NEW MEXICO MUSEUM OF ART

Shop Talk with Liz Rannefeld

New Mexico Museum of Art Shop Manager

I have been here nearly 22 years. I always laugh when repeat customers come in and say, “Are you still here?” I always tell them that I was born in the basement of the museum and that Gustave Baumann used to babysit me.

What I have loved most over the years is my relationship with the Willard Clark woodblock prints. Clark was a genius at capturing the spirit of Santa Fe, and so some of my favorite friends are Willard Clark customers. We connect on some emotional level as kindred spirits, so I am thrilled when I can turn a customer into a collector.

Sara Birmingham is a total joy to work with. She is a phenomenal buyer who asks for opinions and actually listens, which is always affirming. She really has her finger on the pulse.

A real challenge during COVID is that I am limited to three customers. It is really difficult to tell prospective customers that they have to wait.

What gives me the most pleasure is when a customer leaves with a full shopping bag and says, “I just had so much fun!” I hope that we’re not just a shop, but an experience. It really is all about the customer.

Little Shop of Images

Sharing Lasting Impressions of New Mexico

In its small alcove on the northwestern corner of the Santa Fe Plaza, the New Mexico Museum of Art Shop holds the least amount of square footage in the Museum of New Mexico Foundation’s stable of museum shops. Yet it brims with books, cards, exhibition catalogs, prints and other products devoted to the historic and contemporary artists featured at the museum.

“Our challenge is to pack as much interesting merchandise as possible into a very small space,” says shop manager Liz Rannefeld.

The shop succeeds in stocking a whopping 357 matted card images for visitors eager to take home a print of the artworks they have just seen in person. A carefully curated lineup of jewelry, clothing and other decorative items offer a contemporary aesthetic. Avant-garde necklaces made from stainlesssteel piano wire share a display case with a sterling-silver pin by local artist Catherine Maziere depicting the museum’s Saint Francis Auditorium.

Fittingly, the shop is all about image—many different images, in fact. Shop buyer Sara Birmingham says the key to strong sales and return visits from art museum visitors is featuring items related to artists who are strongly identified with Santa Fe and New Mexico. Painter-printmaker Gustave Baumann and printmaker Willard Clark are ever-popular examples. Calendars featuring Baumann’s colorful woodblock prints and greeting cards boasting Clark’s charming prints of life in early 20th century Santa Fe achieve a dual purpose, says Birmingham. They provide the visitor with a cherished memento of both their museum experience and their Santa Fe visit.

Museum executive director Mark A. White points to the role of the shop’s products in achieving a greater museum purpose. “That memento can be a very important thing,” he says. “It can be an emotional or intellectual or spiritual reminder of an experience had in the galleries. On another level, it can offer something more educational, a way of taking the educational impact of the museum home with you.”

Birmingham and her colleagues continually look for ways to feature artists in a fresh and contemporary fashion. The shop’s brand new line of face masks inspired by Baumann prints is one way visitors are carrying a cherished artist into the world of today. The German-born printmaker’s distinctive color woodcuts lent themselves particularly well to the blank canvas of a modern mask.

“It’s an engaging way to take an artist who has been very important in the context of Santa Fe and New Mexico and American art history in general, and to create something fun that is a way of dealing with the stresses of the pandemic,” explains White. “It has a kind of resonance. We thought it would be a nice way to expand the aesthetic interest in Baumann into a practical dimension.”

Other strong-selling images include a matted greeting card of Gerald Cassidy’s famous 1911 Cui Bono? painting. In it, a life-sized figure of an unidentified person clad in blinding white garments stands outside a Taos Pueblo home. The Latin title of the painting translates as “Who benefits?”

Art historians interpret the title as Cassidy’s response to certain stereotypical early 20th century renderings of Native Americans. The image educates visitors about the artist’s mission in identifying his subject as a human being first and an Indigenous person second.

For shop visitors who purchase the matted card, the answer to Cui Bono? is simple. Whether taking the card back to Ohio or Amsterdam, the opportunity to own a small piece of the larger-than-life painting provides a sustaining connection to one of the earliest, unforgettable images in the museum’s permanent collection. For that, the art-loving visitor is by far the beneficiary.

To support the New Mexico Museum of Art, contact Kristin Graham at Kristin@museumfoundation.org or 505.216.0826.

Opposite: Liz Rannefeld, Museum of Art Shop sales associate, with her favorite print by artist Willard Clark. Photo © Saro Calewarts. Above: Gerald Cassidy, Cui Bono?, ca. 1911, oil on canvas. New Mexico Museum of Art Collection. Gift of Gerald Cassidy, 1915. Photo by Blair Clark.