

The name Minidoka sounds like it could be a city from the “floating world” of Japanese prints—a space of geishas, warriors, aristocrats, and ordinary citizens depicted with all due respect to the artistic protocols of 19th century stylized beauty, gesture, clothing, and social traditions. The truth behind Minidoka is more spare and harsh. The name is from the Shoshone Roger Shimomura, Businessman, acrylic on canvas, 60” x 24”, 2008 Indian language and means “broad expanse,” and Anglo settlers gave it to a newly created town in Idaho, in the late 19th century. It was here that the Minidoka internment camp was established and where Shimomura would arrive with his parents in 1942 and live for three years.

Shimomura has been working through the Minidoka series for several decades. His memories and those of others have been distilled into a clarified style that expresses a kind of brittle artificiality that works in tandem with the ironic striving in the camp for the fulfillment of familiar archetypes found in middle-class American culture. Shimomura’s flatness and often acerbic color schemes, like those found in Businessman and Lush Life, are masks for the pathology that comes with living in captivity under clouds of uncertainty.

His broad expanses of unmodulated color mirror boredom and enforced regimentation, and a sense of repressed hysteria lurks around the edges of his impassive faces with their schematic, bland features. In Shimomura’s hands, color can be used to ravish the senses and set one’s nerves on edge at the same time.

In Custom Houses, a five-part work depicting barracks-style camp housing, the seemingly innocuous baby blue of the sky, the ochre color of the bare desert sand, and the relentless black of the tarpaper on the shacks signal Shimomura’s own interpretation of “the banality of evil.” The very comic-bookishness of the houses and the uninflected blue of the cloudless sky are pinned down conceptually by the resonance of the barbed wire fences that bracket the shacks on one side. The viewer is very much a part of this image and, if at first the viewer simply stops to look, the more one looks the more one is drawn into the row of houses. The viewer becomes an implied inhabitant of the camp on the one hand, or becomes another aspect of the bars and the barbed wire containment: the viewer becomes a voyeuristic guard.

Roger Shimomura, Lush Life, acrylic on canvas, 60” x 30”, 2008

diane arMitaG ita e itaG

| may 2009

The magazine | 47

h

JaCkLyn sT. auByn: The Meaning

historically, “nature morte”

of

Things Zane BenneTT TT C onTeMporary a rT 435 souTh guadaLupe sTreeTT, sanTa T fe Ta

has symbolically represented transformation, the cyclical nature of time, and the transitory nature of existence. What does it mean to paint nature-based still-life paintings in the year 2009? Can the genre reflect on contemporary environmental issues or the experience of nature as mediated through photography, advertising, tourism, and urban sprawl? Or is it so over-determined that it can’t move beyond nostalgia? What does it mean to gather, to visually document, to reconfigure bits of the natural world as it is disappearing around us? Does this entail a responsibility? Can the artist simply respond to nature and its previous representations? Is this enough?

Jacklyn St. Aubyn’s paintings do not confront these issues straight on, but these issues circulate around her paintings as they do all contemporary landscape and nature-based still-life painting. They are modest paintings that reference botanical drawings and Audubon bird paintings from the nineteenth century (when the concept “nature” was socially constructed), a history of decorative arts based on natural forms, and traditions of Euro-Western still-life painting.

St. Aubyn’s subject matter is gathered from her personal world—nature experienced and collected in her yard, neighborhood, and community— the outer world brought inside the domestic environment and studio.

The paintings in this exhibition employ three formats: horizontal diptychs, most often juxtaposing a bird or a plant with a simple still life of fruit rendered in three-dimensional space; single panel vertical paintings with all-over, naturebased decorative arts as their subject; or verticals with birds and botanical fragments floating in horizontal bands of different sizes stacked on top of each other in flat pictorial space.

For me, the horizontals just didn’t work. The diptych format, especially those with miniature still-life paintings within the larger painting, combined with the exhibition’s title The Meaning of Things, suggested a correspondence or conceptual dialogue between the images that didn’t happen. Other than referring to outdoor/indoor spaces, the choice of which images were juxtaposed seemed arbitrary, or perhaps, just a visual decision. While there was often a shift in perspective from one panel to the other, the still lifes remained generic and uninteresting. Whatever symbolism or meaning might be there for the artist was too private and personal to have larger resonance, and the visual strategy of juxtaposition offered by the diptych format remained unengaged.

The vertical paintings are a different story. Here St. Aubyn is at her best.

The painting format and composition are not being asked to speak to conceptual concerns. We can just experience the paintings for their visual pleasure.

I looked less to “the meaning of things,” and simply enjoyed the juxtaposition of images for their superb color and attention to detail. Pattern After WM re-presents and activates the tendrils of a William Morris pattern in blues and greens with highlights of magenta and red. The dark green and red flat pattern of leaves and roses in Rose Tree calls up early American drawing and needlework, referencing not only marginalized creative traditions but also painting’s inherent decorativeness.

Other vertical paintings such as Rupture, Birds and Thistle, and Remembrance are divided into horizontal bands of flat color. Remembrance utilizes a cool palette of grayed blues, greens, and aquamarines. A “couple” of birds float above a branch heavy with ripe purple plums. The bottom section introduces natured-based repetitive pattern in conversation with the birds and plants floating above, at the same time as it functions as a decorative border.

The painting has a strong graphic sensibility, engaging traditions of naturalhistory illustration, while remaining a painting.

What we collect and combine is ultimately about creating a sense of self.

What the painter collects and visually combines not only creates a sense of self, but also constructs a symbolic world within the painting site. St. Aubyn layers opaque and transparent paint in a traditional illustrative manner. I found myself Jacklyn St. Aubyn, Remembrance, oil on wood panel, 24”x 18”, 2008 welcoming those places of variation where the paint ever so slightly piled up thicker—where the paint surface itself came alive. Upon close examination you can see that the birds and fruit are not painted on a colored ground but rather that the so-called “backgrounds” are carefully painted “around” the nature forms, so that the paint and pictorial space-ground are what connect the “things” depicted.

The works I enjoyed most were those that simply painted nature and its representations. St. Aubyn’s paintings are unpretentious and genuine—about the pleasure of looking and the pleasure of painting. This is their strength. But is it enough? At times I found myself wanting these paintings to speak through, even interrogate, those histories of nature-based imagery they reference. Political content and visual pleasure need not be mutually exclusive.

harMOny haMMOnd

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

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The sCienCe CLuB: The Boy’s rooM, noW W , f orever , T hen , p arT T 1 BouLder MuseuM of ConTeMporary arT 1750 13Th sTreeTT, BouLder der , C oLorado

erika Wanenmacher needs to get outta town.

Rather, she deserves to get outta town: to some mythical place where her admirably crafted, literally spell-binding, and complex installations can be exhibited full-speed ahead, not in dribs and drabs at her very generous but naturally limited gallery, Linda Durham Contemporary Art. Wanenmacher is a big artist with big ideas and big skills, and they just don’t translate adequately into a gallery setting. The miracle is that Wanenmacher continues to be so liberally supported by her gallerist.

Having established the positive side of the equation, the problem remains: where to show off an artist of Wanenmacher’s high caliber? I am most certainly not suggesting that she move to that provincial bastion of twentieth-century modernism, New York City. L.A. might be good for Wanenmacher, but where, exactly? The MoCA is slightly distracted right now, and neither the Broad Contemporary nor its “parent” (although who’s parenting whom is a whole other story) LACMA, seems fitting. The Hammer would be great as far as its physical space and potential for public exposure go, but Wanenmacher is a far cry from being a member of the “UCLA community” the museum states it serves. Back in New Mexico, the artist’s home base, Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Arts—where Wanenmacher has already shown more than once—is pathetically and seemingly permanently mired in its own muck. And the artist has already had the luxury of a solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, in 2001 under the direction of Louis Grachos, so where can our girl go now?

Art-wise, Wanenmacher can only move ahead, because that is who she is, but I left her exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art feeling conflicted: I loved the show and hated that it felt so confined and far from the broad audience it warrants.

It was like flying to Paris, seeing the Eiffel Tower, and leaving. An unforgettable experience, yes, but how frustrating to miss the rest of the city! I don’t have a solution; so far as I know no one in the art world does, but there are artists for whom it’s a crime that we can’t experience their work often and thoroughly, and for me, Wanenmacher is one of them.

The gist of the Boulder exhibition that ran from September through the end of December was the artist’s aspiration to counter mad-science mojo from radiation experiments conducted on marginalized human beings during the 1940s and into the ’70s.

For example, it turns out that MIT researchers regularly exposed institutionalized children to radiation, without familial knowledge or permission, in a series of experiments known as “The Science Club.” Wanenmacher came upon evidence of this madness in part, at least, because of her frequent visits for scrounging and chatting with the recently deceased Ed Grothus at his Black Hole—a thriftshopper’s heaven, chock-full of discards from the Los Alamos National Labs. The Boulder show’s entry piece comprised an X-ray of what seemed to be a spinal chord gone terribly awry; Wanenmacher had discovered these medical images of human tissue and bone and felt compelled to gather them for some Erika Wanenmacher, The Science Club: The Boy’s Room, mixed media with audio and video, dimensions vary, 2008 serious “off-gassing” in her studio. They had, she said, “the worst resonance of anything I had ever touched.”

The Science Club is Wanenmacher at her best, her deep sociopolitical concerns engagingly presented within an ethical framework, art as a presence that refuses to be ignored. Entrance into the Boy’s Room, the principal component of the tripartite installation, was presaged by radioactive signs in biohazard yellow: quaint ’50s ephemera, they raise the ever-hovering question, “How much radiation is safe?” Copies of Atomic Superboy and Mad magazine, complete with a flashlight for under-the-cover reading, lay on a black and gray atomic-motif quilt with alternating daisy squares, a hopeful counter to the insanity of nuclear warfare. Cowboys astride bucking broncos mixed with radium symbols on the gray wallpaper. A little gray suede vest hung near a toy six-shooter in its holster—how tiny the boy who played with these would have been. A size small, gray lab coat, “Los Alamos Scientific Lab” embroidered in red across its back, made a fashion statement of blamelessness with a pair of black high-top Keds. The scrubbed faces and buzz cuts of the young men of mid-20th-century Los Alamos—at the Boys School and during the Manhattan Project—lingered like holograms in the room, itself all gray and metal and sad. A ham radio emitted the static-y sounds of an unnamed danger. Gray curtains opened onto a black background—is there no escape? A clunky TV ran Wile E. Coyote cartoons in black and white; a fantastic, grayed-out PB&J sandwich waited nearby on a tray with an acid-green drink. There were arrowheads such as a boy like Oppenheimer might have collected—but these were crystal, and served the artist’s spell of reversal.

Outside the Boy’s Room was the “ed center,” where books on the subject of making the bomb shared a table with candles lit to dispel evil.

In the video room, a pentagram, herbs, a sorcerer’s sword, images of the moon, and a snake in a figure 8 worked with the artist’s recorded voice in casting a spell to reverse the evil she spotlit with deliberate lucidity. Black magic functions best in secrecy; it cannot survive the light of truth.

Back to that question of exhibition space: Maybe all the bronze bears in Santa Fe could be replaced with serial installations by Wanenmacher, complete with a citywide map to her art sites? The land of enchantment, indeed.

kathryn M davis

| may 2009

The magazine | 49

D

dark MeMory Dark Silence, White Sleep:

sanTa T f e a rT i nsTiTuTe Ta 1600 sT. MiChaeL’s drive, sanTa T fe Ta

an abiding quandary of contemporary art formed the backdrop of a recent SFAI panel on the late painter and political activist Rudolf Baranik. The panel featured artists May Stevens and Abdelali Dahrouch, and art historians Lucy Lippard and David Craven. The quandary was aptly captured by the program’s citation from art historian and critic Richard Leslie, writing some months after Baranik’s passing in 1998. “One of the dirty little secrets of the more canonical art world is that it continues to claim for art the ‘aura’’ of social relevance derived from the early politicized history of the avant-garde while at the same time it marginalizes art forms such as Baranik’s that are developed from fully-committed political positions.” In other words, by 1998 the socialist legacy of Modernism was “more honored in the breach than in the observance” by its Postmodern heirs.

In the 1970s and 80s, the art world was absorbed in the great debate about the direction of art. Two divergent tendencies with competing claims vied for the postmodern mantle. A conservative camp sought to redefine late Modernism’s dominant formalist ethos by a return to figurative imagery and expressive objects, while an “oppositional” camp with roots in Conceptual art viewed this formalist tradition (championed by Neo-expressionist painting) as detached from its socio-cultural context and commodified by an art market that eschews art’s obligation to engage (political) reality. By 1990 the debate had wound down to a draw. The truce has held to this day. That was the milieu within which Baranik identified himself as a “socialist formalist.”

A New York Times piece on the painter’s death in 1997 noted, “Mr. Baranik believed equally in “art’s poetic prerogatives” and its “moral responsibility,” a stance that made him a moderating, unusually flexible anomaly in the polemic-prone art world of the 1970s and 80s.” Notwithstanding his representation in major museums, Baranik’s work is not as well known as it should be. That may well be due to the tendency of advocacy art to fall prey to the fate of the passing social conditions that fuel it—especially true in today’s attention-deficit society untroubled by the weight of history.

But access to Baranik’s art is further deflected by a trait in the work that should have helped raise it above the transitory appeal of social realism—what might be termed, pace Greenberg, its homeless abstraction.

His signature Napalm Elegy, a series of thirty paintings done between 1967-1974, is a passionate indictment of the Vietnam War whose imagery is based on explicit allusion to a photograph of a Cambodian child whose face had been badly burned and disfigured by napalm.

The poignant title, still-provocative historical subject, and anguished figuration seem at first to be lost in the eerily tranquil, abstracted forms and spare intimation The panel and the audience. of locale or landscape tempered by the monochrome, black and white palette. Yet such a reading might be due simply to our proximity to those events.

The social consciousness of works like Napalm Elegy places Baranik in the tradition of Goya’s Disasters of War and Picasso’s Guernica (both works serving as sources of motifs or compositional devices for his painting and poster art). But the artist’s formalism links him directly to the twin Abstract Expressionist currents represented by Motherwell and Rothko. Napalm Elegy recalls Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic. The somber, monumental feel of Napalm’s broad, biomorphic forms and its stark black and white contrasts infuse the stacked rectangular color fields recalling Rothko with the palpable immediacy of dense, geologic strata. And beyond Baranik’s formal affinity with Motherwell is a similar aesthetic in their approach to current historical themes. For the twenty-one-year-old Motherwell in 1936, the Spanish Civil War was “the most moving political event of the time,” as the Vietnam War some thirty years later would be for Baranik. And the painter’s intention in making the Napalm Elegy would find common cause with Motherwell’s Elegy, which the latter considered as “not ‘political’ but my private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot…” But where Motherwell’s lament for a lost cause is an instance of what Irving Sandler described as the artist’s “desire to monumentalize symbols of his private sentiments,” Baranik’s engagement with his subject in Napalm Elegy starts from a deep personal concern for its current social impact. Yet what is common to both artists is a level of detachment that allows them to convey a universal import occasioned by specific historical events—a quality often lacking in much of the “angry arts” polemic of agit-prop art. Our increasing distance from the trauma of the Vietnam War will likely shift critical focus to the universal import in Baranik’s art.

If the largely anecdotal remarks of the panel fell short of a focused discussion of the artist’s work and its polemic, they offered valuable insight into Baranik’s art with their testimony to the artist’s life. So much more so for having lost his family to fascism and his son to suicide, Baranik’s belief in an “art after anger” provides compelling insights about the abiding role of socially conscious art.

richard tOBin

Anomaly mixed media wor ks by

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Cynthia Cook

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Abandoned Business photograph by

| may 2009

Guy Cross THE magazine | 53

WRITINGS

For Him By

Liza a. Lucero

He sat across from me smiling and talking intensely about why we met because it was destined, he truly believes that.

I am so nervous, I smile so hard my cheeks hurt.

I shake inside with nerves strong enough to make me convulse.

He stares at me runs his hands through my hair puts his fingers on my lips touches them with his rough hands.

I melt like the stars do at night into the big, black sky becoming a part of his universe, he is the sun, and I am the planet who runs her course around him.

He feeds my soul with his poetic affirmations, reducing me to the most concentrated part of a human being.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brilliant, As not just anyone can do that.

My eyes are so lost in his as he speaks and shares his life, the parts he is willing to let go of.

I am thankful for what he gives me because I know this is not a book and I can listen firsthand, like a little girl who waits for her bed-time story.

He tucks me into his heart as he promises never to hurt me, to provide for me to have this long lasting affair with me.

Does he think Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m delusional?

That I believe he can do that, care for me, possibly never developing love for me.

I realistically canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t live like that but for him I might.

54 | The magazine

| may 2009

M ay 8 - J u n e 6 , 2 0 0 9

Opening Reception: Friday May 8 , 5-7 pm Gretchen Wachs, Wave, 2009, ceramic & cast glass, 13.5” x 18” x 5”

Susan Sales At This Point in Time

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Susan Sales, Back in Town (detail), 2009, oil on canvas, 48” x 72”

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