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Ricardo Mazal Uses Multimedia to Stop Time Behind the Scenes at the Santa Fe Opera John De Puy: Taos Modern Transcendentalist
Ai Weiwei Finds Freedom in Native America
SUMMER 2015 Display through Sept. 2015
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Khang Pham-New INSTALLATION OF MONUMENTAL SCULPTURE IN GRANITE
Left to right: COSMOS 78" tall, INFINITY 114" tall, and ESCUTCHEON 72" tall. Catalog of current works by Khang Pham-New available (64 pages in color)
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CHILEAN CARLOS CARULO’S works “Moai” and “Tolomiro” are inspired by the early Rapa Nui people from Easter Island. His sculptures are acclaimed as surrealistic and high-tech combining hard edged metals with soft washes and glazes to create unique works. In the background are recycled metal and ceramic Nests by Phil Lichtenhan.
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CHARLOTTE FOUST New Work August 7 – 31, 2015
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary 200 – B Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 phone 505.984.2111 fax 505.984.8111 www.hunterkirklandcontemporary.com CHARLOTTE FOUST Aqua Sunset, 2015, acrylic on paper, 50 × 38 inches
Photo: Kate Russell
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Friday, Sept. 25, 5:00–8:00 p.m. Friday Night Gathering—Vintage cars and airplanes; music, food, and spirits. Santa Fe Municipal Airport, Hangar K. $150 vip
Saturday, Sept. 26, 8:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. Mountain Tour for entrants, leaving from the Santa Fe Plaza to Canyon Road and beyond. Free to the public
Sunday, Sept. 27, 10:00 a.m.–3:30 p.m. World-class Cars, Motorcycles and Bicycles; Concept Cars; Boyd Coddington Hot Rods The Club at Las Campanas’ ninth fairway $150 vip, $50 general admission, $25 youth
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features Summer 2015 TREND
Long Day’s Journey into Light By Christina Procter | Photos by K ate Russell KATE RUSSELL
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The transcontinental explorations of multimedia artist Ricardo Mazal plumb the depths of human experience.
Anachronistic Anarchist
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124
Painter John De Puy’s abstracted landscapes reflect his transcendental vision and the legacy of the Taos Moderns.
By D evon Jackson
and
Charles C. Gurd
Spiritual Whiteout Kevin Box transforms delicate origami figures into powerful bronze sculptures to address issues of survival, sustainability, and consciousness.
By Christina Procter | Photos by K ate Russell
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trendmagazineglobal.com
PETER OGILVIE
By Craig Smith | Photos by Peter O gilvie
COURTESY OF GALERIE DE PUY
From backstage hands to board members, singers to scenery artists, a cast of many hundreds brings Santa Fe’s opera season to life.
KATE RUSSELL
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The Great Show
Adornment for the 21st Century
The Couleurs of Atelier Zobel Summer 2015
Allison Barnett, owner of Patina, wearing Atelier Zobel by Peter Schmid
PATINA GALLERY Photo: Peter Ogilvie
131 W. Palace Ave. Santa Fe • 505.986.3432 patina-gallery.com N o w i n i t s 1 6 t h y e a r, P a t i n a i s t h e i n t e r n a t i o n a l d e s t i n a t i o n f o r S o u l - S t i r r i n g Wo r k s ® o f c o n t e m p o r a r y j e w e l r y, f i n e a r t , a n d d e s i g n .
departments Summer 2015 TREND
FROM THE EDITOR
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CONTRIBUTORS
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FLASH Santa Fe’s a nexus for new media art at CURRENTS 2015; Good ideas get 140 seconds at Santa Fe Art Institute’s talks; Wheelwright Museum opens the world’s first Southwestern jewelry center; A “Summer of Color” gushes through the city.
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SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS Fans of tiny homes explore a smarter housing scenario. By Zane Fischer Photos by Kate Russell
49 IN THE ZONE Meow Wolf art collective crafts new worlds for an interactive installation and art center that opens this fall. By Jamie Holt Photos by Kate Russell
58 ART MATTERS Ai Weiwei’s installations in the American West explore the idea of freedom from a Native American perspective. By Garth Clark
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OUTLOOK Grammy-winning musician Robert Mirabal returns to farm the Taos land that raised him. By Lynne Robinson Photos by Bill Curry
ON THE COVER: Ricardo Mazal, Prayer Flag PH 2 (2010), archival pigment ink print.
148 INNOVATOR Architect Michael Krupnick designs “movie sets” for people’s lives that keep nature close. By Bill Rodgers Photos by Kirk Gittings
168 BITE & BUZZ Fusing Japanese dishes with farm-to-table priniciples, savvy chefs make 10,000 Waves an enticing escape. Story and Photos by Sergio Salvador
177 BITE & BUZZ Santa Fe is going gastro, bringing high-end food to the pubs. By Nancy Zimmerman Photos by Doug Merriam
190 OUT OF THE BOX Santa Fe Institute researchers keep it holistic when it comes to sustainability research. By Bill Rodgers Photos by Alex Traube
198 ART MATTERS There’s a rise of the creative classroom in Santa Fe. By Seth Biderman Photos by Byron Flesher and Christina Procter
207 END QUOTE
TOP: KATE RUSSELL; BOTTOM: SERGIO SALVADOR
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PUBLISHER Cynthia Marie Canyon EDITOR Christina Procter ART DIRECTOR & GRAPHIC DESIGNER Janine Lehmann PRODUCTION MANAGER & ASSOCIATE GRAPHIC DESIGNER Jeanne Lambert COPY CHIEF Brenda Poppy MARKETING & PUBLISHING INTERN May Mandy Han PHOTO PRODUCTION Boncratious REGIONAL SALES DIRECTOR Judith Leyba, 505-988-5007 SALES MANAGER Dana McIntosh, 505-470-3345 SALES AND MARKETING Nigel Rudlin, 505-470-6442
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Seth Biderman, Garth Clark, Gussie Fauntleroy, Zane Fischer, Charles C. Gurd, Jamie Holt, Devon Jackson, Christina Procter, Lynne Robinson, Bill Rodgers, Sergio Salvador, Craig Smith, Nancy Zimmerman CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Bill Curry, Byron Flesher, Kirk Gittings, Doug Merriam, Peter Ogilvie, Christina Procter, Kate Russell, Alex Traube
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30 TREND Summer 2015
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NORTH AMERICAN DISTRIBUTION Disticor Magazine Distribution Services, disticor.com NEW MEXICO DISTRIBUTION Andy Otterstrom, 505-920-6370 ACCOUNTING Danna Cooper SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING Knock Knock Social SUBSCRIPTIONS Visit trendmagazineglobal.com and click “Subscribe,” call 505-988-5007, or send $24.99 for one year (four issues) to Trend, P.O. Box 1951, Santa Fe, NM 87504 -1951. PREPRESS Fire Dragon Color, Santa Fe, New Mexico PRINTING Publication Printers, Denver, Colorado
Manufactured and printed in the United States. Copyright 2014 by Santa Fe Trend LLC. All rights reserved. No part of Trend may be reproduced in any form without prior written consent from the publisher. For reprint information, please call 505-988-5007, or email santafetrend@gmail.com. Trend art + design + architecture + cuisine ISSN 2161-4229 is published 4 times a year, with Spring (circulation 25,000), Summer (25,000), Fall (25,000), and Winter (35,000) issues distributed throughout New Mexico and the nation at premium outlets. Ask your local newsstand (anywhere worldwide) to carry Trend. Like us on Facebook at Trend art + design + architecture + cuisine magazine. Editorial inquiries to editor@trendmagazineglobal.com. Trend, P.O. Box 1951, Santa Fe, NM 87504-1951 505-988-5007, trendmagazineglobal.com
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hen I moved here nearly three years ago from New York, I realized my story in Santa Fe started when I was 15. It was during a family road trip through the Southwest—a montage of mountains, a green Colorado, train tracks, the red swell of Bryce Canyon—but nothing got through so much as one encounter. Trailing into a gallery on Canyon Road, I plopped down to do a drawing. It was then that a man leaned into my field of vision and asked if he could see my sketchbook. He flipped through it, laughing out loud at the sentences scrawled. Finally, he introduced himself. It was Jean-Claude Gaugy, the artist of that gallery. We chatted, and he told me that to be an artist, you have to go for it without fear. Gaugy’s advice stayed with me, and I’ve learned to interpret “artist” as someone who’s taking risks and making something new of what’s there. That’s exactly what the individuals in this issue have done, whether it’s a
32 TREND Summer 2015
fresh style served up at Izanami restaurant (p. 168) or musician Robert Mirabal returning to the art of farming, an inheritance he tried to escape as a young man (p. 135). For me, when it came time to leave New York, where I was an English teacher in a public high school aiming for arts integration, someone mentioned Santa Fe, and I had what sculptor Kevin Box would call a “click moment” (p. 124). I met Trend’s publisher, Cynthia Canyon, shortly after moving here, and because of that my Santa Fe experience has been about knowing true artists. They’re working here in education, architecture, cuisine, the arts, and of course, behind the scenes at Trend with the likes of master art director and graphic designer Janine Lehman and veteran editor Nancy Zimmerman, who ferried me along. How else could I have ended up talking with one of the Taos Modern painters, John De Puy, who is so much more than the art history category implies? Charles C. Gurd and Devon Jackson’s rollicking piece on his art and life can be found on p. 112. It’s also fitting that in my debut issue as Trend’s editor, we’ve covered a story that required asking tough questions about local schools. Are they creative like the rest of town? In many ways they are, though this was not what writer Seth Biderman or I expected (p. 198). Then, Garth Clark brings new consideration to ideas of creativity and freedom in his account of Ai Weiwei’s recent U.S. installations (p. 58). My greatest honor, though, has been meeting Ricardo Mazal, the Mexican abstract painter. My interviews with him over the past few months, along with Kate Russell’s poetic photography of his life in Santa Fe and Mexico City, make for a fascinating portrait (p. 82). But it’s summertime, and we hope you’ll have fun with our article on the city’s gastropubs (p. 177) as well as an inside look at The Santa Fe Opera’s expanding vision (p. 98). With this and more to come—our sustainability magazine, EcoSource, becomes part of the mother ship in our Fall Issue, and this winter, we launch our fashion LOOK BOOK—it’s just good to be here, with the artists of Santa Fe. —Christina Procter, Editor
CECE PALASKI
from the editor
from the publisher
Actress and model Joan Severance
I
THE VISION
am excited to announce the launch of our new annual fashion LOOK BOOK for the winter issue of Trend, on newsstands December 1, 2015. After more than 15 years of showcasing the best of our region’s art, design, architecture, and cuisine through in-depth stories and unparalleled photography, Trend is expanding to new visual territory to cover one of today’s most on-trend art forms. We’ve gathered some top talent from around the world to focus their photographic skills and style savvy on our region’s emergence as an important center of art, design, and fashion. Local photographer and guest photo editor Bill Curry has curated the work of these internationally renowned fashion photographers to bring you haute couture with a distinctly Southwestern flair. You will see art, couture, and designs alongside our stunning photo essays, which will cover a variety of international fashion looks and trends. Available all year locally throughout Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Taos, this premier issue of the new Trend LOOK BOOK will lead buyers to one-of-akind finds. I know you look forward to reading every issue of Trend, published each spring, summer, fall, and now winter too. See for yourself why the Santa Fe region is the world’s best shopping destination for art, design, home accessories, fashion, and unique merchandise that appeals to mind, body, and spirit. —Cynthia Canyon, Publisher and Founder
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contributors 2 kate russell
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3 kirk gittings
4 charles c . gurd
5 bill rodgers
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from spontaneous inspiration rather than ongoing thinking. His research takes him from Santa Fe to Vancouver Island and Provence on a regular basis.
WRITERS Bill “Billiam” Rodgers (bottom left) serves as editor with CFileOnline.org, where he covers design, architecture, and art in the field of ceramics. He’s currently exploring environmental storytelling on the narrative team for Meow Wolf’s The House of Eternal Return, an interactive art installation scheduled to open this fall in Santa Fe. On his weekends he DJs techno in the city’s finest dive bars. Painter and fine art photographer Charles C. Gurd (bottom middle) recently opened the Elmore Gurd Contemporary gallery in Santa Fe to showcase his work. A graduate of McGill and Rice universities, his work champions the intention of an earlier Transcendental Group of Santa Fe and Taos artists—to inspire and uplift with abstraction that results
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Garth Clark (center) is the nation’s leading writer, critic, and historian of modern and contemporary ceramics, with more than 60 book titles. Among his many honors are the 2005 Mather Award for Distinguished Art Journalism from the College Art Association, Art Book of the Year from the Art Libraries Society of America, Fellow of the Royal College of Art, London, and honorary doctorates from the Kansas City Art Institute and Staffordshire University, England. He and his partner, Mark Del Vecchio, founded Garth Clark Gallery in New York and Los Angeles before
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TOP ROW, FROM LEFT: DANA WALDON; KATE RUSSELL. BOTTOM ROW, FROM LEFT: BILL RODGERS, KIM RICHARDSON, KIRK GITTINGS.
1 peter ogilvie
Kate Russell (top right) is a nationally recognized photographer based in Santa Fe known for her ability to create evocative images and elevate simplicity. A sensitivity to light and the moment is evident in her work, as seen in The New York Times, Western Interiors, Santa Fean, and Su Casa, among others. She’s also featured in Restaurant Martín Cookbook: Sophisticated Home Cooking From the Celebrated Santa Fe Restaurant by Martín Rios with Bill and Cheryl Jamison, Old World Interiors by David Naylor, and Designers Here and There by Michele Keith. Russell’s earlier work with a traveling circus and the arts brought her to the world of photography, and remains an inspiration. Her images can be seen at katerussellphotography.com. Born in Alaska in 1950, Kirk Gittings (bottom right) has lived in New Mexico for some 60 years. He studied photography at the University of New Mexico and received his MFA at the University of Calgary in Canada. Known for his architecture and landscape photography, he has been widely published in the U.S. and abroad. A former instructor at the University of New Mexico, he now teaches at the School of Art Institute of Chicago and the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. R
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Featuring OCEANSIDE GLASSTILE
S TAT E M E N T S
photographers Peter Ogilvie (top left) was raised in Southern California and studied art and architecture at Berkeley. He then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and started making documentary films. Filmmaking led to still photography, both fine-art and commercial. Pursuing his career in advertising, fashion, and fine art, he’s lived in San Francisco, Milan, Paris, New York, and now New Mexico. He has traveled the world on assignments and won numerous awards for his work with clients like Saks Fifth Avenue, Gap, AT&T, Levi Strauss & Co., Sony, Macy’s, Vogue, Marie Claire, and GQ.
TILE / LIGHTING / KITCHENS / FLOORING
they moved to Santa Fe in 2008. Clark’s now editor-in-chief for the nonprofit CFile Foundation’s publishing projects. He recently completed two books, Mind Mud: The Conceptual Ceramics of Ai Weiwei and Lucio Fontana Ceramics.
new media neotoric city
news, gossip, and innuendo
Electric City
CALL IT OPEN-SOURCE ART.
CURRENTS 2015: 6th Santa Fe International New Media Festival
Soft Revolvers by Montreal artist Myriam Bleau
The ever-mutating digital controllers and codes used by new media artists are freely shared, each innovation propelling a force that accelerates the creative flow. And what these artists produce is as mind-blowingly diverse, boundless, and unpredictable as the 21st-century digital world itself. Experience this neoteric realm at CURRENTS 2015, the 6th annual citywide Santa Fe International New Media Festival, June 12–28. Produced and curated by Santa Fe’s Parallel Studios, CURRENTS is an interactive experience of multimedia light, sound, and moving-image art in venues around town, almost all of them free of charge. Among the categories this year are 3-D-printed sculpture along with architectural mapping, robotics, and art involving the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift. Expect to be surprised. Singapore artist Kian Peng Ong’s installation, Particle Waves, uses an exposed circuit board to connect 12 clear-plastic bowls on gently swaying stems. Each bowl contains tiny lead pellets that shift as the bowls tilt and move, creating a mesmerizing sound like waves on the beach or wind through leaves. On June 27, CURRENTS presents a retrospective selection of multiscreen compositions from the remarkable career of Steina, longtime Santa Fe resident and one of the pioneers in video and electronic media. Notes Frank Ragano, Parallel Studios coexecutive and co–artistic director with Mariannah Amster: “We’ve never been afraid of beauty. Our main focus is the art—technology in service of the art.” For a full schedule of events, visit currentsnewmedia.org. —GUSSIE FAUNTLEROY
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COURTESY OF CURRENTS MEDIA
#Flash
creativity conversation citizenship
#Flash
SFAI140 “There’s an assumption it takes a long time to communicate new ideas,” says Sanjit Sethi, Santa Fe Art Institute’s director since 2013. “That’s a dangerous assumption.” Sethi’s “uber-reminder” is a poster from the 1960s Parisian revolt: a police thug wielding a baton, bearing the slogan: Votez toujours, je ferai le reste. (Just vote, I’ll do the rest.) “To promote advanced citizenship,” he says, “you don’t need to bloviate for hours.” In fact, you only need a couple of minutes. Three times a year, the SFAI 140 lecture series gives 20 speakers exactly 140 seconds to share new ideas. Last year, participants blasted a dazzling array of possibilities about food justice: an edible hut in Detroit, a food hub in Northern New Mexico, even the “poetics of potatoes.” “It’s about sparking exchange,” Sethi says. “Solutions will emerge.” — SETH BIDERMAN
sfai.org/sfai-140
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nadelbachphoto.com(c)
COURTESY OF SANTA FE ART INSTITUTE
At Santa Fe Art Institute, good ideas get 140 seconds
Flash
news, gossip, and innuendo
Space of its Own The Wheelwright Museum’s new Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry is the first of its kind
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Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry is the world’s first museum space permanently devoted to American Indian jewelry, from prehistoric times to the present. The elegant, light-filled addition includes 2,000 square feet of gallery space for permanent and changing exhibitions, as well as research and classroom areas. It showcases one of the country’s most important collections of Navajo and Pueblo-Hopi jewelry, flatware, hollowware, lapidary, and stone carving, including work by 20th-century masters and important contemporary artists. The inaugural exhibition in the center’s changing gallery, on view through the summer, pays tribute to
COURTESY OF THE WHEELWRIGHT MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
hen rangers at Mesa Verde National Park invited Gail Bird (Santo Domingo-Laguna) to give a talk on Pueblo and Navajo jewelry a couple of years ago, it was the first time in the park’s more than 100 years of cultural history presentations that the subject was Native American jewelry. “All too often, male anthropologists overlook jewelry. It’s seen as being for women, or frivolous. It’s not seen as an integral part of the culture,” says Bird, half of an acclaimed jewelrymaking team with Navajo artist Yazzie Johnson. The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian has taken a step to rectify that. The museum’s newly opened
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COURTESY OF THE WHEELWRIGHT MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN
Opposite above: Liz Wallace (Maidu/Washoe/Navajo), Cicada (2005), silver, gold, turquoise, and rubies. Opposite below, from left: Charles Loloma (Hopi), tufa-cast gold bracelet with badger paw, lapis lazuli, coral, and turquoise (c. 1985); Preston Mononyge (Mission Indian raised with Hopi), tufa-cast gold bracelet with Kokopelli, Bisbee turquoise (circa 1970-80); Charles Loloma, carved wood, coral, turquoise, and ivory bracelet (1974); Roy Talahaftewa (Hopi), silver, and gold bracelet with turquoise (2008). Front center: Harvey Begay (Navajo), gold, Chinese turquoise, and coral bracelet (1989). Above: Liz Wallace, Wild Iris tiara, enamel, sterling silver and gold. Bottom: Denise Wallace, Dancer I (1996), silver, gold, fossil ivory, sugilite.
noted scholar John Adair, whose seminal 1944 book, The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths, set the example for excellence in research. The museum continues to maintain a strong focus on the human story of the artists behind the work. “Anytime a museum opens doors to the people who have firsthand knowledge and firsthand interest in what the museum houses, it’s a very important asset to the community,” Bird says. — GUSSIE FAUNTLEROY Wheelwright Museum
505-982-4636
wheelwright.org
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news, gossip, and innuendo
eidos contemporary jewelry
Summer of Color
The city mixes up a brightly hued cocktail of art, cuisine, and entertainment
JOHN BIGELOW TAYLOR / COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART
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hat’s five millimeters long, eats prickly pear cactus, and makes Angelina Jolie’s lips look luscious? If you said the cochineal bug, you’re right. The tiny insect, with a lifespan of only a few days, is the source of a red dye that marked history in cultures across the world. This and other fascinating trivia will be yours during Santa Fe’s “Summer of Color,” a marketing campaign initially intended to attract more tourists to Museum Hill that ended up jogging the various imaginations of curators and chefs citywide. As it turned out, the Museum of International Folk Art already had in the works its exhibition on bug juice, “The Red That Colored the World.” The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture was opening “Turquoise, Water, Sky: The Stone and Its Meaning,” and the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art was mounting a show called “Blue on Blue: Indigo and Cobalt in New Spain.” Word spread. Now more than 75 other museums, galleries, hotels, restaurants and bars (Geronimo, Georgia, Coyote Cafe, and The Shed, to name a few) are creating special events and specialty drinks (envision cocktails the color of celadon, cerulean, and cerise) to finally disprove the tourists’ lament that “this town is all adobe.” (The New Mexico History Museum’s exhibit will directly counter that claim with an exhibit called “Fifty Shades of Adobe.”) El Farol Restaurant has adopted red—naturally—to accompany its six-week Flamenco Dinner Show, July 9 to August 23. The galleries turned out in greatest numbers, with more than 50 dedicating special exhibitions to their colors of choice. Patina Gallery jumped on the bandwagon early, taking its adaptation beyond summer to encompass an entire “Year of Couleur,” including eight exhibits, each focusing on a particular color (in French, bien sûr). GF Contemporary is celebrating a “Summer of Green” while rebels GVG Contemporary and Mark White Fine Art explore various interpretations of White. At PhotoEye Gallery, gold’s the color of Kate Breakey’s photographs. And so on. A calendar of events continues to evolve daily on summerofcolorsantafe.org, and many of these are free, including the August 9 community day on Museum Hill, with activities and demonstrations for all. It’s time to don that neon shirt or gunpowder jumpsuit and come out to play. Rainbow wig, anyone? —HOLLIS WALKER Firefighter’s ceremonial coat, (kajibanten), Japan (18th–19th century, Edo period), wool with gold- and silk- thread embroidery and appliqué (John Weber Collection).
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eidos contemporary jewelry 500 Montezuma Avenue inside Sanbusco Center Santa Fe, NM 87501 505 992 0020 www.eidosjewelry.com
Social Constructs
Sliding Scale
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edged between steel-clad warehouse buildings at the tattered edge of Santa Fe, where the city air carries scents of sage and radiator coolant, Greg Hesselden has been building a cottage on wheels. It’s a well-appointed thing, his cottage, with a peaked roof, ornate trim, and thoughtfully placed windows that stream the highaltitude light into cozy interior nooks like astral spotlights. A locksmith staring into his sixth decade of trying to make sense of life and everything else, Hesselden has added a floor-to-ceiling window in the close-quarters bathroom. Space is at a premium, but he can have a shower with nothing but doubleglazing between his bare ass and the rest of the world, which creates, among other things, a sense of space. “I don’t expect to be putting [the house] anywhere I need to worry about neighbors,” Hesselden says. “And when you build something this small, it’s important to find ways
44 TREND Summer 2015
to invite more space in.” He’s done just that using smart design. The dense slate of his kitchen counter is positioned to absorb sunlight from a large window during the day, and cut thick enough to function like a passive solar Trombe wall that releases stored heat at night. For an exterior finish, Hesselden constructed a rain screen from a repeating pattern of short, angled boards, which could read as an ancient motif or an op-art exercise. Assembled atop a 16-foot trailer, the towhitchable home is what’s commonly called a tiny house, an increasingly popular idea that, depending on who you ask, is a fad, farce, or the final nail in the coffin of the traditional family home. To many, it could mean the end of a financing tunnel that’s strangled the working class with burdensome mortgage payments. In New Mexico, the movement just might leverage an architectural past in service of future innovation. The movement has been massive enough to earn satire on TV hit Portlandia and to
BY ZANE FISCHER | PHOTO BY KATE RUSSELL
support more than a few companies that are peddling tiny home workshops, components, or full-blown construction. Most are built on trailers and designed to fit within height and weight restrictions that avoid the building code and permit requirements of permanent structures. Some qualify as RVs, which prompts a world of possibility, including RV-friendly financing mechanisms. In California, one company sells more than 100 tiny houses per year at a notso-tiny profit. But can you really live in a house that’s under 150 square feet? Hesselden thinks so. “My kids grew up, moved out, and I was living in a three-bedroom house. It was too much. I’ve always liked everything within reach, and it appeals to me to have greater security and flexibility in my retirement, to not pay a mortgage,” he says. “Frees me up to have more fun.” Hesselden may be thinking about more cheddar for chasing his retirement dreams, but younger people are starting to rethink
OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF PROJECT GREGORY
Exploring a smaller, smarter, society-shifting housing scenario
the logic of the college-marriage-mortgage path. Testifying before Congress in March 2015, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen seemed to sense a looming sea change without knowing exactly what to do about it. It turns out that millennials are carting around a truckload of college debt, aren’t exactly lining up to buy houses, and appear ambivalent about marriage, she explained to stony and bewildered congressmen. The powers that be don’t know what the impact of this behavior will be, but they seem to be raising some waxy eyebrows. “The housing industry pushes people toward bigger and bigger houses because, well, they’re more profitable,” says Hesselden. There’s ample evidence of the industry pushing profitability over practicality, but it also seems like a pipe dream that millions of millennials are ready to conscript to a tiny house revolution. There does appear to be some legitimate splintering from accepted values among millennials, along with a lingering hangover from the housing crisis, but the National Association of Realtors reported that millennials comprise 32 percent of the housing market this year. So it’s not exactly true that young people aren’t buying houses, presumably in medium, large, and extra-large. In part, they’re pushed toward ownership after years of in-
creasingly steep rent, even if they seek not to emulate their parents. Yet a significant shift may have yet to occur, says Daniel Werwath, a principal at Werwath Associates, which provides consulting for community development nationwide. “In the work I do, there’s a growing recognition and demand for a new housing model that fits between renting and ownership—a model where people can still build some amount of equity while preserving a high level of housing flexibility and low ecological impact,” he says. Cost-cutting is a motivating factor in the switch to a tiny-home lifestyle. A 150-squarefoot house built by a professional can easily cost $80,000, not including the price of somewhere to park it or of financing a mortgage, which can pretty much double what you pay over 30 years. According to data collected by The Tiny Life (thetinylife.com), without factoring in owner labor, the average owner-built tiny house costs about $23,000. There’s a strong romance tangled up in what Hesselden is doing: tossing a motorcycle in the bed of his truck, hitching up the house, whistling for the dog, and setting off for the next epic vista or perfect climate. But there’s also a powerful vision to which Werwath alludes: systemic change that could meet the needs of a rapidly evolving, technology-centered culture.
Several cities around the country have established tiny house communities, some organic, others planned. The Pacific Northwest boasts a high concentration, as does Colorado, Texas, California, and, less predictably, Florida and Wisconsin. The Olympia, Washington, Quixote Village was created by faith leaders after the city’s rousting of homeless encampments. It boasts 30 individual units, manicured grounds, and bike paths. Other efforts, such as Dignity Village in Portland, are more free-form and aesthetically quirky, but both examples offer stewardship of home and land to disenfranchised populations and have become part of the larger community fabric. The movement’s true potential emerges when tiny house residents begin to explore community. It’s tied to an old principle of settlement—the commons. Small houses make more sense with shared amenities, like co-working spaces, communal kitchens, greenhouses, and so forth. It’s more economically feasible, and small modular houses built as urban (and even suburban) infill bring compelling potential for alternative financing and lifestyles. In New Mexico, where Hesselden will hunt for the right habitat to park his home, many dwellings have historically been modular by necessity. Almost every adobe house older than a few decades started with one
A design company in Slovakia has hatched Project Gregory, a plan to convert billboards into dwellings for the homeless. Opposite: Greg Hesselden and his dog Lola outside their new home. 45
Social Constructs
small room that was added onto as a family’s wealth or numbers increased. These traditional tiny homes still sit on blue highways and back roads all across the state and represent a vernacular of style that’s born from practicality: How large a beam can two people lift? Peering into the history of New Mexico’s Spanish land grants and pueblos proves that community and private properties can coexist. If tiny-house owners congregate, they could create a shared commons with community assets, and membership therein can build equity beyond the size of any home. If people had membership in such developments, they could presumably travel with their house or maintain a tiny personal space in different cities. Maybe these funky, frilled sheds teetering dangerously down the highway represent a turning point in the fundamental ideas of home and community. The large, looming question is how to put these ideas into practice in a contemporary context. Spur, Texas, a populationchallenged point on the map about halfway between Santa Fe and Dallas, is billing itself as the “nation’s first tiny house– friendly town.” It means life on a lonesome prairie, but it’s also an opportunity to pilot a new way of living. The Route 66 RV Park in Edgewood, New Mexico, is available to tiny-home enthusiasts making a go of it at the southern edge of Santa Fe County. Maintenance supervisor Bo Harrington says he has a few good sites for tiny houses, and he’s open to people building on location. No one’s taken him up on the offer yet, but he says he’s had quite a few calls from people who, like Hesselden, have started their projects. Such RV parks offer enough legal flexibility to become living laboratories for living different. In more populated areas, zoning that permits mobile homes is more likely to accommodate a coagulation of tiny houses than would traditional residential neighborhoods. It’s an opportunity waiting for an entrepreneur willing to think small in order to make it big. And it’s one case where scaling way back means a much wider horizon. R 46 TREND Summer 2015
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InArt SANTA FE
Gallery of Fine Art
Canyon Road
a magical mile
Since its early Native American and Spanish roots, Canyon Road has been a trail of abudance—initially as a farming community, later as the site of an art colony, and today as the country’s top art distination with more fine art galleries and studios in one short mile then any other place on earth. Nestled into the foothill of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Canyon Road is a magical place that invites exploration. More than 100 galleries, artist studios, and sculpture gardens occupy the gracious adobe buildings that line the road and offer an incredibly diverse array of art by established and emerging artists. Enjoy exceptional food at gourmet restaurants and cafes, artist demonstrations, cutting-edge galleries, and art ranging from blown glass and works on canvas to pottery, sculpture and exquisite, hand-crafted jewelry. Boutiques and shops feature, unique fashions and wearable art, textiles, hand-made furniture and exceptional one-of-a-kind items.
UPCOMING EVENTS ON CANYON ROAD
Celebrating our
10th year! 219 Delgado Street (on Canyon Road)
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October 17, 2015 HISTORIC CANYON ROAD PAINT OUT AND SCULPT OUT October 31, 2015 HALLOWEEN TRICK OR TREATING December 24, 2015 CANYON ROAD FAROLITO WALK February 25–26, 2016 ARTFEAST EVENTS May 6-7th, 2016 PASSPORT TO THE ARTS June 11th, 2016 EDIBLE ART TOUR
visitcanyonroad.com
In THE ZONE BY JAMIE HOLT | PHOTOS BY KATE RUSSELL
CRAFTING WORLDS A new Santa Fe art installation explores a fantastical family narrative
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In THE ZONE
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ou enter a large building formerly known as the Silva Lanes bowling alley, buy your ticket at the counter, and proceed into what’s apparently someone’s front yard. It’s dark as night, stars shine above, and light radiates from the porch and windows of an old twostory Victorian. It’s not your neighbor’s place, not your childhood home stirring up memories, but the keystone of The House of Eternal Return, a permanent, interactive installation by the collective art group Meow Wolf, set to launch this fall. Situated within the Meow Wolf Art Complex on Rufina Court in the geographical heart of Santa Fe, the installation unfolds over 20,000 square feet and two stories. Its overarching narrative is of a house divided, 50 TREND Summer 2015
not in the traditional sense, but through space and time, as if it’s been drawn into a black hole only to emerge reassembled in wildly fantastic ways on the other side. Visitors are presented with the story of the imaginary Selig family—a mom and dad, brother and sister twins, an uncle, and grandfather. Each possesses a unique character, but also abilities beyond natural that when exercised precipitate a fracture in space and time. This event occurs within their home, causing the family’s memories, secrets, and fantasies to expand and contract in unusual ways. An uncle’s dream of success, for instance, takes the form of a travel agency, and a family remembrance of a trip becomes a cave of luminous lights
and interactive sounds. A place of touchsensitive stalagmites and stalactites (the father’s retro-game nostalgia) turns into a light-filled arcade and pinball experience that immures you in the game. Visitors can discover the family’s story through audio, video, and tangible objects, like a cell phone. The group even outsourced the creation of an app that allows spectators to snap photographs at various points and pull up further information. Yet the house takes up only about a tenth of the installation. One can explore it and then by various egresses, such as through the refrigerator or backdoor, discover the remaining spaces. Some of these were conceived by Meow Wolf mem-
Artist Erika Wanenmacher has contributed a dome of animal eyes to the installation. Opposite: Several of the core members of Meow Wolf, from left: Corvas Brinkerhoff, Matt King, Caity Kennedy, Emily Montoya, and Sean Di Ianni.
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In THE ZONE
Top: Some of the Meow Wolf pack with George R. R. Martin (center with bowling pin) and other contributors. Below: The group’s Due Return installation of 2007 pitched a unique aesthetic that Eternal Return will take to greater scope.
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bers, while others are the result of applications from artists across the nation. This collaborative approach has defined the Meow Wolf pack since a core group of members established it in 2007. They’re best known for The Due Return, an immersive installation in the form of a 73 ½-foot, two-story ship that was moored outside the Center for Contemporary Arts long enough to draw 100,000 visitors in 2011. The House of Eternal Return is Meow Wolf’s most comprehensive project yet, exemplifying the group’s mission to build multifaceted projects that provide a full sensory experience. “It’s an environment that you walk into, that surrounds you,” says Emily Montoya, a core member and the group’s graphic designer. “It’s not ‘don’t touch this, don’t open that.’ It invites you to be a character within it at some level, to share its reality and to make it your own.” Making it your own is what the story’s about. Although the fictional family members can all interact with the element of time, it was the twin brother Lex—aided by his uncle—who conducted an experiment gone wrong, putting the home at the focal point of a rupture in physics. Yet the real gist of the story is a reward to spectators who search for it, uncovering the secrets of the narrative and how family dynamics are written into time and space. More than 85 artists and 180 volunteers have contributed to Eternal Return in a space big enough for nine Due Returns. Since January 2015, Meow Wolf has assembled various teams: technology, performance, narrative, graphic design, aesthetic direction, administration, volunteer coordination, and more, each with a project leader, several artists, and a greater number of long- and short-term volunteers. “Many of our new artists have expressed that they’re taking this opportunity to build a piece they’ve been dreaming about making for years but have never had a venue for,” says Caity Kennedy, project coordinator. Local artist Erika Wanenmacher has been involved with Meow Wolf since its inception. She champions the collective’s niche in the city’s art scene—its vitality, diversity of shows, and general “artists-helping-artists” mentality. Her project is a dome of meticutrendmagazineglobal.com 53
ART
SANTA FE . 2015
JULY 9-12, 2015 INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR CHILE | CUBA | JAPAN | SOUTH AFRICA | USA 4th place winner in USA Today’s “Top 10 Best Art Fairs”!
Opening Night Gala: Thursday, July 9, 5 PM - 8 PM Friday, July 10 | Saturday, July 11 | Sunday, July 12 11 AM - 6 PM | Santa Fe Convention Center 201 W. Marcy Street | Santa Fe | New Mexico
505.988. 8883 | www.artsantafe.com Saturday, July 11 | ART Santa Fe Presents Keynote Speaker
DON BACIGALUPI, Founding President of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Chicago, Illinois; “Building the 21st Century Museum: Crystal Bridges and Beyond.”
Tickets available at the Lensic Box Office 505.988.1234
C E L E B R AT I N G F I F T E E N Y E A R S Image detail: ©2014 Brian Goodman, California, Prismatic Exploration 1, Edition of 12, Archival Pigment Print on Canson Arches Aquarelle Rag 310, 60 x 36 inches
Opening Night Gala, lead sponsor Art & Antiques
In THE ZONE
First-time contributors Christina Sporrong and Christian Ristow make large-scale robotic pieces that have been featured in wide-ranging venues, from Burning Man to the International Symposium for Electronic Arts 2012 Machine Wilderness installation in New Mexico. For Eternal Return, they’ve created Swarm, an installation of 300 flocking mechanical birds.
lously crafted iridescent animal eyes located deep within Eternal Return, and it includes the ever-watching eyes of the family pet and other significant animals. Others involved in forging this world include volunteer painters, filmmakers, and actors, as well as those working in welding, lighting, and website building. Following a town-hall-style public meeting at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Meow Wolf also coordinated youth involvement. Projects headed up by youth include posters, drawings, notebooks, and other items belonging to the twins in the narrative. And two kids were cast to play the twins in various films, photographs, and audio recordings throughout the space. Zubin, age ten (like the twins), built a Minecraft version of the entire installation, and Liam, 11, wrote and illustrated the notebooks of Lex. For Liam, Meow Wolf changes the face of what art 54 TREND Summer 2015
can be. He recalls the impact of seeing The Due Return. “It’s cool that art can be a world,” he says, “a place you can walk into.” Resources, both financial and technical, helped turn Meow Wolf’s dreams of an art center into reality. In early 2015, CEOs Sean Di Ianni and Vince Kadlubek made a winning pitch to Albuquerquebased Creative Startups, followed by the purchase of the Silva Lanes building and the public support of Santa Fe local George R. R. Martin, author of the popular Game of Thrones book series. Along with a Kickstarter campaign and private donations, the Meow Wolf Art Complex took form. Alongside the installation space, it will include 19 artist studios, a learning center, gift shop, and a smaller gallery with rotating shows. The group’s hope is that the complex will receive 100,000 visitors a year for Eternal Return alone, a figure Kadlubek says is just
slightly less than the annual attendance of the Santa Fe Children’s Museum and about a third of Albuquerque’s Explora museum, both of which were chosen for their interactive appeal. The number doesn’t include those who visit the gallery or performance center. There will also be students from ArtSmart and other programs held at the Loughridge Learning Center, which at night will double as a venue for creative classes aimed at adults. With its worlds within worlds, Meow Wolf’s expanding community of artists has created an exhibition space unlike any other. The House of Eternal Return begs visitors not just to view but explore the world before them and become a part of its story. It invites you to join a created world—and its fictional family, but with its creators, designers, even fellow visitors, forming a makeshift family across the boundaries of space and time. Visit meowwolf.com/art-complex. R
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oland van Loon’s paintings are wildly colorful, sometimes flamboyant reflections of the human experience. In 1991 he arrived in Santa Fe, where he has embraced iconic cultural representations that are not just local but universal in origin. Whether it’s a bull engaging a flamenco dancer or a glowing Virgin Mary illuminating a bar scene, van Loon’s depictions of the tension between love and separation, darkness and light bring exceptional vitality to his abstract realism. As a teen he trained in Honolulu with the great muralist Jean Charlot—a colleague of Diego Rivera’s—and he traces his use of color to this experience. His recently opened studio-gallery at the corner of Agua Fria and Romero is a cornerstone of the budding CAM FAM neighborhood behind the Railyard, which van Loon refers to as Santa Fe’s “mini-Soho.”
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Invited Artists
Gina Adams, Ojibwa; Michael Billie, Diné; Roy Kady, Diné; Sallyann Paschall, Cherokee; Ambrose Teasyatwho, Diné; Holly Wilson, Delaware/Cherokee
Indian Market Weekend ROBERT ERLICHMAN
Celebrating our 10th year anniversary and moving into Santa Fe, opens a whole new chapter for the Encaustic Art Institute. The Gallery features over 200 works of art, representing old style encaustics, new style with photography, paper, mixed-media and more. All works of art include the medium of WAX. The gallery includes the Institutes members art work for sale from across the nation, including Canada. Also showing is a Permanent Collection of encaustic artwork, displaying the diversity of this ancient medium.
FASHION SHOW Friday, August 21st 6-8 PM Jolonzo Guy Goldtooth Internationally recognized designer, Jolonzo features his New York Fall Collection, Original work. Dance performance by Dancing Earth
LEARN MORE, COME VISIT. OPEN WED THROUGH SUN 11-5 632 Agua Fria Street (Also access from Romero Street) Santa Fe, NM 87501 505-989-3283 www.eainm.com EAI is a 501C3 non-profit arts organization
E L L SWO RT H G A L L E RY Conte mporary Painti ng and Sc ul pture | Fi ne Asi an Anti ques
Ikeda Clan Samurai Armor Japan c. 1760 Iron, Lacquer, Silk, 60 x 25 x 25
Claire McArdle Torso Luminoso , 2015 Carrara Marble, 35 x 9 x 9
Elise Ansel Red Ribbon, After Ingres (detail), 2015 Oil on Linen, 30 x 22
215 East Palace Avenue | Santa Fe, NM, 87501 | 505.989.7900 | info@ellsworthgallery.com www.
ell sworthgalle ry .com
art matters BY GARTH CLARK
CREATIVITY
INCARCERATED
58
Summer 2015
Ai Weiwei’s installations in the American West explore the idea of freedom from a Native American perspective
E
turns out the pots are common and can be bought inexpensively in China. The nation’s cultural heritage loss was minor, and, in the end, Ai emerged an art star. His recent U.S. exhibitions have taken place at Coyote Canyon in the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and on the prison island of Alcatraz off the coast of San Francisco. He didn’t set foot in either venue, though, since his passport has been withdrawn. Endless hours on Skype sharing details with his large staff, as well as visits to Beijing by the American staff, helped to keep the project moving despite the artist’s absence. Two curious threads link Ai’s otherwise wildly distinct U.S. installations: porcelain, one of the artist’s favorite materials, and an exploration of how Native American groups whose cultures are under attack have navigated political and spiritual struggles. Pull of the Moon was a site-specific performance piece by Ai and Navajo artist Bert Benally. Organized by Eileen Braziel for Navajo TIME (Temporary Installations Made for the Environment), it
OPPOSITE: ERIC GREGORY POWELL / COURTESY OF AI WEIWEI STUDIO; JAN STÜRMANN / COURTESY OF FOR-SITE FOUNDATION
ven if you don’t follow art, it’s difficult not to know the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. In and out of headlines the past ten years, he’s had various near-death encounters with Chinese law enforcement and once disappeared for three months while in the custody of the Beijing secret police—an event that caused such a major international uproar it helped render him the world’s most famous and controversial contemporary artist. His 2012 exhibition Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern in London set the world record for attendance of a living artist’s solo show, with 1.2 million visitors going to see the installation of 100,000 hand-sculpted porcelain seeds. Ceramics has played a key role in his career since 1995, when his photographic triptych Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, which depicted the destruction of a pristine 2,000-year-old vase, caused a furor. The belief was that the then-37-year-old artist had just demolished a “priceless” museum-quality treasure. The media went ballistic about his making art by destroying history, but it
In Ai Weiwei’s Blossom (2014), shown above and in detail (opposite), freedom blooms from the plumbing. This part of the @Large exhibition was installed in the hospital wing on the prison island of Alcatraz.
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ROBERT SCHWAN / COURTESY OF TIMENM.COM; EILEEN BRAZIEL (2) / COURTESY OF EILEENBRAZIEL.COM
art matters
60
Summer 2015
Drawing by Bert Bernally for his Pull of the Moon installation, which began with fires (right and below).
ROBERT SCHWAN (2) / COURTESY OF TIMENM.COM
Opposite, clockwise from top: Pull of the Moon at Coyote Canyon; Bert Bernally at work in his studio in Eileen Braziel Fine Arts Gallery; Ai wearing a gift from the Navajo Nation.
trendmagazineglobal.com 61
art matters canyon and trucked to the site. Benally and several assistants communicated with Ai via Skype to install it. Benally’s sand drawing, based on creation stories told to him by the matriarchs who live in the canyon, was gouged into the canyon sand itself. Seeing Ai’s interlocking bicycles as the machine that powers China’s industry, Benally considered which machine might represent his own people’s labor. Since the Navajo Nation has no manufacturing industry to speak of, he came up with something more benign: laying out patterns and symbols from weaving, silversmithing, and other crafts. The centerpiece was a 12-foot, Navajo-style utilitarian clay pot plastered onto a wooden frame woven from saplings. Benally placed a corn sculpture welded from metal and bicycle parts inside the pot, which would be revealed as the pot burned and crumbled. Benally began his performance as the sun disappeared. Fire rose out of the giant pot and shot skyward like a burning beacon, and as the pot sagged and cratered, the fire spread into the drawing’s four quadrants each representing the four ways of Navajo life, and headed toward a pyre at each compass point. Given the drama, Ai’s drawing might have just lain there inert, but the fire took care of that. The bicycle mandala rose like a
ROBERT SCHWAN / COURTESY OF TIMENM.COM
was the result of a unique partnership between New Mexico Arts and the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock. The public event, which was held on remote Navajo land in June 2014, was restricted to a small audience of 30 people. Santa Fe’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts later held an exhibition of the 3-D modeling digital landscape, created by xRez Studio in Los Angeles (Rez for resolution, not reservation), that showed a flyover of Benally and Ai’s installations. xRez also produced a film for the 50-foot-diameter dome screen at Museum Hill in Santa Fe. But why did Ai choose this project out of the many proposals he receives? “I’d lived in North America for 12 years and had Native American friends involved with pottery,” explains the artist. “I like projects that are set up in special conditions or that have a deeper significance. The Navajo people are quite spiritual, and it’s interesting to share in this exchange of ideas.” The event, an evening performance, involved the creation of two sand drawings on the canyon floor. Ai’s piece was a mandala from his Forever Bicycles series. (Shanghai Forever is the name of China’s leading Chinese bike manufacturer.) It was created with crushed white porcelain—from recent works, not ancient shards—atop a circle of black sand found in another part of the
62 TREND Summer 2015
COURTESY OF XREZ STUDIO, XREZ.COM
with 71 other Native American men, women and children. Documentation and images from this protest form a substantial part of the book that accompanied the exhibition, which closed in April 2015. Ai was prevented from ever setting foot on Alcatraz, but in the political sense he occupied it all the same. His installation, though conducted from afar, is as much a tribute to the Hopi resisters as it is a salute to persecuted artists around the world, who, like Ai are confined to their homes, countries, or prison cells. It was his usual sly, perfect critique. The @Large exhibition included multiple installations in four buildings. In the lower gun gallery stood Refraction, a powerful metal sculpture that contrasted the idea of flight with the room’s former role as a receptacle of apprehension and death. In the dining hall, Yours Truly invited visitors to sit at bare dining tables and write postcards to the prisoners held in Trace, which was in one of the more haunting spaces of the prison, a pair of porcelain-tiled chambers that were once used to isolate and observe mentally ill inmates. Echoing within the clinical, tiled walls were the sounds of Hopi and Tibetan chants. The Hopi Above: Bert Benally’s Pull of the Moon project in Coyote Canyon (opposite) of Navajo Nation. music was derived from a traditional Eagle Dance that invokes the bird’s healing power—a nod to the first prisoners of conscience on Alcatraz and another reference to the witness, a voyeur, to what was happening alongside it. It was theme of flight. an alien counterpoint, precise and mechanical next to Benally’s Blossom, located in the hospital wing where an ailing Al Capone more organic expression—two worlds, one light source. Soon the was once nursed, may have been the most successful segment. Ai bicycle parts were warping and twisting, toward the end resemtransformed utilitarian fixtures in several hospital ward cells and bling the randomly scattered remains of a giant skeleton. medical offices, like sinks, toilets, and tubs once used by hospitalBenally had also woven a soundscape from different indigenous song sources across the world, and every tremble, murmur, ized prisoners, into vases for fragile porcelain bouquets. While and guttural groan echoed against the canyon walls. With a the flowers referenced traditional Chinese arts, they also carried pulsing bass, the music moved through chant into feral sounds another association; China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956, and melodic surges, with a final note that left the canyon’s small which happened a year before Ai was born, was a brief period of audience breathless. government tolerance for free expression that was followed by a In contrast to the natural setting of that installation, Ai’s @Large severe crackdown against dissent. was installed on the prison island of Alcatraz. Where Pull of the In the West, where risk of punishment is slight, perhaps we’ve Moon spoke to contemporary cultures surviving (or not) with nature downgraded courage in the arts to making Facebook comments. on their own terms, Alcatraz, a barren rock surrounded by swift Not Ai, who, during his three-month imprisonment, was kept in a currents and frigid water, used nature as a guard to prevent escape. windowless room without pencil, paper, radio, television, or comThe manmade prison is totally devoid of evidence of the natural puter. It was not strictly solitary; two guards were present in his world, aside from glimpses of sky through small barred windows. cell at all times, but they were forbidden to speak with him. Today It is a totalitarian temple to justice and injustice, having housed he remains under 24-hour surveillance in Caochangdi, a village some of the nation’s most dangerous felons from 1934 to 1963, in suburban Beijing that’s popular with artists. So his art is not a and its rough concrete and coarse metal harshly amplify noise. conceptual exercise. What cinched the deal for Ai was seeing a photograph from That’s one reason his fans are so staunch and so varied. He’s a 1910 of Hopi prisoners on the island. (Their lands are adjacent to moving, complex, ambitious, visionary artist who puts everything the Navajo.) Hopi men were imprisoned for refusing to turn their on the line to talk about freedom, and, in this way, he defines our children over to boarding schools designed to “take the native out time and cultural context. He’s also aware that he may have to of the Indian.” This was the point of political empathy. pay the price for his activism, maybe the ultimate price someday. He was also struck by the Indian occupation of Alcatraz from And finally, he’s managing to redefine ceramics, and art, for all of 1969 to 1971, which was planned by Adam Fortunate Eagle along us—and that might be about as free as it gets. R trendmagazineglobal.com 63
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Shimmering #153 - oil on canvas 64�x66�
C Gurd charlescgurd.com
RICK STEVENS Interwoven Life June 26 – July 19, 2015 “A sense of structure is important to me, but I also require a fluidity where everything is flowing into the next thing.”
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary 200 – B Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 phone 505.984.2111 fax 505.984.8111 www.hunterkirklandcontemporary.com RICK STEVENS
Suspended Stability, 2015, oil on canvas, 72 × 36 inches
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KATE RUSSELL (BOTTOM). OPPOSITE: MARTI MILLS PHOTOGRAPHY (BOTTOM AND MIDDLE LEFT)
Walking entrance to 225 Canyon Road featuring Karan Ruhlen Gallery exterior. Center left: Karen Melfi Collection exterior. Center right: McLarry Fine Art, Landscape of Silence 2014 show, by landscape oil painter Peter Hagen. Bottom: Dancing Ladies interior
Art at 225 Canyon Road
I La Mesa Gallery, Russ Vogt sculptures
t’s one of those bad-luck-to-brilliant transformations, and visitors and locals can reap the benefits every day. In the early 1980s a developer planned and began building a townhome complex near the entrance to Canyon Road. It would have been a wonderful place to live. The compound was well designed with ample parking, sidewalks, lovely landscaping, and tucked-away outdoor spots. Then the project went belly up. That’s when the brilliant part came in. A group of visionary Santa Fe investors decided to purchase the half-finished, bankrupt property and transform it into retail space. When it was completed, even the buildings designed to be galleries and shops had the appearance of homes, some with two stories, all with fireplaces and comfortably sized rooms, and many with outdoor areas and portals. Today, all the features originally intended for easy, graceful living are melded into one of the most exciting and enjoyable strolling and shopping experiences in the heart of Santa Fe: Art at 225 Canyon Road. It’s easy-to-find, quick-to-park, and wonderfully convenient, close to the Plaza in downtown Santa Fe and accessible by car or foot. It’s rimmed with twelve galleries and shops filled with fine art, exquisite handcrafted jewelry, magnificent art-to-wear clothing, artisan-made items for the home and garden, museum-quality antiques, hand-painted furniture, and a wide range of accessories and gifts. > trendmagazineglobal.com 69
LA MESA
OF SANTA FE
225 Canyon Road • Santa Fe NM 505-984-1688 • lamesaofsantafe.com
Hand Forged Steel
Louise Casselman
Photo: Kate Russell
Encaustic Diptych
Steve Ebben
Fused Glass
“Eucalyptus” 12’
Melissa Haid
Ceramic Spheres
Heather Bradley
Handcrafted dinnerware, pottery, glass art, lighting, furniture, and fine art by more than fifty contemporary artists
K A R A N R U H L E N
Ziegen Hepler pHill
G A L L E R Y
New Mexico Modernists to Present Day Contemporaries
Karan Ruhlen Gallery • 225 Canyon Road • Santa Fe NM 87501 505.820.0807 • karanruhlen.com • info@karanruhlen.com
long
Tolman
Baker
Martha Rea Baker • Gary Beals • Sally Hepler • Elaine Holien • Estate of Janet Lippincott • Mary Long • Martha Mans Kurt Meer • Stephen Pentak • Daniel Phill • Bret Price • Jinni Thomas • Kevin Tolman • Pauline Ziegen
tiM cherry
HOW WE LIVE
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“Owl Moon” 86"h x 26"w x 15"d Bronze edition of 18
Artist Pauline Ziegen during the Annual Canyon Road “Paint Out” at Karan Ruhlen Gallery
Artist Present September 25th Reception 5-7pm
M cLarry f i n e a r t
www.mclarryfineart.com 225 Canyon Road Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 505.988.1161 info@mclarryfineart.com
“There’s such a variety of galleries and shops here and not much overlap,” observes Karan Ruhlen, owner of Karan Ruhlen Gallery. Among the longer-established denizens of 225, Ruhlen represents works by exceptional contemporary regional and nationally known artists, as well as the estate of legendary New Mexico Modernist Janet Lippincott (1918–2007). Among upcoming shows: The Nature of Color, an Aug. 21–31 group exhibition of gallery artists coinciding with the citywide celebration Summer of Color; paintings by Martha Rea Baker, Mary Long, and Daniel Phill, Sept. 11–23; and a landscape show set for Oct. 16–27. Other highlights include works by longtime New Mexico landscape painters Elaine Holien and Pauline Ziegen, and Sally Hepler’s elegantly lyrical bronze and steel sculpture. Outdoor sculpture is on view around all the galleries at 225. For those who love 72
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contemplating sculpture outside or just resting and breathing in the clear, fresh Santa Fe air, the compound offers seating on tree-surround and portal benches, along with soothing water features and shady, well-tended garden spots. “The grounds at 225 are always kept beautifully. There are lots of flowers. It makes people feel welcome,” says Mary Larson, owner of La Mesa of Santa Fe. First opened on Johnson Street in 1982, it’s been a cornerstone of 225 Canyon for almost 28 years. It is the compound’s go-to gallery for colorful outdoor pieces by New Mexico ironwork artist Christopher Thomson and sculptor Russ Vogt. These and other artists offer a delightful, water-conserving way of bringing vibrant color to outdoor living areas in times of drought or regions with limited rain. La Mesa of Santa Fe is equally inspirational for home and table décor. Representing more than 50 contemporary
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artists, many from New Mexico, the gallery features quality handcrafted tableware, ceramics, sculpture, fine furniture, paintings, and glass art. Because the galleries at 225 Canyon were designed as residences, or to match the style of the original townhouses, they provide an excellent opportunity for seeing artwork as it would look in a well-appointed home, notes Chris McLarry, owner of McLarry Fine Art and its sister gallery, McLarry Modern. Enjoying a presence in the compound for 20 years, McLarry points to the longevity and continuity of most of 225’s businesses. Returning visitors and collectors encounter friendly, familiar faces and know what to anticipate, while also knowing new art adventures await. McLarry Fine Art exhibits traditional painting and sculpture by emerging and established artists from around the world. In the gallery’s lineup are shows by New
Clockwise from top left: McLarry Fine Art Sculpture Garden, bronze works by sculptor Tim Cherry; La Mesa Gallery interior; Karan Ruhlen Gallery, Jinni Thomas roses and paintings; Karan Ruhlen Gallery opening for Quiet Beauty.
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Jim Arndt for Parasol Productions
HOW WE LIVE
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Hand drawn indigo wax resist batik jacket
Dancing Ladies
exquisite wearable textiles 225 CANYON ROAD #3 SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO 505.988.1100 DANCINGLADIESDSF@QWEST.NET
Mexico landscape painter Peter Hagen, opening July 24; still lifes from Chuck Sabatino’s Weather Vane series, Aug. 7; Western landscapes by Paul Van Ginkel, Aug. 21 (Indian Market weekend); sculptor Tim Cherry and painter Cheri Christensen, Sept. 25; and new works by Donna HowellSickles opening Nov. 26. A contemporary perspective is on view at McLarry Modern, which represents artists of local, national, and international acclaim, among them Cherokee painter Poteet Victory. For those with an eye for exceptionally fine handcrafted jewelry, the Melfi Collection is a must-stop. Founded in 1989, the gallery specializes in 22-karat gold and natural colored diamond necklaces, rings, earrings, and bracelets by Melfi, a jewelry designer for 35 years. Karen Melfi also showcases magnificent adornments in a wide variety of styles, materials, and price points by some 30 artists, the majority of whom live and create in New Mexico. In conjunction with Santa Fe’s Summer of Color, on July 24 the gallery hosts Gold Rush, a special trunk show featuring the work of nationally known Santa Fe jewelry artist Denise Betesh. For the rest of the female form, Dancing Ladies de Santa Fe presents clothing made from handspun, handwoven, embroidered textiles from Southeast Asia. Owner Cass Schuck, who designs all the garments, was 74
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inspired by years of collecting fabrics during visits to the hill tribes of the region. Her stylish creations honor the beauty, intricate artistry, and cultural expression the tribal women weave into their textiles, which incorporate hand-drawn, wax-resist batik cloth and hand-dyed cotton, wool, and silk threads. Schuck also designs elegant, sumptuous jackets and tunics fashioned from antique, museumquality textiles. Visitors to Dancing Ladies encounter a dramatic array of colors from a wide selection of hemp jackets, shirts, and smocks—which soften like linen but lose the wrinkles—as well as jewelry, accessories, fanciful mobiles, and other art-to-wear clothing. “People linger in this remarkable, festive shop, so rich with history and beauty,” says manager Karen Wright. “There’s no other place like this.” That sums up the experience of 225 Canyon Road itself, rounded out by Art of Russia Gallery; traditional representational painting and sculpture at Meyer Galleries; contemporary representational art at Meyer East; Scarlett’s collection of antiques, vintage jewelry, and other collectibles; and folk art, furniture, and gifts at Leslie Flynt. Right across the street are two cafés. And of course, the rest of Canyon Road rolls out beyond the entrance to 225, with dozens of galleries, restaurants, and shops. Aren’t you glad those early developers went broke? R
MARTI MILLS PHOTOGRAPHY
Karen Melfi Collection interior: (left to right) Patrice Ray, Karen Melfi, and Debrianna Mansini
KAREN MELFI collection
Photography by Wendy McEahern
225 Canyon Road Santa Fe, New Mexico 505.982.3032 karenmelficollection.com
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GVG Contemporary 241 Delgado Street, Santa Fe Open Monday - Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 505-982-1494 | gvgcontemporary.com
CREDIT
GVG CONTEMPORARY
E
rnst Gruler grew up building and taking things apart. A furniture artist, metalworker, and painter, he’s mastered many a medium, from rigging car engines to cabinetry and model making to fine art. Gruler’s furniture is not about perfect finish or exotic wood. He prefers the durability of plywood, with which he crafts pieces that make an art of ergonomics. His modular chairs—remarkable for seating bodies of all variety—are painted with dark, textured hues. His recent metal bell structures meld sculpture and sound. For Gruler, creating art is a form of active meditation. When asked how long it takes him to make something, he says, “the sum total of my moments in life so far.”
B
lair Vaughn-Gruler says she’s come to understand paint as an ointment. Working with viscosity and layering, she explores physicality. Through intricate loops, lines, marks and drips, a calming whole is formed. She’s intrigued by the materiality of a painting and how the viewer then interacts viscerally and physically with the work. Vaughn-Gruler’s art is as playful as it is meditative and inquisitive as she searches for the moment when individual marks coalesce in singularity—the mystery of physicality at its core. There’s a wry sense of humor in her titles, which grapple with the duality of possessing and losing form as journeying lines give way to the brilliance of white below. Mental Gymnastics, oil and mixed media on claybord, 40” x 30.” Below: Blair VaughnGruler. Opposite: Ernst Gruler with one of his dining sets and his painting A Gift For You My Love, mixed media on canvas, 48” x 60.”
CREDIT
Blair and Ernst own GVG Contemporary, where they show painters and sculptors whose work is in conversation with their own. Blair’s latest paintings will display in her upcoming solo exhibition WHITE, opening Friday, August 7.
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p a s c a l p i e r me
ANTIPODES 1 mixed media 52x52
707 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501 gfcontemporary.com 505.983.3707
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Ernest Chiriacka, The Pioneer, Oil on Board, 24”x 36”
Ernest Chiriacka, The Rage, Oil on Board, 30” x 24”
Terrance Guardipee, Eagle Ribs, Mixed Media on Ledger Paper, 36” x 19”
Lorraine Alexander, Abiquiu, Land of Color, Oil on Board, 12” x 24”
713 Canyon Rd. Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 505-988-2966 casweckgalleries.com
(1913-2010)
Ernest Chiriacka, Geronimo, Oil on Linen, 30” x 40”
Ernest Chiriacka was born Anastassios Kyriakakos in 1913 in New York City, the third of six children born to Portia and Herackles Kyriakakos, who immigrated to America from Xero Cambi, Greece, in 1907. From a young age Chiriacka was drawn to art, often sketching pictures with pieces of charcoal cadged from the wood-burning stove in his home. In 1929, at age 16, he was selected to participate in a program for young artists through the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and from there he went on to study at the Art Students League of New York, the National Academy of Design, and, under Harvey Dunn, at Grand Central School of Art. In the 1930s and ’40s he worked as a commercial artist, designing covers for pulp fiction novels and providing illustrations for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Argosy, Coronet, Ernest Chiriacka Collier’s, and American Magazine. He also spent five years in the 1950s painting pinups for Esquire. Much of his work from this period was unsigned, but when he did add his name, it was usually a pseudonym: Acka, Darcy (an Anglicized version of a childhood nickname), A.D., D, or E.C. In the late 1960s Chiriacka transitioned to fine art. Deeply moved by the Incident at Wounded Knee, he turned his focus to Native American and Western subjects. His paintings were shown in galleries all over the country, including the Kennedy Galleries and Grand Central Galleries in New York City and Mongerson-Wunderlich Gallery in Chicago. Despite having been diagnosed with Lyme disease in 1989, Chiriacka was able to paint well into his nineties before passing away in 2010 at the age of 97.
Terrance Guardipee, Lady in Red, Gouache on Board, 24” x 16”
Long Day’s Journey into Light Artist Ricardo Mazal’s multimedia exporations plumb the depths of human experience
BY CHRISTINA PROCTER PHOTOS BY KATE RUSSELL
If you walk through fear, ecstasy may be on the other side. Or enlightenment. It’s the sort of idea that Mexican abstract painter Ricardo Mazal, a resident of Santa Fe, would grin at with his customary— and infectious—delight. “Things come together in a strange way,” says the artist. “In crisis you find opportunity, in breaking down an opening up.” These are the sorts of discoveries Mazal makes continually in his internationally acclaimed, wide-scale exhibitions. With paintings he designs to fit and transform the show’s architectural site (whether it’s a museum or gallery space), he also orchestrates collaborative audio and video components for installations in order to recreate the spaces that have contained some of humanity’s most fascinating customs. This may be the treatment of an ancient queen’s death, as indicated by her tomb in Palenque, or the burial practices held at Kailash—considered by many the most holy mountain—located in Tibet. In a single painting his energetic black-andwhite striations and wildly interacting color planes can suggest experiences so extreme that they loop back to their opposites—like love’s proximity to loss in the human psyche, or how eroticism can skirt violence and laughter flares up in grief. Mazal’s having a dialogue about culture and what it means to be an individual in the age of globalization, using complex processes to execute a single painting. He first paints from a photograph shot at the original site, and then back in his Santa
Fe studio, begins painting. From there he takes a photograph of the painting’s first iteration and then shifts the composition in Photoshop, zooming in to perfect an element or extracting it to merge with another. Then it’s back to canvas again in a continual loop with digital sketching, all with the gusto of a perfectionist. As his paintings emerge, they become one part of a complex installation—a spatial reckoning of architecture, sound, and image. But Mazal is also highly empathic, and he’s instinctively forging the most direct route to what connected him so profoundly to places like Palenque and Kailash: the phenomenon of human experience. Says international gallerist Sundaram Tagore, “He’s very much using what’s available to create these extraordinary works of art. But when he creates them, he deals with something primordial and eternal, which is life, death, and redemption.” It was in Mexico City in 2005, when the artist’s work appeared in two prestigious museums simultaneously (El Museo Nacional de Antropología and El Museo de Arte Moderno), that Tagore discovered Mazal’s talent. “It was beautiful work, some of which I recognized as new art history. He was navigating between cultures, distilling artistic language and syntax. He was also creating his own language, yet knew its grammar really well.” Mazal’s captured the imagination of international audiences too, earning him 12 solo museum exhibitions and four retrospectives, along with regular appearances trendmagazineglobal.com 83
Mazal engages in dialogue about culture and what it means to be an individual in the age of globalization
marriages and changed their lives. Bond’s teachings endured. “That’s where I learned how to learn. He taught you to rebel against everything outside of you and everything inside of you in order to be creative and free.” When his commercial career started to feel empty, Mazal sold his share of the company and jetted off to Barcelona to “be a bohemian.” He decided to learn how to paint, at first by copying figurative elements from art books, until he discovered the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s musical composition Tabula Rasa one night and began to see colors. “I closed my eyes and it was like I could see painting after painting. I could imagine spaces.” Whether or not it was a brief bout of synesthesia, he’s been painting with that inspiration ever since with such pace and intensity, it’s as if he’s listening to a high-energy orchestra.
Previous page: Mazal’s Bhutan PF 1 (2014), oil on linen, from his most recent series reflecting on the function of prayer flags. Above: Through Mazal’s eyes we see images like Mount Kailash Cobra (2010), archival pigment ink, print on paper. Right: The second leg of his trilogy on cultural burial practices took Mazal to a forest cemetery in Germany, where he produced works like Odenwald 1152 No. 12 (2008), oil on linen. 84 TREND Summer 2015
THIS PAGE AND PREVIOUS: COURTESY OF RICARDO MAZAL
at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York and Hong Kong, as well as in galleries in San Francisco and Toronto. Born in Mexico City in 1950, Mazal didn’t start painting until his mid-30s. First he studied design, took a semester abroad, and ended up working at a design firm in Chicago, where he met photographer Gary Mankus. When Mankus was unfairly fired, Mazal walked out that day, and it wasn’t long before the two, still in their late twenties, hatched their own project, moving to Mexico City and starting a commercial design firm that eventually became a popular chain. Yet before all this, Mazal had met a British instructor named Robin Bond who had been the art teacher alongside founder A.S. Neill at Summerhill, the well-known experimental school in England. Many who studied drawing with Bond, quips Mazal, left their
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For Mazal, there’s a universe of design in the split instants of fabric moving in air
Another moment of epiphany set the direction of his career. “At one point I was thinking to myself, ‘Everything I’m doing is claustrophobic. I need air and light and transparency.’ I realized I was not a painter telling stories.” It was at this point his move to abstraction began. Mazal left for New York, where he refined his color palette after he saw a retrospective of Mondrian’s work and walked out with a realization. He only wanted to paint with black, white, and the primary colors. Although he mixes these to create other hues, including gray, he’d never again use white to “dilute” a primary color; rather he uses transparency and the white of the canvas or primer below. Color thus became his language. This 86 TREND Summer 2015
is most apparent in his more personal, earlier series, like those from 1997, when he responded to an odd event. A Brazilian psychic told him: “Your brother doesn’t talk.” This was more or less true, Mazal’s brother being generally concise, and his response was My Brother Doesn’t Talk paintings that became door-sized portals to incredible sound, with layers concealing flashes of other colors emerging through a vertical diptych that’s half brilliant red in base, half black. His Yellow Circle series of the same year was painted after he went through a tough breakup. He realized, “There are four walls in my studio and four in my apartment, so I’m going to do eight paintings of the same size, and they’re all going to be yellow. And that is
my rationale!” When a friend told him it’s the color of the heart chakra, Mazal wasn’t surprised. It’s also no surprise he placed the wall-sized yellow canvases facing each other in a circle for the show—he was starting to think about how to reenact the performative qualities of spaces that hold experiences. His abstractions continued to draw from his personal experiences through the early 2000s, as seen in work like the ecstatic E-Series, based on passionate email exchanges with a woman named Fabiola, who lived in Mexico City, which eventually led to their marriage. (The couple had been introduced by a friend after Mazal halfjokingly promised a painting to the person who introduced him to his wife.) Not long
after, at the age of 52, Mazal painted the last of his personal series, One Inch Above, during the months before their first daughter, Julia, was born. A weird twist of fate brought the family to New Mexico. While based in New York, the couple would spend summers in Santa Fe visiting Mazal’s in-laws at their vacation home. Mazal would rent an old warehouse studio from the Center for Contemporary Arts that leaked when it rained. Fabiola was pregnant with Julia when they were set to fly back to New York on September 13, 2001, when the events of 9/11 intervened. Mazal’s studio was four blocks from Ground Zero, so the soon-to-be parents elected to stay in Santa Fe. Since 2008, Mazal’s worked in the studio he’d always imagined, a New York–
style loft space with Sangre de Cristo views that he created with local architect Jonah Stanford. Mazal keeps an apartment in New York, where his family frequently goes for his shows. They acquired another apartment this year in Mexico City—one designed by the renowned modernist architect Ricardo Legorreta. Though Julia and Sofia, who attend private schools in Santa Fe, are fluent in Spanish, the Mazals do find it strange to raise their daughters in a country of their choice but not their homeland. This is perhaps another of Mazal’s many identities that construct what Tagore, for one, identifies as a “third culture” in his work. It was after his move to Santa Fe that Mazal began discovering his digital process.
Mazal, left, works in his studio. Like his paintings, his studio, shown above, was designed for holding air and light. Outside there’s a small pool, a favorite spot for his daughters.
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COURTESY OF RICARDO MAZAL (2)
Left: Odenwald 1152 PH1 (2008), pigment ink print on paper. Above: Bhutan Abstraction G1 (2014), oil on linen. Opposite: Mazal and his assistant, John Wolbers, also make variously sized brushes out of foam pieces held together with cardboard.
His energetic black-and-white striations and wildly interacting color planes suggest experiences so extreme that they loop back to their opposites “It was fast and fascinating,” he says. “I loved that instant success with the computer. You can expose things quickly. You can see small parts blown up. Everything opens up.” In 2002 he embarked on a trilogy about burial practices that took him about a decade to complete, starting with La Tumba de la Reina Roja (Tomb of the Red Queen) in the Mayan ruin Palenque in Mexico; then Odenwald 1152 from one of the Friedwälder, or “peace forests,” in Germany, where the dead are cremated and buried to grow with a selected tree; and ending with his Kailash and related Kora and Black Mountain series. These exhibitions made the world gasp. He was recreating some of humanity’s most pro-
found experiences. For him, the trilogy emphasized a symbol that was already operating in his life and work: the circle. His mother had passed away when he was only 30, and Mazal and the rest of the family were with her when the nurse said it was time. They stood in a circle holding each other’s hands. “I had visions later of this bird’s-eye view of my mother lying there in a circle,” says Mazal. “And since then the circle has been in my work.” Meanwhile, his design training never left him. It was with this trilogy that Mazal began using multiple Photoshop layers to resize paintings for the walls or floor, experimenting with their interactivity and occasionally requesting a temporary wall
be erected. Only then does he create new paintings for the space. His most recent series, Bután Abstracto (Bhutan Abstractions), opened March 12 and exhibits through June at El Centro Cultural Estación de Indianilla in Mexico City. It may be his most successful distillation yet, inspired by his awe for prayer flags. He calls their function to carry prayers through the wind into humanity “a poetic and beautiful statement. An idea in itself worth a whole exhibition.” His ideas don’t always reveal themselves right away, though. It was Fabiola who exclaimed, “Your paintings!” upon seeing the prayer flags on rooftops in Bhutan. Their white base and strips of red, yellow, and blue, the colors of Mazal’s own works,
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Julia Mazal (left), age 13, and Sofia, age 11, frequently visit New York and Mexico City with their parents. Above: The family’s apartment in Mexico City, designed by Ricardo Legoretta. Opposite: Mazal and his wife, Fabiola, who accompanies him on his journeys.
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are meant to ward off natural disaster. Though he notes he’s neither religious nor superstitious, he’s also quick to say things like, “I’m Mexican more than anything,” or “That’s from my Jewish side,” and he appreciates an encouraging sign now and then. He began gathering material. Back in Santa Fe, he approached his frequent collaborator, musician Chris Jonas, with a video he’d taken of the prayer flags beating in rapid wind. Slowing it down, Mazal discovered incredible compositions in the stills. The pair did the same with a recording he’d taken of Buddhist monks chanting; once decelerated to abstract the sound and layered with instrumentals, it became the exhibition’s soundtrack. Next he teamed up with a young coder, Charles Veasey, to program a video installation that allows people to type their prayers—within the attention span of 140 92 TREND Summer 2015
characters—into an iPad or through his website, ricardomazal.com. To record the prayers for @ButanAbstracto, Veasey had to circumvent Twitter’s time limit between archiving posts. He also devised a code that twists the text of people’s prayers instantaneously into the projected flags. “As an engineer it can be easy to lose sight of aesthetic,” Veasey comments. “Ricardo constantly reminded me that technology has to be poetic.” The projection room was constructed by draping transparent black shades at the entrance of the exhibition, through which visitors could glimpse the main room. “There had to be air coming out,” comments Mazal. “It’s about the wind, the prayers.” After you pass through this space, the six paintings of prayer flags that are hung inside the gallery take on new meaning. Their color bands are part of a
network, solid and relational. Yet at another end of the large room, there’s a diptych of white space with freer fabric leaping from its two-dimensional plane, as if it’s in communication with something beyond. “It was like stopping time,” Mazal says. “The movement is in there, but you don’t see it. I stopped the video every half-second and ended up getting gorgeous compositions with twists of color.” For Mazal, there’s a universe of design in the split instants of fabric moving in air. As Tagore notes, he’s abstracting until his work becomes about selection and negation, a contemporary approach. “He’s taking a vast universe and then looking from the macro to the micro. And he’s narrowing it down, so something as small as a hand, or an insect, a speck of dust, a dust particle on your finger, can represent the whole universe, and so you
have to treat the world accordingly.” “I’ve never been inspired by nature,” Mazal muses, “but I’ve always found my work reflecting it somewhere.” The most profound iteration of this goes back to his Kailash series. He’d been painting blackand-white striations for years before he saw a picture of the 21,000-foot mountain’s snow-lined visage, in which he saw an uncanny resemblance to his work. “I think that at the end of my life I’m going to think Kailash was probably the most amazing experience I’ve had,” he says. Comments Tagore, “Having known Ricardo Mazal and deconstructing his psychology, you come to understand who he is, and based on that it seems natural for him to go to these places and to search. For him to search for things that are vanishing, or cultures that are vanishing, is very important.”
When Mazal’s party arrived at the base of Mount Kailash, their ascent was delayed a day because a group of Indian priests had rented all the yaks. This was fortuitous, as Ricardo and Fabiola ended up witnessing a sky burial, an ancient Buddhist practice. By the time the Mazals arrived at a sacred plateau near the mountain-base, the body, already separated into parts, lay with legs facing the mountain, head away. About a dozen family members stood together behind it as the priest prepared the deceased in a final act of generosity and compassion for those still in existence. Every few minutes, the family walked in a circle around the body in a short version of a kora, a traditional pilgrimage and meditation. Ricardo and Fabiola watched the ritual from a distance until vultures and wolves began to descend. “It’s the kind of thing where you tell yourself to
Opposite: PF1–PF5 (2015), part of the Bután Abstracto exhibition. Above: Visitors can type in their prayers to see them instantaneously projected on the screens with prayer flags. trendmagazineglobal.com 93
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Previous page: Bhutan Abstraction paintings, mostly created in early 2015. Above and right: Opening night for the exhibition in Mexico City, where his younger daughter, Sofia, kept things light with a song by Taylor Swift. 96 TREND Summer 2015
absorb everything about it, stay with it, and then let it come out in ways that are totally abstract,” says Mazal. They returned to camp, but the mountain remained shrouded in clouds, and word was it could stay that way for weeks. Discouraged, they went for a walk around Manasarovar, one of two lakes at its base. As Mazal walked, picking up stones, he spotted one with a striking resemblance to the mountain’s northern peak, composed of the same blackand-white striations. Ecstatic, he showed Fabiola. Not 15 minutes later, he says, a wind so strong they had to hunch down came up and blew away the clouds. Kailash had revealed itself. “I stayed about two hours photographing [the north side of the mountain]. There was this point when I felt
enormous fear. We were on top of this glacier, a place where, in a second, you’re gone,” he says as he snaps his fingers. “I had this struggle with amazement and fear. I think that’s what has stayed with me the most.” The next day the group climbed another 2,000 feet over the Darmala Pass to complete the 18,000-foot pilgrimage, but they never saw the mountain again. If Mazal sees the fear in these paintings, it’s fear he’s already walked through. In the Kailash paintings, Tagore sees enlightenment. “In the snow melting against the great shift of the mountain, there’s the melting of the ego. And the dissolution of the ego leads to the complete understanding of how the universe works. Our struggle, our everyday existence, is to understand that.”
Tagore was so impressed by this work that he selected Kailash Black Mountain 2 to submit to the 2015 Venice Biennial. It will hang in the grand ballroom of the Museo di Palazzo Grimani, a 16thcentury palace, through November. Mazal won’t admit to such a message as Tagore outlines, but you can see it in his work. You can also see that without struggle and fear there’s no journey to beauty, a concept explained by Chinese philosopher Tsang Lap Chuen. Tsang says the sublime happens when we approach the life-limits of our being: At the top limit we border on something neither human nor natural, at the bottom on nonexistence, and we live in the median. For Mazal, though, there are no separate states, just an ever-circling journey between the limits. R trendmagazineglobal.com 97
The
great show From backstage hands to board members, singers to scenery artists, a cast of many hundreds brings Santa Fe’s opera season to life
BY CRAIG SMITH | PHOTOS BY PETER OGILVIE
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Daisy Geoffrey from the PR department looks at costumes in their expanded space. Previous page: Former sets make a new scene in storage, with horses from Intermezzo, torchères from Così Fan Tutte, and a great mirror from Lucio Silla. The chandelier is from an Apprentice Scene Concert, part of a program open to new talent.
“I
t takes a pretty large village to put on an opera season,” says Charles MacKay, general director of The Santa Fe Opera (SFO). Audiences see and hear the singers onstage, he points out, “but what they don’t see and hear are the 200 or so people whose work made that moment possible.” This includes directors, set and costume designers, technicians, stage management personnel, costume and wig shop crews, and people working in set construction. Those involved year-round in administrative roles like planning, marketing, education, fundraising, and accounting, along with summer employees, also contribute to the spectacle, and their numbers swell to as many as 750 during the season’s peak. At Santa Fe, as in all opera houses, repertoire and casting decisions are made years in advance of the performance. The planning window can be three to four years out, sometimes even longer in the case of a company commission from a contemporary composer. A number of questions go into the process. How long has it been since such-and-such an opera was done here? Would it expand the company’s repertory suitably? Shall we do a world or company premiere (something SFO has regularly done since its first season in 1957)? Does the piece under consideration have unusual artistic merit? Might it attract interested donors for underwriting? Is there a young singer rising fast who we need to secure now, before other companies step in? How well might 100 TREND Summer 2015
tickets sell? Every factor is examined in the balance of artistic merit, budget integrity, and practical considerations. Once a season’s set, the nuts-and-bolts start to move. According to Paul Horpedahl, director of facilities and production, the production department generally knows what’s set three years in advance. Take the 2015 season’s opening opera, Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment. In early 2012, the company started budgeting for the show, a Santa Fe premiere. By summer 2013, two years out, the put-it-together team of director and designers of scenery, costumes, and lighting was assembled. Sometimes one person handles more than one responsibility; for example, a single artist might design both scenery and costumes. As it turns out, everyone involved with Daughter had worked in Santa Fe before. Anyone who hadn’t would have been brought in during the 2012 season to learn about the facilities, watch operas in rehearsal and performance, and become acquainted with the open-air house’s unique circumstances. “The air is never still onstage,” Horpedahl points out. “You have to deal with that, with curtains and soft goods, how they’ll react to stray breezes. It‘s why we don’t like to have live fire onstage.” Then there’s the ever-concerning question of weather: In Santa Fe, rain may well blow in on set, singers, orchestra, and audience, and consideration must be made for that eventuality. Since Santa Fe has no-fly space above the stage, where set continued on page 109
TOP: RENDERING BY MATIZ ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN / COURTESY OF THE SANTA FE OPERA
The Dream Continues
uring more than 40 years at the helm, Santa Fe Opera founder John O. Crosby was pretty much everywhere at once. On the podium conducting. Backstage during a performance. Working in the office. Lunching in the cantina. Supervising the parking lot. Inspecting a well. Or even stationed outside the restrooms, timing how long it took patrons to wait in line and exit the facilities. Crosby could then calculate how many new conveniences should be added when circumstances and money permitted. Today, 13 years after the founder’s death in 2002, SFO is further enhancing the festival dream Crosby first brought to life in 1957. During the three off-seasons of September through May, from 2014 through 2017, a $35-million reconstruction project has been undertaken to provide audiences more comfort and streamline production efficiency. In addition to easing the long lines at the concessions and restrooms, the project will bring the backstage and technical areas up to 21st-century capacity. “During my first season working for the opera when I was a teenager as an extra player in the orchestra and a pit boy,” says Charles MacKay, general director, “there was a lot of empty space under the stage and in the backstage areas.” Since that 1968 season, he says, it’s become overcrowded. “All that space has been taken over by more equipment, more people working backstage, and more complex productions than we were mounting in the 1960s.” The dressing rooms also needed major renovation to provide more privacy, although the company’s egalitarian policy of having the performers dress and get made up together has been retained. The ambitious construction entails three phases. The first, which was completed earlier this year, relocated the gift shop while almost doubling its size. A new covered food service facility was installed, and additional picnic tables were placed near the box office. The number of restrooms was nearly doubled. Backstage, where no notable improvements had been made since 1968, the costume shop was refurbished and expanded, with new equipment installed.
The second part of the project, to take place this fall and into 2016, includes enlarging the scene shop, where set pieces are built, and installing a stand-alone paint shop. A second story will be added to the Opera Club for patrons, artists, and company guests, adding more space and buffering noise from the highway below. The final phase, scheduled for the 2017 off-season, involves repaving the main parking lot, which also hasn’t happened since 1968, and constructing permanent storage units for stage properties and sets to replace the semi-trailers currently parked around the property. Additionally, about $4 million is allotted for main-stage programming. “What I find most compelling about this campaign,” says MacKay, “is that it addresses the comfort of the patrons but also takes care of the people who work backstage. It’s really about honoring them.”
General Director Charles McKay (right) and Paul Horpedahl, director of facilities and production, review plans. Top: Matiz Architecture and Design’s rendering for the front of the opera house, part of the “Setting the Stage” construction campaign. trendmagazineglobal.com 101
KEN HOWARD; UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER / COURTESY OF THE SANTA FE OPERA
TOP AND RIGHT: KEN HOWARD. BOTTOM LEFT: MICHAEL ROSENTHAL / COURTESY OF THE SANTA FE OPERA
Clockwise from top: Wigs in preparation for Italian Straw Hat, performed in 1977; The original theater at SFO; Dancer (1985). Opposite: Ashley Putnam has her wig fit for Italian Straw Hat (1977); The space for opera set design and costume-making has doubled in size since 1985.
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Ross Wick (foreground) starts the layout for the deck of Rigoletto, while Dave Schneider works on The Daughter of the Regiment carriage, constructed, like most sets, from scratch on site.
meet the board Both regular SFO company activities and the construction project are overseen by a board of directors—volunteers who contribute unique talents behind the scenes. What compels them to do so? We spoke to three representative members.
CREDIT BOTTOM LEFT AND RIGHT: COURTESY OF REGINA RICKLESS
egina Rickless knows SFO firsthand. The mezzosoprano, who played Suzuki in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly on opening night in 1957, was the first woman and second person onstage. Over the years, she’s been a singer, a teacher of apprentice singers, and now an honorary board member after eight years of board service. Even while raising a family and pursuing an international singing career, she’s made a point of maintaining contact with the company, returning frequently with her husband, the late Elwood Rickless. “We came most summers, unless I was singing in Europe.” Familiar with scores of opera houses, from backstage to the front of the house, Rickless brings that extensive knowledge to her role on the board, along with an understanding of the vital
Regina Rickless (right) at SFO’s first opening night (above).
support services, which include administration, education and outreach, fundraising, marketing, and the technical and production wings. Rickless has watched SFO grow through the years and welcomes the renovation project underway. “I think there were 12 singers that first season,” she recalls. “We all shared a room, all the females in one, all the males in another. Nobody thought twice about it. It was just camaraderie. But it’s a different kind of place now. Scenery is more complicated. Costumes are more opulent. There are just more people involved. The backstage, the scenery department—you just couldn’t continue to use that space. “People have been so generous,” she notes, lauding the broad range of support the renovation project has received. “This community comes together and supports the opera like no other place I’ve ever been. From the very first seasons, John [Crosby] would say, ‘I couldn’t do it without the people of Santa Fe.’ ” Active as a voice teacher, Rickless has a special interest in education, especially introducing younger people to opera. “I teach students from 18 to 30. I want to see that generation going to the opera. It’s about getting people used to opera at a very early age, so they’re not intimidated by it. “The Santa Fe Opera’s been part of my life now for close to 60 years,” she concludes. I will be a help to them in whatever way they want me to be.” trendmagazineglobal.com 105
Regina Rickless
efore Charles “Chuck” Moore and his wife, Barbara, moved to Santa Fe six years ago from New York, they collected art, were patrons of dance—including New York City Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—and earlier on, enjoyed attending Houston Rockets games. These days, they’re regular attendees at The Santa Fe Opera. At first opera wasn’t Moore’s cup of tea, he confesses. But the operatic art form, he says, “can take you over. I’ve learned so much, and I understand why people love it. It’s the total experience. I’ve decided, ‘Chuck, look what you’ve missed out on your whole life.’ It’s never too late to discover, right?” When the Moores first attended SFO, they were drawn by its reputation and the unique beauty of its setting. They became friends with Carole Ely, a former board member and president who was then the company director of development. Through Ely and her husband they met other opera buffs, and Chuck soon found himself becoming a board member. Since then, the couple’s experience with SFO and its festival 106 TREND Summer 2015
atmosphere has opened them up to “a smorgasbord of interesting people and places around the world. And beautiful music. Over all these years, it’s really been instrumental in changing our lives,” reflects Moore. Now, he’s co-chair of the construction campaign. “We’re always between a rock and a hard place,” he says. “We have to build things during the winter. We’re a summer event and we can’t just shut down the opera for a year.” Music isn’t the Moores’ only passion. They’ve also been collecting art over their 47 years of marriage. “We don’t collect for anyone other than ourselves and our own enjoyment,” says Chuck. I think in many ways that’s how you should look at art.” The Moores serve other institutions as well. Barbara’s a board member of National Dance Institute and Chuck sits on several boards, including Performance Santa Fe and SITE Santa Fe. “It’s a way of serving the city, state, and country that we live in. We always look forward to helping however we can. And we picked the right spot when we decided on Santa Fe.” >
Charles and Barbara Moore
relatively new member of the Santa Fe Opera board, Kristina Flanagan came to Santa Fe a few years ago from San Francisco, where she was a member of the San Francisco Opera board. Knowing the company here, she said, was “part and parcel of my decision to move.” Flanagan first came to SFO to see a landmark production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute in the 1980s, then returned with a San Francisco Opera group in 2012. “I had friends in the opera world who had performed here and I got to follow their work,” she says. “It was wonderful.” Flanagan is well versed in the art and science of fundraising and is a generous donor herself. “In the business model of the nonprofit, you’re pretty much in full-time panic—where’s the money going to come from? I come at it from a different angle, which is that unless you give generously, you don’t get benefit. And when you give generously the benefit you personally achieve is transforming. Then you actually play a key role in changing lives. I see it as an investment.” Her interest in the renovation campaign comes from family roots. “Bricks and mortar contributions are really not my thing, so that’s a tough ask for me, but when I heard about the campaign, it interested me because of my dad. He was a native New Mexican, born at St. Joe’s hospital in Albuquerque in 1921, and he developed a wonderful manufacturing company 40 years ago.” When she heard that one of SFO’s funding opportunities was to sponsor a break room in the shop, Flanagan was intrigued. Her father, she notes, “loved tinkering on the shop floor more 108 TREND Summer 2015
than he liked running a company. He started his business out of his garage, working there during his vacations, and as it became successful he built a plant, where he spent all his time on the shop floor. It wasn’t long before he designed a break room where everyone could hang out, talk shop. “It was his reality that the people actually doing the work were a whole lot more about the company than the people who were trying to sell the work,” Flanagan explains. “That notion that there’s no hierarchy of knowledge in a successful enterprise has guided my whole life.” Flanagan also has a special interest in the technical apprentice program. “To my knowledge, Paul [Horpedahl’s] shop and Glimmerglass [in New York] are the only places that develop young artists in production. We’re in the business of creating great work, and our audience assumes we’re also teaching people how to do great work. I think it’s one of the reasons the company is so very well regarded.” Besides her passion for opera—especially for works by Wagner and a German repertoire in general—Flanagan has a strong interest in the visual arts. “I’ve collected art all my life,” she says. “I prefer to collect artists I know. I consider art very personal. I have relationships with it, and a collection I’m very happy with.” Flanagan’s here to stay. “I think you have to search pretty far to find an arts organization that’s so well integrated,” she says of SFO. “I think it’s one of the reasons that what they offer is so consistently exemplary. It’s run like a Swiss clock. Every part works, and every part works together.”
CREDIT
Kristina Flanagan
WEBB YOUNG / COURTESY OF THE SANTA FE OPERA
continued from page 100
pieces and backdrops can be stored on hanging cables, scenery must be designed for quick transport between changes. More than a year ago, Daughter’s designs and concept were ready for discussion. “We looked at the preliminary design in early March 2014,” Horpedahl explains, “then at final designs in August 2014. This involved all the production department heads, usually the production stage manager.” MacKay and Brad Woolbright, director of artistic administration, are typically involved in such brainstorming sessions, often with the production’s conductor. If singers already retained for the production are in the house, they’re invited too. Scenery building for Daughter began last October. “We have a properties carpenter here year-round, so if there are big pieces, they can be started then,” Horpedahl says. “In Daughter of the Regiment there’s a large carriage. That’s a great project to work on in the winter, when there’s more space and time to finesse it.” The costume department started meeting with the designer in the winter as well, “to swatch the fabric and trims and buttons and all that. Everyone is plugging right along all winter.” That’s the case whether the production’s look is traditional, abstract, avant-garde, or futuristic—everyone is engaged in bringing the concept to life so that singers can work with it effectively. This summer’s seasonal production began in March— first with a few added staff members each week, building to an additional 30 to 50 people a week by end of April, until the full production staff size of 200 was reached. With about 125 professional staffers and 75 technical apprentices on hand, things really begin to move. There are four other productions happening at the same time, of course, since Santa Fe opens its repertoire in a rolling fashion over the course of a month or so, and not every production can be prepared simultaneously. “We get into rehearsals, nominally the first of June, and go immediately into lighting sessions,” says Horpedahl. “It’s not just musical and performance rehearsals. We have technical rehearsals that go from 8:30 in the evening until 2:00 in the morning. That’s worked into the schedule, with rehearsals during the day. And there are more steps still to get us to opening night.” SFO’s also on the lookout for opportunities to partner with other companies. A co-production with the Metropolitan Opera brought Donizetti’s La Donna del Lago to Santa Fe in the spring of 2013. Immersed in constant planning, problem-solving, and magic-making, it’s safe to say that the SFO village is abuzz with activity year-round. As Horpedahl notes with a chuckle, “My favorite comment is, ‘You must enjoy the off-season, when it’s so quiet.’ ” R trendmagazineglobal.com 109
the New Season
S
ummer is a bustling time at SFO. From July 3 to August 29, five new productions unfold. Donizetti’s comic The Daughter of the Regiment receives its company premiere, followed by Verdi’s tragic Rigoletto, which was last seen and heard here in 2000. The company premiere of Mozart’s charming La Finta Giardiniera comes next, and Richard Strauss’s Salomé, which honors Santa Fe Opera founder John Crosby’s lifelong devotion to the works of the great German composer, returns for its first staging since 2006. Finally, there’s the eagerly awaited world premiere of American composer Jennifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain, with libretto by Gene Scheer. Based on the acclaimed novel by Charles Frazier, adapted as a celebrated 2003 film starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renée Zellweger, Higdon’s operatic version was commissioned by SFO, Opera Philadelphia, and Minnesota Opera. The season rounds out with August 16 and 23 operatic-excerpt concerts executed by SFO apprentice artists, who perform and do production design. For tickets, call 505-986-5900 or visit santafeopera.org. Single tickets are $31–$220, with various discounts, family night tickets, and season subscriptions available. A 1974 poster for The Santa Fe Opera by Webb Young trendmagazineglobal.com 109
L. Scooter Morris Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Handle With Care acrylic, mixed media, canvas on canvas 48 x 48”
Walking Across America acrylic, mixed media, canvas on canvas 48 x 48”
“Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) The Wind Among the Reeds, pub. 1899
Treading On My Dreams acrylic, mixed media, canvas on canvas 48 x 48”
Don’t Tread On Me acrylic, mixed media, canvas on canvas 48 x 48”
“Tread Softly”
Exhibition July 1 through July 15
Artist Reception Friday, July 3 5PM - 7PM
Originals in series $34,500 Embellished Giclees also available at $5,200 A RT A S E M I S S A RY
403 Canyon Road Santa Fe, NM 87501 505 982 2403 866 594 6554 art@wifordgallery.com wifordgallery.com
Anarchic Anachronism
Taos painter John De Puy's abstracted landscapes reflect his transcendental vision
OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF GALERIE DE PUY
by Charles C. Gurd and Devon Jackson portraits by Kate Russell
Wim Wenders would love John De Puy. And his art. He may not exactly be the sort of mystery man played by Harry Dean Stanton in Wenders’s Paris, Texas (the 1984 film where Stanton, an amnesiac, wanders through the south Texas desert in search of his ex-wife), but he’s definitely the type of American artist that Europeans—and more than a few Yanks—drool over. He was educated back East, rooted in the West, mentored by strongwilled Europeans, descended from French nobility, adopted by a Navajo medicine man. He’s also been married multiple times (his current wife is decades younger than him), and is the father of five children, a war vet and a sufferer of post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s a tall, erudite artist’s artist unconcerned with networking, a self-described “anachronism,” and fellow rabble-rouser and best friend to the late iconoclastic writer Edward Abbey. In short, he’s a character. One who’s seen plenty, done more, and hopes to live to 140. Now 87, he’s more than halfway there, and he’s spent the majority of that time on the Colorado Plateau, with Taos serving as home base. From there he’s ventured out, often on foot, armed with pen, ink, and sketchbook, into the canyons and mesas of western Colorado, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southwestern Utah, where his summer studio was a mobile home with no electricity or plumbing. But, oh, what pearls he fashioned
John De Puy. Opposite: Echo Cliffs (circa 1970s), oil on canvas.
in that little aluminum oyster shell of an “immobile” home, as Abbey aptly described it. De Puy’s Southwest exists outside linear time. He sees the past in the present, its emotional tyrannies held in the land. And while, like many artists of the Southwest, he draws his inspiration from the area’s landforms, Native peoples, beauty, and myths, they’re more felt than depicted. He’s more interested in the land’s inner qualities than its outer ones. “It is the basis of my motif,” says De Puy, as softspoken as he is grizzled, “both for images and my transcendental attitude toward life and art.” It’s an art that’s poignant yet elusive— evocative, evasive, direct but indirect, captivating and profound. Abbey once described it well while admitting to the futility of trying to describe it at all: “De Puy’s landscape is not the landscape we see with routine eyes. He paints a hallucinated, magical, sometimes fearsome world—not the world that we think we see, but the one, he declares, that is really there. A world of terror as well as beauty—the terrible beauty that lies beyond the ordinary limits of human experience, that forms the basis of experience, the ground of being.” He’s no modern-day Jeremiah Johnson with a brush, or some sort of isolationist with little regard for his peers and ancestors. De Puy didn’t just traipse through the prehistoric landscape of the Southwest like so many plein-air dilettantes. He has also visited—and sketched and painted—France, Mexico, Crete, and Greece. While all these trips abroad added to his oeuvre, many of his more formative experiences at home and outside the U.S. occurred well before he settled in Taos in the mid-1950s. As rooted as he was in the West, he grew up mostly in New Jersey after his grandfather lost his New Mexico ranch during the Depression and his father relocated the family to the East Coast. His parents bathed him in creativity and every year they took him to New Mexico, where he’d go off with his grandfather for camping trips into Monument Valley, Navajo Mountain, and the north rim of the Grand Canyon. He was studying anthropology at Columbia University in New York when the Korean War broke out and the navy came calling, De Puy’s dad having enlisted him when he was 17. Service was expected of him; the De Puys trace their lineage to Raymond du Puy, the first Grand Master of the Knights of Malta, and Adhemar trendmagazineglobal.com 113
Edward Abbey (left) and John De Puy on one of their many camping trips in southeast Utah. Opposite: Canyon in Winter (1979), oil on canvas.
of Le Puy, who led the First Crusade. Designated a medic in Korea, De Puy lost part of his hip in an explosion that brutally ended his best friend’s life. After doctors in Philadelphia implanted a titanium ball, he could walk again, but he wasn’t the same. His surgeons wanted to do more; De Puy didn’t, so he went AWOL. He hitchhiked to the Navajo reservation in Arizona, changed his name to John Thoreau after his literary hero, and ended up in the psycho-spiritual care of a 90-something Navajo hataali (medicine man), who took him through a healing process called the Beauty Way. “He took one look at me and said to stay with him a year, or my life would shortly end,” says De Puy. He assisted the hataali with his sand paintings (part of 114 TREND Summer 2015
meditation), fasted, went out of his mind, found his animal spirit guides (coyote and raven), was given the Navajo name hagli da (in English: Dawn Walker), and could have married the old man’s niece. After a year spent mostly outside, says De Puy, “I vowed to devote my life to art and the defense of wilderness.” He bolted again, this time for Santa Fe, where the FBI—ever assiduous back then when tracking soldiers who’d left their posts—found him and threw him into Albuquerque’s county jail. But at his court martial, rather than being convicted, he was discharged with a 70 percent disability. Free as a lark, De Puy took his disability pension and GI Bill and went back to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League
and “learned color” from GermanAmerican Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman before spending a year at Oxford studying art history and writing a thesis on the history of Expressionism. Around this time, from the mid 1950s to the mid ’60s, he had three other significant encounters that would affect his approach to art. The first occurred on a trip to Switzerland, where he spent a day with the German abstract expressionist Emil Nolde, who looked over his watercolors and inspired De Puy to keep painting. “Calling me a young American Expressionist,” recalls De Puy, “he encouraged me at a crucial time in my life.” The second encounter involved his brief acquaintance in New York with Mark Rothko, whom he met through another modernist of critical influence, Clay Spohn. Rothko told De Puy to return to where his roots were—the Southwest. The source of his art was there, Rothko said. “I felt a wave of intense spirituality in his presence and work,” says De Puy. And the advice? That, says De Puy, “was an epiphany for me. I returned once again to Taos.” The third encounter came after he’d moved back to Taos. Stumbling around Santa Fe Plaza stupid drunk one night with a friend, he was introduced to an equally drunk, equally irascible and compelling character: Edward Abbey. Artistically, the encounters with Nolde “His paintings have a liberating quality. They make a window in the wall of our modern technoindustrial workhouse—a window that leads the eye and the heart and the mind through the wall and far out into the freedom of the old and original world. They take us back to where we came from long ago. They take us back to where we took the wrong fork in the road.” —Edward Abbey, Down the River
UNKNOWN PHOTOGRAPHER / COURTESY OF GALERIE DE PUY
De Puy didn’t just traipse through the prehistoric landscape of the Southwest like so many plein-air dilettantes
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BRENNAN STUDIO / COURTESY OF GALERIE DE PUY
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Roswell’s Museum and Art Center, which houses the largest collection of his work; and in Taos’s Harwood Museum of Art and 203 Fine Art, along with recent shows at Addison Rowe Fine Art in Santa Fe. His paintings are like liminal apparitions that border on the uncanny— in Freudian terms, the unheimlich. Ominous blotches of color in forms recognizable as mountains, rivers, rocks, and plants are gossamered into existence with the slightest thread of a line, as if their entire beingness might crumble at any moment, all of which hint at ruminations on spirituality, transience, and the evanescence of beauty. They’re simple in the way ancient renditions of the cosmos and nature are simple, and all the more powerful for that simplicity. And they’re ominous—hence the sense of dread, unease. The unheimlich. Which is how nature—in the Southwest, anyway— often feels. But whatever feelings of awe they bring about, the colors and forms are inviting, and De Puy’s sense of delineation is never harsh or abrupt, but mesmerizing and inspiring—those other sensations nature can elicit. De Puy developed a language of color fields and forms to express what he witnesses as the metaphysical life of the land. And though his work Navajo Mountain may evoke a sense of fragility for any viewer, with forms teetering at the edge of balance with what surrounds them, it’s also the place that healed his psyche. His deepest influence has always been the land. Nature, hiking, camping, allowing as little as possible to get between him and the earth. It’s what bonded him and Abbey—never mind the booze and the ex-wives, the anarchism and disdain for corporate systems. Sure, Abbey witnessed his friend Debris, as he liked to call De Puy, overturn a punch bowl and smash it against the gallery wall at his own New York opening one night, an event De Puy later described as a “preliminary cocktail party for kissing ass.” And yes, the two of them burned and chopped to pieces innumerable billboards and sanded and sugared plenty of earthmovers and D9 bulldozers Monkey Wrench–style, all of
“De Puy’s landscape is not the landscape we see with routine eyes.”
COURTESY OF GALERIE DE PUY
and Rothko influenced De Puy in ways that are more or less visible in his art, but other artists and ideas have been just as weighty. Expressionism—distorting reality for emotional effect—played a big role, but so did the beliefs of abstract painter and fellow Taoseño Louis Ribak, who tried to push his post-Abstract Expressionistic vision into something bigger. “I think we all felt in those days that our work would develop into a new art,” reflects De Puy. His own art developed a freedom of color and form like that championed by Europe’s CoBrA group, a short-lived (1948–51) avant-garde movement that accentuated spontaneity and experimentation and drew inspiration from primitive art and artists like Paul Klee and Joan Miró. Then, too, there’s the undoubted debt to the American abstract painter Clifford Still. “Still provided a model with direct implications for nature-inspired painters,” explains De Puy. “He worked with naturalistic shapes that reflected rock, crystal, and landforms—forms which were abstract rather than illustrative. Yet he believed above all else that abstract art could speak of a new and profound pictorial truth.” And while De Puy can be fitted neatly into the Taos artistic tradition—from the Taos Art Colony artists of the early 20th century to the Transcendental Painting Group of the late 30s and on through to the Taos Moderns and fellow abstract Taoseño painters like Agnes Martin— he’s always had his own style, even while learning and incorporating all he could from other artists. He did this with the Transcendentalists, specifically with one of that group’s leaders, another of his many mentors, Raymond Jonson, who De Puy says “helped me to understand the metaphysical in my art and inner life.” Too little seen—though he did enjoy some recognition in the ’60s and beyond as one of the media’s Taos Moderns—De Puy exhibited steadily, if quietly, over the years. Early on he showed with Louis Ribak and Bea Mandelman in Taos at Stables Art Gallery and Galeria Escondida. Most notably he exhibited in Raymond Jonson’s gallery at the University of New Mexico;
Monument Valley (year unknown), pen and India ink, from De Puy’s sketchbook.
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which no doubt served as the model for the fictional George Hayduke and his fellow Monkey Wrench Gang of anarchopranksters in Abbey’s 1975 cult classic. After all, it wasn’t until meeting Abbey that De Puy would fulfill the second half of the vow he made at Navajo Mountain. Between them it was understood that Abbey would write the Southwest and De Puy paint it, but they were also compelled to protect the land that fused them. In Jack Loeffler’s biography of Abbey, he describes finding him eating beans and drinking beers with De Puy on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. They lament the desolation of the Four Corners plant, and Abbey shouts about defending wilderness: “It’s not just our right. It’s our duty!” It’s no surprise then that Wrenched, the 2014 film about Abbey’s legacy of environmental activism, reenacts the time he and De Puy stumbled across a D3 Caterpillar tractor in Colorado with the keys still in the ignition and sent it soaring off
a nearby cliff. More formally, they organized to persuade local ranchers and farmers to support the founding of the Canyonlands National Park in 1961. On the less formal side, they helped a coalition stop a coal plant from developing the Kaiparowits Plateau in Utah. (They’d been out there camping and pulling up miles of sensors.) The two of them were most simpatico—despite the time De Puy pawned Abbey’s favorite deer rifle to pay for a trip to Minoa, and Abbey, in return, sold off all of De Puy’s furniture while he was away—when they were out on the land. De Puy had come to see hiking as a form of continuous walking meditation, a methodology he’d developed during his Rinzai-ji Zen training at Jemez Springs that “stressed a mindfulness before subject matter,” while disengaging the mind from active thinking and allowing it to access a spiritual essence. He got up too early for Abbey and rarely slept, tended to
chant while he cooked or made tea, and was prone to pontificating about the noospheric philosophical ponderings of the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Their relationship was as much a ménage à trois with nature as it was a lifelong friendship between two likeminded, independent, strong-willed men. Abbey died more than 25 years ago, but his words can be read in many of De Puy’s paintings, just as the essence of De Puy’s work can be felt in Abbey’s writings. “Walking,” writes Abbey, “stretches time and prolongs life . . . and makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details.” This is what great art does, and it’s what De Puy’s paintings do most of all: stretch time, prolong life, make the world bigger and more interesting. R John De Puy’s work is now showing at Addison Rowe Gallery in Santa Fe through August 7.
John and Isabel Fereirra De Puy hiking the family’s land in Ojo Caliente with their daughter, Noelle, age 10. Opposite: Untitled (1958), oil on canvas. trendmagazineglobal.com 119
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t says something about a retail center that many of its shops have been there for decades. El Centro Mall, one block south of the Plaza, was established in 1970 as the first indoor gallery and retail space of its kind in downtown Santa Fe. Here’s what it tells us about El Centro that shops have called it home for as long as 40-plus years: quality, authenticity, and memorable experiences that bring visitors back again and again. “We’re selling to the third generation of collectors,” says Judy Wade, owner of Joe Wade Fine Art, located at El Centro since 1973. Presenting exceptional painters and sculptors in a range of genres and styles from realist to abstract, Joe Wade Fine Art is one of El Centro’s four first-rate art galleries. Peña Gallery features the work of renowned American Indian painter Amado Peña, while contemporary gourd art by Robert Rivera is on view at Torres Gallery. Internationally collected artist Bette Ridgeway is among those
represented by The Signature Gallery, where Ridgeway’s luminous, layered, abstract imagery on cell-cast acrylic disks—glasslike, yet a third of the weight of glass—will be spotlighted in a show opening Sept. 5. At Santa Fe Boots and Boogie, owner and custom boot designer Roy Flynn offers boots in a seemingly infinite selection of colors, designs, and leathers. “It’s strictly a boot shop, no other nonsense,” the affable owner says, adding the promise of “a fine experience, even if you leave without boots.” Also available along El Centro’s charming corridors: artist-designed jewelry at Golden Web and Mario Chavez Designer Jewelry, Dean Cheek’s handloomed custom designed knitwear at DC Knits boutique, and Arroyo Coffeebar, featuring fresh coffee, sandwiches, and light meals. “The best people in the world walk through my door, the best artists and the best clients,” claims Judy Wade. The same could be said for El Centro itself.
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Spiritual Whiteout Kevin Box transforms delicate origami figures into powerful bronze sculptures to address issues of survival, sustainability, and consciousness BY CHRISTINA PROCTER | PHOTOS BY KATE RUSSELL
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W What happens neurologically when a decision is made? We may think the process involves a back-andforth volley of logical arguments lined up like ducks in a row until pow, the right decision becomes clear. But according to neuroscientists, the rational part of the brain has little to do with why it goes pow. They’ve discovered that without a connection between the frontal cortex and the older part of the brain that deals with emotions and memories, we can become incapacitated by even the smallest choices. “All action is a result of consciousness, and there’s no action that happens without consciousness first. There’s an invisible side to our reality that’s just as important as the visible,” says Kevin Box, whose sculptures of paper cast into bronze offer metaphoric solutions to questions of existence and survival. In this sense, Box’s art reflects the neurologist’s mapping of the mind. His creative process integrates thought, emotion, intuition, and spiritual reflection, mimicking the invisible neural circuitry of decisions that make up a life. When it comes to societal actions, he hopes bold decisions will be made in the general direction of good for everyone. And that, he believes, is sustainability, the endgame for any successful model—something we can achieve globally, as if a decisive pow could go echoing through our psyches. Yet there’s an urgency to Box’s optimism, which is perhaps why he started so young. The now 38-yearold became the youngest person to be inducted into the American Sculptors’ Guild while in his late 20s, and was named one of the country’s top 21 artists under 31 by Southwest Art magazine in 2005. He is
a prolific powerhouse of creative energy, producing sculpture that is intriguing, accessible, and widely collected. No one is likely to mistake a Box sculpture for anyone else’s work, although he frequently collaborates with his wife, Jennifer Cady Box, and with Robert J. Lang, a physicist and renowned origami artist. Box’s signature style grew out of his development of an organic burnout process for casting original paper molds into compelling works in bronze that took him years to devise and perfect. He casts in wax so that as the folded paper heats and disintegrates, it leaves an imprint of lines, an enduring likeness of the original fragility of form. Box’s sculpture employs a simple visual language of symbols such as cranes, boats, the olive branch, or the rock-paper-scissors game. These images may invoke archetypal narratives and stir some ancestral feelings, but the artist is also exploring the extended impact of making a choice. A paper airplane requires seven folds, for instance. For Box, this series of folds becomes “an absolutely accurate document of all the choices made for that piece of paper to achieve the dream of flying,” he explains. Other works involve folded and unfolded pieces of paper cast at different stages along the arc of taking shape—emerging from crumpled chaos or in full form, like the crane rising from crane in a recent towering bronze sculpture called Master Peace. “He’s using paper, often origami, to explore and heal relationships,” comments Eddie Fleetwood of the Selby Fleetwood Gallery, which represents Box’s
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work in Santa Fe. “Using the memory-quality of paper, each fold reveals a process. It’s also this interaction with nature as he’s translating it to the lasting substance of cast metal.” For Box, the go-to space for his explorations is the color white, the sum of all colors as well as the possibilities implied by their absence. He also expresses a vast potential through wordplay in his titles. In the Light Conversations and Center Peace series, we see wall-hanging sheets of paper go from a crumpled state to a piece that’s shaking off its wrinkles and then reaching a central point where, with one deliberate fold, it takes on a geometric design. But any point in the series, there’s room for interpretation and associations in the light and shadows of valley creases and mountain folds. “Kevin has the broadest appeal of all the artists we show,” Selby Fleetwood says. “There’s something that’s very contemplative about his work. His wall pieces, for instance, show the missteps as well as the firm decisions.” Box’s artistic path began in his family home in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and later was marked by several bold decisions. His mother was an archivist, and it was she who first instilled in him an appreciation of the great value and fragility of paper. As a student at the School for Visual Arts in Savannah, Georgia, he studied graphic design. But a semester in Greece shifted his focus. Wondering at the aliveness of ancient art, he realized that as a design intern for a large corporation, everything he created would end up in a landfill. So he made two more decisive moves: He switched his major to fine arts and decided to become a sculptor. Box moved to Austin, where metalworkers congregate, and as an $8-per-hour apprentice at Deep in the Heart Art Foundry in the nearby small town of Bastrop, he learned everything he needed to know. The rate charged to employees for materials was an hour’s work for a pound of metal, and when he was promoted to production manager, he offered to trade his raise for free casting rights.
Box also made a deal with the foundry’s owners, former rocket scientist Michael Hall and his wife, Rosemary, offering to experiment with challenging techniques on his own work first, reducing any risk of losing a large commission. “There were probably multiple milestones in my career where I got ahead because I was just willing to be the guinea pig,” he jokes. He also had his eye on the business side of things. “We were working directly with successful artists, and when they sold a piece we had to make it and ship it. We had our finger right on the pulse of their success. I’d see the work, a magazine ad, and the gallery where it ended up, and I became aware that there are these art markets.” Box was shortly ready to go out on his own, and he left his foundry job soon after 9/11. Concerned about the economy, he called one of his mentors, the late sculptor Gene Tobey. “There’s no better time than now, because with everything that’s going on, people need positive work,” Tobey told him. “He also said, ‘Kevin, do you know how many artists are going to do nothing this year because of what you’re talking about?’ I realized I needed to go boldly.” With this and the advice of other mentors, Box abandoned plans for his MFA degree and instead hunkered down to build an inventory that sold nearly as quickly as he produced it. In 2007 he became a consultant for a foundry in Thailand, and there he befriended a Thai worker who introduced him to Buddhist principles of action and consequence. This allowed him to articulate for himself the intent of his work. Soon after returning to the U.S., he left Texas for Santa Fe. “We have this ability for these click moments,” he reflects. “It’s a choice, but when that click happens, it determines how much impact can be achieved in a lifetime. So the earlier it happens for us, the more potential there is.” In Chaos and Consciousness, a bronze-on-steel sculpture of loosely crumpled paper transitioning into a diamond-sharp geometric form, he conveys the
“You can’t plant the same crop every year or it’ll ruin your soil. And you can’t do the same image over and over again because you’ll saturate your market.”
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Previous page: Detail from Box’s Chaos and Consciousness series. Above: Box in his studio, which is adjacent to the compound’s gallery (right).
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Jennifer Cady Box strolls through the couple’s newly opened Turquoise Trail Sculpture Garden, where Box’s Origami in the Garden series is set among striking Dakota sandstone formations.
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Jennifer runs daily operations for the Box enterprise and serves as her husband’s creative consultant and collaborator. Right: Botanical Peace (2014) with Basket Full of Stars (2014), hand-painted fabricated aluminum.
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“Conscious choices can displace any mess we’ve made of things— including the current unsustainable model of life on earth.”
idea that conscious choices can displace any mess we’ve made—including the unsustainable model of life on earth. Building a sustainable economic, ecological, and creative model is just what Kevin and Jennifer aim for on their 35-acre piece of land on the Turquoise Trail near Cerrillos, New Mexico. In collaboration with a group of graduate students and professors from Taliesin’s Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture in Wisconsin and sustainability architect Alexander Dzurec of Autotroph Design in Santa Fe, the couple is building a compound they hope will ensure a sustainable work and sales environment for Box and eventually other artists as well. The fully solar-powered house has radiant floor heating, full water catchment, and signature Autotroph features such as a shading roof that functions like a baseball cap for the home. The Boxes are also restoring the land, whose distinctive topography has earned it the name Garden of the Gods, part of the same well-known formation in Colorado. The jutting fins of pink and yellow Dakota sandstone create a striking backdrop for Box’s mostly white sculptures. With a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, former wetlands have been restored on the property. The Boxes also followed the edible-forest philosophy to plant 68 types of trees and shrubs, providing fruit for insects, animals, and people. This past spring the couple opened the Turquoise Trail Sculpture Garden on
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the property, a public space currently showing Box’s Origami in the Garden series, which debuted last summer at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden and will begin its national tour this fall. Additional plans include converting what is now the couple’s private residence and attached gallery space (f lexibly designed for changing iterations) into a museum, as well as building artist studios for a future residency program. Jennifer runs educational programming, inventory, advertising, and sales for the business. Previously a professional dancer in New York, she studied higher education and nonprofit administration before she accepted a master teacher position at the nonprofit National Dance Institute in Santa Fe in 2008. It was just a few days after she moved to Santa Fe that Box spotted her standing next to one of his sculptures at his first opening in town. They were married soon after. Now they travel each year to study models for museums and residency programs in preparation for the next phases of the project, especially those with features integrating nature and art. “That’s where it’s meant to be, I think,” Box says. “The dialogue of 132 TREND Summer 2015
Opposite: Hero’s Horse (2014) maquette, powder-coated, fabricated steel. Opposite below: Close-up of Crane Unfolding (2005), powder-coated cast bronze. Left: Master Peace (2014), a Kevin and Jennifer Cady Box collaboration made in tribute to Japanese Senbazuru tradition of making a thousand origami cranes in a year. With 500 in the monument, the rest are individual pieces scattered around the world.
sculpture is in nature.” The entire compound has the feel of an ark in the desert, a reflection of the couple’s strong sense of stewardship. “How do you build an ecosystem that enables you to live an entire life spent creating? You have to follow nature’s laws,” the artist says. “You can’t plant the same crop every year or it’ll ruin your soil. And you can’t do the same image over and over again because you’ll saturate your market.” Knowing their time invested in work would be considerable, the couple chose not to have children. Plus, the sculptor quips, although he uses recycled materials to offset his resource-heavy art, not having children reduces his ecological footprint. Jennifer arrived at the same decision. “With our focus on bringing joy through our work, I’d rather be known as a great aunt, friend, and supporter of children’s organizations,” she explains. “The bottom line is we’re part of an ecosystem and we need to act like it,” adds Box. He plans to introduce the butterfly form in his work, an expression of his belief that humans are in the caterpillar stage of their existence. “I think our civilization is going to produce a sustainable model that survives,” he says. “But constant growth and expansion is not it. A plant grows to a certain point and then it has to get more efficient. Only then does it grow a little more.” There is hope and resilience in the image of crane rising from crane, and Box believes the solutions to global crises reside within us. “All the questions we ask—who am I, where am I going, what should I do with my life—these are spiritual questions. If we can align with consciousness and take responsibility for our choices, a spiritual world within can make these choices that directly change the world outside.” So he folds paper and casts it in metal, which will age, as paper does, but over the course of centuries. He tracks his own decisions, and his prolific work is as much about consciousness as the struggle to practice living consciously. “We’re in this universe of amazingly articulated design, organized and choreographed with systems and rules that work. It’s all designed toward something, I think, and that’s growing consciousness. Consciousness is the most valuable invisible thing in the universe, and it’s housed in something physical,” he marvels. “That’s us.” R trendmagazineglobal.com 133
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BY LYNNE ROBINSON | PHOTOS BY BILL CURRY
orn to a family who farmed in Taos Pueblo for centuries, Robert Mirabal wanted nothing more as a kid than to escape that fate. “We were dirt poor,” he says. “It was all about survival. I never expected to do what I’ve done.” What he did was live a musician’s life. The artist, now 48, moved to New York in his early 20s and began to fuse hip-hop, funk, and rock influences with traditional Pueblo technique and sound. He produced his first album at age 22 and went on to tour internationally with percussionist Reynaldo Lujan, collaborate on two Grammywinning albums, compose an acclaimed soundtrack, and he’s even seen his handmade flutes displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. But now, says Mirabal, standing in the doorway of a shed on his Taos Pueblo property, he’s come full circle to the material that inspired many of his lyrics from the start. “About five years ago I had a dream,” he says. “In the dream the Corn Maidens came to me and told me, ‘We have ten years left. If you help us, we’ll help you.’ I’ve been helping them ever since.” According to Pueblo cosmology, the Corn Maidens are deities representing life and abundance. The dream is what prompted Mirabal to initiate a project with his friends Nelson Zink and the late Steve Parks, a longtime Taos gallerist and art dealer, to return Taos Pueblo to its pre–World War II agricultural heyday, when wheat and corn were grown in great abundance to feed American troops. They launched Tiwa Farms, a program designed to reintroduce traditional crops and growing methods to the wider community. Using ancient ways to provide for present needs mirrors his inclination to incorporate ancestral rhythms into contemporary songwriting. Mirabal lifts bag after bag of seeds he’s been curating and planting for the past
Cultivating Identity Grammy-winning musician Robert Mirabal returns to farm the Taos land that raised him
several years: corn kernels from the high Andes, Pueblo corn, blue and yellow, white and red, Hopi corn, and corn from Mexico, all stacked on shelves buckling under the weight. There are other seeds too, beans and squash, but it’s the corn that compels him most. Within the first year, using old tractors and plows, 45 fields were planted; another was added prior to growing season this year at Taos Pueblo. By encouraging this return to agriculture, Mirabal has sparked a renewed interest in the ancient farming techniques long used by Pueblo farmers. Mirabal is planting traditional, organic crops. Here he holds the seeds for Taos White and Taos Blue corn.
Taos Pueblo has other gardeners joining the movement. The area’s Red Willow Grower’s Co-op now has a year-round farmers market. In 2012, Tiwa Farms became a part of the Po’Pay Society, a nonprofit named after the leader of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that provides agricultural educational programs to keep customs— from storytelling to pollen gathering to arrow making—alive in the community, especially among the youth. Mirabal has become an avid storyteller on his website, and covers everything from spring snow runnoff to weather patterns on mirabalnativeflutes.com and the blog Tiwa Farms Journal (tiwafarms.blogspot.com), with revealing vignettes about working in the fields. The movement’s success has been evident in the many Pueblo residents returning to their fields to till the land. One Taos Pueblo grower reports that he couldn’t afford to plow his fields and didn’t even consider farming until he heard about Tiwa Farms. Three years ago, he began growing corn, as well as other traditional crops, and plans to add other varieties this year. For Mirabal, that prescient dream of the Corn Maidens is no less real than the corn he’s been collecting. “Out here, we live in a world of metaphors,” he remarks, returning the seeds to their bags and the cool darkness of the shed. But in the collective upper and middle Pueblo fields, as well as on his own land, where the Rio Pueblo and an acequia run, his work extends beyond metaphor. He’s even become an outspoken advocate for organic farming and a poetic interpreter of its toil. “When I go out to work in the fields, it’s as if I’m going to meet my beloved,” he says. “I have a relationship with the fields and the seeds I plant, and as with any relationship, it requires work.” Although machinery is used to plow the Pueblo fields, it’s mostly old and outdated, and much of the work at Tiwa Farms is still trendmagazineglobal.com 135
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Mirabal says Taos Pueblo can build a sustainable food system by returning to traditional crops and low-impact farming practices. Summer 2015
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Robert Mirabal and his daughters, Masa Rain (left) and Kona.
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done the old-fashioned way—with bare hands in the dirt. It’s little wonder, then, that the young Mirabal longed to leave for an easier life and livelihood. Performing music, though fraught with its own challenges, certainly seemed easier on the body. But now he sees it differently. “I wish I could transform the farming into money,” he comments wryly. “I have kids to support, and the music has blessed me with the ability to do that.” His two youngest daughters go back and forth between Mirabal and their mother, Dawn, his ex-wife. When they’re with him they can be found helping their father remove kernels from corncobs to be ground for flour.
Top: Mirabal recalls Good Deer Concha, who was one of the last farmers to plow with a horse (circa 1960). Right: Last year’s harvest survived despite struggling with scant precipitation.
“It’s ironic really,” he continues. “I spent my childhood wanting so badly to escape this destiny, which is why I began playing music, but in a sense they are cousins, music and farming.” He’s starting to deftly merge the two. Mirabal’s recent collaborations include Ironhorse, a multimedia album he’s creating with another award-winning New Mexican rock artist, Robby Romero. They released a CD, with a video in the works, and in December 2014 played a sold-out show at the Taos Center for the Arts followed by a sold-out evening at the Farmhouse Cafe and Bakery. At the event, they rolled up their sleeves and cooked a traditional dinner to benefit a Tiwa Farms initiative to bring organic meals into Taos schools. On the menu were deer stew with piñon nuts, buffalo tamales, and a dessert of butternut squash with dried fruit and rice drizzled trendmagazineglobal.com 139
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with honey. Except for the rice, all of the ingredients were hunted or grown at the Pueblo. After dinner the pair performed an acoustic set from Ironhorse. In spring they threw another meal-music event to continue the organic school-lunch program and to raise funds for the Taos Pueblo Head Start garden. “Everything’s connected,” says Mirabal. He looks out toward the mountain, from where the Rio Pueblo flows. “You know, the corn is the only plant that gave itself to the people,” he adds, holding up an ear of dried blue corn. “This can sit around for 140 TREND Summer 2015
hundreds of years, and all it needs is for a human to come along and plant it.” Mirabal continues to tour and play on his own as well as with other musicians. He recently returned from South America, where he has a large fan base, and he tours Europe regularly. Clearly, music is in his blood. He remembers one of his elders, Frank Samora, who was immortalized in the late Frank Waters’s book, The Man Who Killed the Deer. “Frank Samora was a great man,” he says. “He taught me many things and he gave me my Indian name, Flute Song.”
Mirabal playing the didgeridoo in performance with Robby Romero (left), Mina Tank (middle), and Dakota Romero at the Taos Center for the Arts.
These days, the musician’s connection to the land is as deep as song. In summer months, the corn plants stand more than six feet tall. “We could feed a village,” he says. “This is who I am,” he adds softly. “I live this life. Born a Pueblo farmer, raised a Pueblo farmer, die a Pueblo farmer. Nothing more, nothing less.” R
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Architect Michael Krupnick designs “movie sets” for people’s lives that keep nature close
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he adobe porch Michael Krupnick designed for a studio in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, is plain, nearly featureless on its own. In the afternoon sun, though, a shadow splits its wall into two perfect triangles, one light, one dark. It’s the kind of detail that could take months to notice, but it’s key to understanding the Santa Fe architect’s approach: using minimal desert design features to quietly enhance the drama of the client’s life. Krupnick’s work, at its most basic level, is a hybridization of the timeless stillness of ancient desert architecture combined with the more modern, minimal-industrial influences one might find in a city loft. But beyond that, his goal is to create a sense of place. The 49-year-old architect thinks of his homes as movie sets where the daily events of the residents’ lives play out. Composition plays a part, too; it’s not just the structure, says Krupnick, but how it enhances, and is enhanced by, the space it occupies. “What I work on most is the ‘space between,’ how shadow and light interact with the sky and landscape,” he says. “More than the building’s structure, it’s the space between and the negative space the building creates.” Krupnick, who started his studio with his wife, Kim Ray, in 1995, is a transplant to Santa Fe from Florida. He says he became interested in architecture as a reaction to how unfulfilling his hometown of Fort Lauderdale felt while he was growing up; the developments seemed “uncaring,” he says. He calls it “bad Modernism”—buildings and neighborhoods that spare no thought for the people who inhabit them, buildings with no sense of the space surrounding them. Krupnick wanted to compose spaces, private and public, that enhanced people’s lives. “I got into [architecture] because I knew I could do better,” he says. Krupnick first attended the University of Colorado, Boulder, where one course, more about imagination than design, helped him to think of architecture less in material terms and more as a space where the events of people’s
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Krupnick teamed up with contractor Michael Freeman to design his Corrales, N.M., home. LEED platinum certified, its cantilevered roof (previous page) affords a view of the Sandia Mountains and allows morning sun in while shading the patio during the peak of day. Above: This room is a focal point of the house, with a Trombe wall that provides radiating heat. Opposite: The rustic barn door was crafted from reclaimed walnut that Freeman’s father had saved for years, waiting for its calling. The dining table, sustainably harvested, is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
Krupnick’s work, at its most basic level, is a hybridization of the timeless stillness of ancient desert architecture combined with the more modern, minimal-industrial influences one might find in a city loft
lives unfold. He came to study in New Mexico in 1990 and fell in love with the adobe buildings and the local culture, enjoying the lack of “flash” and the openness and warmth he found in the people here. He decided to stay. At UNM he was able to study under Modernist architect Ricardo Legorreta and also Charles Moore, whose collaborative Sea Ranch condominium project had an important impact on Los Angeles architecture. And though he didn’t study directly with Antoine Predock, Krupnick and many of his classmates were influenced by his Modernist-industrial work. “He was the local architecture hero,” Krupnick says of the Albuquerque-based Predock. “He was very Modernist-industrial, very much sense-of-place. It’s influenced my work tremendously.” Krupnick began working as an intern renovating rural New Mexican churches with adobe made from clay collected on-site. At first New Mexico hadn’t struck him as beautiful, he recalls; the desert and its architecture demanded quiet and patience to be appreciated. But in the cracked adobe walls of those old churches, Krupnick learned a subtle style that he uses to this day. “New Mexico churches are like no other buildings at all, ever,” he says. “It’s not about the building—it’s about the people. Check out the softness of this line,” he says, pointing to an image of a church and observing how its peaked roof sagged and bent against the evening desert sky. “There’s a humanness in putting this out there. Sometimes architecture is so perfect that it takes out the human aspect.” It was while he was restoring the old churches that he met his wife, Kim Ray, who would become his partner in the business for 16 years before establishing herself as a nurse and yoga instructor. In the studio’s earlier days, the husband-and-wife team tackled large-scale restaurant and apartment projects through Fort Lauderdale developer Alan Hooper. Even though Ray has since branched out, she still has input in some of the studio’s projects. “Kim
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TOP: COURTESY OF KRUPNICK STUDIO ARCHITECTURE
The 49-year-old architect thinks of his homes as movie sets where the daily events of the residents’ lives play out
is one of the best designers I’ve ever met,” Krupnick says. “So even though she’s not a full-time part of the firm, she’s always involved.” Krupnick always makes room for nature, an important feature of his minimal designs. When Carlos Ramirez, a bridal and wedding designer from Miami, hired him in 2013 to renovate a 1940s Santa Fe adobe home that had undergone some slapdash renovation in the 1970s, he put that sensibility to work. The house sits on a piece of land that faces the mountains, but its original design obscured this view with a utility room and gazebo in the backyard. What followed between Krupnick and Ramirez was a renovation by means of negation. They picked out features of the old home that worked and removed those that didn’t, often choosing to leave space rather than fill it. The utility room and gazebo were among the first to go, and a wall to the east was replaced with a window—the Sangre de Cristos would now provide an unobstructed vista for Ramirez’s dining room. The vigas in the living room were retained and painted white, while the old adobe portal to the home remains, opening onto a foyer with a black limestone floor. Ramirez says his working relationship with Krupnick was “fluid.” The new design removed the cluttered feeling of the earlier renovation, he reports, and left an open, airy home with a floor plan that flows naturally. “It has a definite feeling,” Ramirez says. One of the studio’s earliest projects was a home for Edwina and Charles Milner in northeast Santa Fe. Edwina, who’s served on the boards of several art organizations, wanted to build a home
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Opposite top: Photographer Kim Jew’s studio is an articulation of space and light in Corrales. Opposite bottom and left: Traditional adobe massing meets rusted steel and reclaimed oak detailing in artist Joyce B. Scott’s Ojo Caliente studio, which has a bermed, belowground workshop. Below: Krupnick’s urban taste is seen in contractor Andy Joseph’s Santa Fe home.
that could showcase her art collection, house a studio for her own work, and be a place where she could entertain guests. When the couple hired the young architect, Edwina was intrigued by rounded homes that were created by pouring concrete over inflated weather balloons. She wanted something that looked similar. The lot sat on an incline with a view of the mountains to the east, and the home the Krupnicks and Milners designed now curves its way up that hill, with a view of the surrounding desert landscape from each of its five levels. It’s not designed in concrete or adobe, but rather a concrete-ash mix that evokes the look of old New Mexican homes, flawed but endearing. Upon seeing the pocked and bubbling material, Edwina fell in love with its pink-beige color. “It’s so pretty,” she says. “I didn’t let them paint over it at all. I just love that surface.” The living room, with a large window that overlooks a patio and a view of the mountains, is a set piece for Edwina’s role in the fine-art world. A fireplace sits in the center, with traditional vigas radiating from the curved chimney. Her guests often gather there to listen to speakers and socialize at cocktail parties. The stairway was enhanced with additional windows, providing an unbroken connection to the outside. In Edwina’s art studio, windows open to the hillside slope at ground level. Edwina and Charles were so happy with the work that they recently invited Krupnick back to add a guest room with a private entrance and kitchen. Another recent addition to Krupnick’s oeuvre, one that draws more heavily on his industrial roots, is a gallery in Santa Fe’s Railyard Arts District. California sculptor Bill Schindler hired him to transform what used to be an auto repair shop into a studio and a gallery space. In the back of the building, where people used to work on cars, Schindler has drills, a workbench, and boxes upon boxes of scrap metal and bent airplane propellers—everything he needs to make his art. trendmagazineglobal.com 153
The gallery area is tidier but doesn’t lose the industrial aesthetic. Steel supports cross the ceiling above a concrete floor nicked with thousands of imperfections. But it’s the 22-foot, triangular steel tower and its canopy at the gallery’s entrance that is most striking. The tower links the gallery to similarly styled buildings near the train station. “It’s a nice sculptural entry,” Schindler says. “Being a sculptor, that’s important to me.” The majority of the studio’s large-scale development work is in Florida, where Krupnick is also licensed. Ray was there to design some of the earliest entries, and many of these projects utilize the couple’s more minimal, modern influences. They worked together on the Mill Lofts, Foundry Lofts, and Himmarshee Bar & Grille in Fort Lauderdale, often in partnership with developer Alan Hooper. He and Krupnick were childhood friends from Fort Lauderdale, where they used to play baseball and ride bicycles around the neighborhood. They ran into each other again in 1996 after Krupnick spotted Hooper working on a house on the street where he grew up. They began a conversation that turned into a 19-year working relationship spanning many projects and millions of dollars in development. Hooper says that Krupnick considers everything, from the building’s relationship to the sun to what things will look like at night and how the area will feel for pedestrians. We make buildings that look like they’ve been there forever,” Hooper comments. “We’re not as vanilla as most developers. Most developments are the delivery of a box for some sort of user based on square footage, but we go for the cool factor.” The duo are entering the second phase of a project in College Town, a residential area near Florida State University in Tallahassee with access to food and 154 Summer 2015 TREND
Opposite: Edwina and Charles Milner were Krupnick’s first clients. Contractor Toby Anderson helped bring the sculptural, organic architecture to life in the home designed as a showcase for the couple to display and talk about their art. Below: Along with Alan Hooper and Brad Innes, the Southern vernacular industrial style of College Town in Florida is transforming the area into an arts and entertainment district.
WILLIAM ELLIOT PHOTOGRAPHY / COURTESY OF KRUPNICK STUDIO ARCHITECTURE
entertainment within walking distance of Doak Campbell Stadium. The “cool factor” here includes multiple areas for restaurants and bars, wide brick sidewalks that are inviting to foot traffic, outdoor concert venues with canopies supported by steel struts, and a rooftop pool with a view of the stadium. College Town may seem stylistically removed from the meditative desert homes Krupnick builds in New Mexico, but his architecture-as-movie-set approach is the same. Venues and restaurants along the streets are separated from the sidewalk by railings, but not quite. There’s permeability in this design that can be seen in many of the architect’s projects. When Krupnick was adding these dividing rails to College Town, he was imagining a scenario in which a resident walking on a Friday night recognizes friends at one of the restaurants and decides to exit the sidewalk to join them. It seems natural and unplanned, but Krupnick designed it to feel that way. His technical drawings of College Town are peppered with similar scripted incidents. For efficiency’s sake, Krupnick often designs on his computer, but he says he reaches a different space artistically when he’s drawing by hand and listening to music. Scattered among hand-drawn plans are little notes he’s left himself, like “sitting on the steps waiting for a friend,” and “cool little pub.” The latter refers to part of the development that doesn’t have much visibility. Krupnick says he imagines someone turning this corner and stumbling across an almost-hidden bar. It’s this harmony between public and private life, between a structure and the person that inhabits it, that intrigues Krupnick. It’s one of the reasons he wanted to be an architect in the first place. “It’s not the love of buildings, it’s the love of community building, of public spaces, composition, and drawing,” he says. “Houses are little compositions creating more of a village feel with walkways and pathways. I sometimes like the space between the buildings more than I like the buildings.” R
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by salsa verde and romesco sauce; or a pan-roasted chicken breast stuffed with house-made chorizo, roasted sweet pepper, and cilantro alongside a fingerling potato stew. The wine list pairs especially well with the food, so don’t miss the opportunity to sample a new vintage. Desserts are inventive as well, ranging from decadent to refreshing—or a mix of both, such as ruby grapefruit granita with grapefruit-basil salad and poppy-seed cake, or frozen passion fruit–white chocolate mousse in a blueberry-ginger port glaze. Outside the elegant dining room are a flower-filled patio and a smaller garden patio for private parties. All private dining rooms can be reserved for groups of 10 to 200 people, with special tasting menus available.
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Izanami A Zenlike escape in the Sangre de Cristo foothills
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ince 1981, people have been beating a path to Ten Thousand Waves to soak in the restorative onsen thermal baths. Nestled among 20 acres of juniper and pinõn near the base of the Sangre de Cristos, ten minutes from Santa Fe, the compound’s Japanese-inspired architecture makes for a serene setting. But until recently, visitors emerging flushed and famished from the rejuvenating waters had to drive downtown to find a meal. That changed when Izanami opened in 2013, putting spa-goers a stone’s throw from the kitchen—and no one bats an eye at those dining in robes.
With a new head and sous chef recruited from Portland to take the helm at Izanami, the menu’s expanding, and what doesn’t arrive locally sourced from farmers, the cooks have started growing themselves, both on-site and at a nearby community garden. Above: Soba noodles with duck breast and shimeji mushrooms.
Founding chef Kim Mueller of Galisteo Inn and Compound repute worked with Ten Thousand Waves designer Debra Fleig to create a small-plate menu you might find at a Tokyo izakaya—best described as a casual, after-work eatery with sake, brews, and other drinks paired with seasonal fare. The experience might be compared to Chinese dim sum or Spanish tapas, but in the case of Izanami, in a more meditative ambience. Just months after opening, Izanami became one of a handful of eateries nationally to be named a 2014 James Beard nominee for Best New Restaurant. Mueller eventually moved on, but
Izanami didn’t miss a beat in wrangling executive chef David Padberg from Portland—where he was in the formative stages of starting his own izakaya—along with David Gaspar de Alba, then head chef at Yakuza Lounge, a Portland Japanese pub, and now one of Santa Fe’s more qualified sous chefs. Padberg uses the Japanese phrase ichigo ichi to describe his first meeting with Ten Thousand Waves owner Duke Klauk. “It’s loosely translated as ‘one chance in a lifetime,’” Padberg says. “It was a major turning point for me and for Izanami.” Calling on his extensive culinary background, including eight years as executive chef at Portland’s renowned Park Kitchen, Padberg wasted little time in trendmagazineglobal.com 169
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Top: From the omakase menu, hamachi zukuri is yellowtail amberjack briefly cured and sliced like sashimi, served with orange, avocado, radish, and radish sprouts. Left: Pork belly kakuni with parsnip puree, apple, and celery kimchi. Above: Guests ordering the wagyu ishiyaki sear raw slices of marbled beef striploin on a 600-degree hot stone.
building on the foundation at Izanami and adding some meaningful changes. “Kim developed a terrific menu I could work with,” Padberg says. He added a bento box and ramen bowl to the lunch menu, both of which recently surpassed the locally sourced Waygu beef “nami burger” as the most popular menu items. Another popular plate is his wagyu beef ishiyaki, which allows diners to cook strips of wagyu beef on a prepared stone right at their tables. If it’s true that vegetables are the real test of a chef’s prowess, Padberg’s improvements to the Izanami pickle program are testament to his abilities. The menu now offers four categories of Japanese pickle: the sweet vinegar amasuzuke, salt-cured shiozuke, and fermented nukazuke, as well as misozuke and kasuzuke, which are cured in miso. Dozens of different brines are used to produce golden beets, greens, peaches, plums, and kimchee; guests can order a featured plate from this program or find its pickled accents in other entrees. Padberg has also introduced specific elements of Japenese presentation to the plating. Sasa no ha (salted bamboo leaves) are served under grilled meats and fish, while shikigami (decorative paper) is used to present fried foods, and soba noodles are served in zaru (bamboo baskets). Another modification has been to add the traditional omakase service to the dinner menu. Omakase is a culinary voyage with the chef at the wheel. Diners call out requests for ingredients or cooking methods, or warn of an allergy, then Padberg spins seasonal items into a multicourse excursion. This new service necessitated a kitchen remodel, moving the chef and expediters from the back of the house to the center of the action and close enough to interact with guests. Padberg also signed Izanami up for Santa Fe’s farm-to-restaurant program, locally sourcing as much of his produce as possible. Izanami serves local beef and pork, but Padberg and Gaspar de Alba have bigger plans. In addition to plots at the nearest community
Top: Kinpira gobo is burdock root and carrots braised in soy sauce and sesame oil. Left: Alexandra serves up a tasting flight from 40 different sakes, which range from complex nama, bright and fragrant ginjo, and clouded nigori to rich and bold junmai and elegant daiginjo.
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garden, they’re preparing a one-acre plot on the property for farming. The land has a working well, an irrigation system, and a large greenhouse, and during some seasons Padberg expects the majority of the produce to be sourced on-site, with the cultivation of a high-altitude adaptation of a dento yasai, a traditional Japanese vegetable garden. Drinks get special attention as well. “We have the best sake list between New York and San Francisco,” says Fleig, a certified sake sommelier. She points out that there are more than 50 varieties of artisanal sake on the menu, and it’s not the jet fuel you’re used to being served warm, which merely masks impurities. Imported from Japan and served cold, each sake has a unique flavor profile and food-pairing proclivity.
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There’s also a revolving list of ten imported Japanese microbrews that range from traditional lagers to variations on American standards like IPA. Along with fine wines, growerproduced champagne is another alternative, complementing the cuisine with variations of high acidity and pronounced yeast. And the sparkling water is free. The building, inspired by the minka Japanese farmhouse tradition, is the creation of master carpenter Jon Driscoll, an expert in Japanese woodworking. Driscoll helped transform Ten Thousand Waves in the ’90s, and he was called in to work closely with Fleig to oversee Izanami’s construction, a $3 million vision. Driscoll drew on his experience training as a Buddhist monk for five years
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Master carpenter Jon Driscoll, who trained as a Buddhist monk in Japan, modeled Izanami’s building after a Japanese minka farmhouse, with aesthetic elements true to the resort’s serene character.
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in Japan. His focus on natural form and simplicity expresses itself breezily through the design, which spares no luxury, yet interacts modestly with the mountain, as if it has always been there. Driscoll reclaimed stone from the foundation to build a stunning waterfall at the restaurant’s entrance, and within, the warm glow of chochin lanterns makes the expansive space seem more intimate. The
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exposed beams were brought in from Mora County and dried onsite. Guests may opt to dine at the bar, the community table, private booths, or the zashiki f loor seating with thin zabuton matresses. Now that the experience at Ten Thousand Waves includes a world-class izakaya, what’s next? A major project is in the works to expand Houses of the Moon, the compound’s ryokan (inn). Soon there’ll be no reason to ever leave. R
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Saveur Bistro
Saveur means taste, and the name says it all.
Clockwise from top: Bernie and Dee Rusanowski, owners of Saveur Bistro in Santa Fe; grilled red, green, and yellow peppers and summer squash from the buffet; lobster seafood crĂŞpe with asparagus, a garden salad, and a glass of Joseph Drouhin Macon-Villages.
204 Montezuma, Santa Fe, New Mexico | 505-989-4200 Open Mondays through Fridays, 7:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Breakfast, lunch, and catering.
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By Nancy Zimmerman | Photos by Doug Merriam
Going Gastro It’s pretty rare for food trends to originate in England—the very name conjures up visions of soggy chips, flavorless tinned meats, and staples like broccoli and bacon boiled beyond recognition. Well, it used to, anyway. In 1991, restaurateurs Michael Belben and David Eyre took over a historic London pub called The Eagle and transformed its traditional bar menu of pickled eggs and peanuts into an array of comforting dishes prepared with a fine-dining flair. They then
added a nice selection of wine and even a few rums, and thus gave birth to a new kind of bar-eatery: the gastropub. Merriam-Webster defines the term as “a pub, bar, or tavern that offers meals of high quality,” a concept that, unsurprisingly, caught on immediately. Gastropubs spread rapidly throughout England, then migrated to the United States around 2000, taking root all over the country and appealing to a vast market of diners who loved the neighborhood ambience of a pub
A new kind of eatery is catching on in Santa Fe, fusing the casual fun of a bar with the elegance of high-end food and appreciated the high-end comfort food delivered by accomplished chefs at typically reasonable prices. And now, at last, the gastropub trend has reached Santa Fe. Over the past couple of years, several local entrepreneurs have settled into a range of sites—a strip-mall storefront, an industrial warehouse, a historic adobe—to offer affordable fine dining in a relaxed setting. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for, whether we knew it or not. > trendmagazineglobal.com 177
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The Loyal Hound
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wners Renee Fox and Dave “Bert” Readyhough, longtime veterans of the restaurant business, had always lamented the fact that they just couldn’t find the kind of food they liked at prices they could afford. The gastropub concept appealed to them because it allowed them to serve up universally loved comfort food in a friendly environment, at prices that wouldn’t break the bank. So, after ten years in Santa Fe, they quit their jobs and in 2014 opened their own place, the Loyal Hound, in the Plaza del Sol shopping center on St. Michael’s Drive. “It’s not low-calorie, of course,” says Fox, the chef, of such fare as pork and waffles with green-chile coleslaw or braised bison short-rib nachos, “but it’s healthy because we use high-quality ingredients, locally sourced and organic whenever possible. We bake all of our own bread except for the hamburger buns, which come from Fano Bakery, and pretty much everything is made from scratch, including the sauces, dressings, and desserts.” Menu favorites include the Wil-burger—local grass-fed beef topped with Talleggio cheese and a compote of house-cured bacon, cherry, and red onion—and fish and chips made with fish that’s flown in fresh daily rather than frozen. “Using fresh fish really makes a difference in the texture,” says Fox. “Some people come here just for the fish and chips. If you check our freezer, you’ll see that it’s almost empty. Even simple, familiar foods can taste special if the ingredients are fresh.” The libations menu, curated by Readyhough, includes a broad selection of craft beers as well as a nicely balanced wine list and a few artisanal ciders. “The quality of the drinks
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Fish tacos at the Loyal Hound. Opposite: Owners Renee Fox and Dave Readyhough (top) enjoy the casual atmosphere as much as their patrons (bottom).
should match the food,” he says. “We don’t offer any mass-produced products, and we serve eclectic wines that you won’t see stacked up in crates at Sam’s Club. I’ve visited all the vineyards, and I know the vintners personally.” He also points out that the Hound’s wine by the glass is fresher than at most bars, never oxidized, because it’s offered on tap. The same close attention paid to the food and drink is also evident in the decor, which Fox and Readyhough transformed from its previous plastic-andvinyl incarnation as the Hidden Chicken into a sleek but warmly inviting series of rooms decked out in earthy wood tones, with an outdoor seating area being readied for the summer months. You’ll rub elbows here with a mixed clientele— the age groups vary with the day of the week and time of day—but on a typical night you might find a group of young people celebrating a birthday, an earnest middle-aged couple on a first date, some neighborhood regulars enjoying one of the monthly Monday night supper club dinners, and a pair of seniors at the bar knocking back a few Bosque IPAs. From the beginning patrons have commented on the photo of Lola, the couple’s eponymous loyal hound, adorning a wall near the door, and they spontaneously began bringing in framed shots of their own dogs to hang. “It’s like a celebrity wall, only with dogs,” laughs Readyhough. 730 St. Michael’s Drive, Santa Fe, 505-471-0440; loyalhoundpub.com trendmagazineglobal.com 179
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Fire and Hops
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f you belly up to the bar at Josh Johns and Joel Coleman’s Guadalupe District gastropub, Fire and Hops, you might find yourself f lanked by a couple in their 70s on one side and a tattooed 20-something on the other. The crowd here is a genial mix of young and old, hip and nerdy, and the 108-year-old adobe residence that houses the pub makes for a cozy, companionable venue to drop by for a drink and a nosh. And what a nosh it will be. Coleman, the pub’s chef, has a fine-dining resume that includes Mauka and Koi in Santa Fe as well as stints in the Bay Area, Southeast Asia, and Hawaii, where the Santa Fe native was raised. “Not everyone will go out to a fine-dining place, but everyone goes to a pub,” says Coleman of his decision to try his hand at a more casual kind of establishment. He brings his high-end, Asian-influenced sensibilities to bear in a seasonally changing menu that reinterprets comfort food with dishes like beerbraised pork belly with sweet and sour cabbage and spicy mustard, and Chiang Mai sausage with Thai black rice, green papaya, and red curry. 180 TREND Summer 2015
Clockwise from top left: Co-owner Josh Johns is often at the bar, pulling pints and chatting with guests. Fish “spontanée,” a daily special, varies according to what’s fresh. The charcuterie plate complements the broad selection of brews, wines, and ciders.
Non-Asian offerings include poutine with green chile, cheese curds, and bacon; fried mac ’n’ cheese; and an arugula salad with roasted beets, apple, radish, and maple vinaigrette. “Everything’s made in-house,” says Coleman, who visits the Farmers Market weekly for provisions and inspiration and stresses his preference for sustainable products. “What I’m proudest of is the quality of the ingredients we use. It’s as high as in any fine-dining places, but we can offer the food at affordable prices by getting creative with those ingredients.” The large and small plates, along with a number of atypical bar snacks—crispy Brussels sprouts, a pickle plate, and housemade pork rinds, anyone?—pair well with the thoughtful wine list and extensive roster of brews. “We rotate 11 taps of beer, with five or six of them always local,” says Johns, who launched Santa Fe Hard Cider before partnering with Coleman. “We also have a wide-ranging list of bottled brews, including a number of hard ciders.” Patrons can sit at the bar or settle into one of the comfy dining rooms, which are decorated with peyote-inspired Huichol embroidery and beadwork and paintings by local artist Rob Rael. The beer garden sees a lot of action in the warmer months—it’s kind of like enjoying a brew in a friend’s backyard. 222 North Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, 505-954-1635, fireandhopsgastropub.com trendmagazineglobal.com 181
Mrs. J, Welcoming You Home for 50 Years!
Florence Jaramillo, Owner of Rancho de Chimayó Restaurante
A Timeless Tradition! 1965 - 2015 300 Santa Fe County Rd. 98 Chimayó, New Mexico 505.984.2100 ranchodechimayo.com
BITE & BUZZ
Duel Belgian-Style Brewery & Taproom
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ot just a pub but an actual brewery, Duel is also a neighborhood hangout and an arts and entertainment venue. It’s housed in a former warehouse in the industrial Rufina Street neighborhood, with a sign so unobtrusive you can easily miss it. Owner Trent Edwards, a professional photographer and painter, wanted to create a place for the community to gather to enjoy great beer, food, and conversation. “I wanted to appeal to the locals,” says Edwards, “and to present a creative, aesthetically pleasing atmosphere. Taverns historically were where ideas were put out there and debated, and I like the idea of providing a place for lively discussion.” The decor, a kind of industrial-chic-meets-Old World-charm, embraces a primarily urban loft kind of look, but with an antique wooden credenza behind the bar that seems entirely appropriate for a place that pushes Belgian brews. Why Belgian? “I’m an Old World kind of guy,” says Edwards, “and it’s the kind of beer I like to drink. It’s not as hoppy as other beers, so it’s less bitter. Belgian beer has complexity, subtleties, nuance, and depth, so that’s what I went with.” He also embraced Belgium’s famous waffles, offering several variations on the menu. The Waffle Monte sandwich, a baguette stuffed with ham, Swiss cheese, beer mustard, and berry
Duel’s Duchamp chicken salad. Left: Patrons of all ages flock to the pub to enjoy live music with their brews and snacks. trendmagazineglobal.com 183
BITE & BUZZ
Santa Fe's premier wild game
and seafood house, located in the historic plaza district. Looking for a change of pace from the same old same old in New Mexico, experience casual fine dining "big city" style featuring the freshest "flown
in daily" seafood and game.
The congenial atmosphere at Duel is as fun for the staff as for the customers.
preserves, is covered in batter and grilled, then served with syrup for dipping. The Waffle Cristo is filled with cheddar, Spanish cream cheese, berry preserve, and mayonnaise. Of course there’s a dessert version as well, but it’s not all waffles. Other favorites include the brewhouse plates, which offer various combinations of sausages, salami, aged cheeses, grilled and roasted peppers, and Duel’s own mustard. There are also dishes like beer-steamed mussels, a classic Reuben sandwich, and a variety of appetizers: house-made pretzels, green-chile hummus, and sardines served with herbed crostini and tapenade. “Unlike a lot of pubs, we don’t serve anything deep-fried,” says Edwards, “just wholesome, soulful dishes.” 5:00pm until close
5:00pm until close
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Duel’s events range from live music performances to special beer dinners to political meetings. Recently added are lifedrawing sessions on Sundays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and included in the fee is a Belgian waffle and beverage. Edwards’s choice to locate the pub in the Rufina Street neighborhood is turning out to be an inspired one, with Meow Wolf taking over the old Silva Lanes bowling alley to add to the increasingly creative ambiance of a neighborhood in transition. After all, it was at Duel that George R. R. Martin and the Meow Wolf pack first gathered to flesh out plans for their new project, The House of Eternal Return. 1228 Parkway Drive, Unit D, Santa Fe, 505-474-5301, duelbrewing.com R
museum hill cafÊ Situated on a beautiful hill between multiple world-class museums, Museum Hill Cafe’ offers diners a breathtaking hundred-mile view with a full spectrum of beer, wine and coffee drinks available. Owner Weldon reinterpreting culinary traditions, from Southwestern staples to the timehonored soup, salad and sandwich. Custom events also available year round
O pen 7 D ays a week L unch 11-3 w ine /B eer /L it tLe pLates On W ednesday -T hursday -F riday 710 Camino Lejo Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505 www.MuseumHillCafe.com 505-984-8900
Wine/Dine Advertisement
PHOTOS BY STEPHEN LANG
Santa Fe Bar & Grill
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ew restaurants can boast a unique cut of steak. Yet at the Santa Fe Bar & Grill, a charbroiled sirloin is cut to resemble a baseball, one of several unique selections on the menu at this creative Southwestern-style eatery. Here diners take a journey through classic favorites interpreted with locally inflected flavors to arrive at an original Santa Fe destination that has garnered loyal patronage from both locals and travelers. For Santa Fe native Rob Day, a former chef and now restaurant entrepreneur, the key to a restaurant’s success is to “find your niche.” For Day, that niche is “a dining experience that incorporates New Mexico cuisine, original staples of Southwest cooking, and Latin American flavors with an international dining experience.” From childhood, spent watching his mother work in the small restaurant she owned on Canyon Road, to stints as the dining-room manager at La Fonda Hotel, to years abroad apprenticing and cooking in Italy and Switzerland, Day has been immersed in the world of food. Upon his return to Santa Fe from Europe, he served as dining director for the original Rancho Encantado Resort in Tesuque, then opened his first restaurant on San Francisco Street in 1984. Following the success of its sister restaurant, the San Francisco Street Bar & Grill, just off the Plaza, Day introduced the Santa Fe Bar & Grill in 2002. Strategically located in DeVargas Center, this restaurant provides a northside mainstay for residents from Las Campanas, Tesuque, and Los Alamos. Visitors enjoy the convenient access and ample parking. After 30 years, the San Francisco Street Bar & Grill was sold in 2013. The restaurant interior is nothing short of epic. In contrast to the curving enclosures of traditional adobe architecture, the Santa Fe Bar & Grill features a grand dining room amplified by lofty ceilings. Day took his vision for the restaurant’s design to Santa
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Fe–based Plan A architect Stephen Samuelson. Together they’ve incorporated the expertise of local artists, from commissioned paintings celebrating essential culinary elements to hand-hewn metalwork framing the open kitchen and elegantly abstract, custom-designed lighting fixtures. An airy sense of space encourages visitors to take a breath, observe, exhale, then relax and enjoy the environment. This attention to detail extends directly to the very ingredients that grace the plate. Here, bistro classics are given a Southwestern spin, expressed by the addition of chile as well as sauces, dressings, and aiolis made from poblano and Chimayo red chiles, pine nuts, and Cotija cheese. For instance, the Cobb salad includes jicama and mild poblanos, while the baseball cut sirloin steak is adorned with poblano rajas, a succulent mild green chile precisely julienned for excellent flavor. The steak itself is locally sourced from Colorado’s Heritage Farms and Sterling Ranch. Beyond these favorites, the extensive menu features such familiar comfort foods as tortilla soup with roasted tomatoes, poblanos, corn, tortilla strips, and Cotija cheese—popularly considered Santa Fe’s best tortilla soup. And indeed, the Santa Fe Bar & Grill represents the best of both worlds: a touch of home with a uniquely Southwestern provenance. Open daily, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
187 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe 505.982.3033 | santafebargrill.com
CREDIT
One of Santa Fe Bar & Grill’s more popular entrÊes is the char-broiled baseball cut sirloin with Poblano pepper rajas and mushroom butter. Bottom: the Santa Fe burger, baseball cut sirloin, prawn salad & northwest salmon. Opposite Top: Owner Rob Day. Opposite Bottom: Santa Fe Bar & Grill patio.
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Rory Wagner (1950 • 2010) Museum Collection
Messiah, 72 X 62 Inches, Acrylic on Linen Canvas, 1992.
The Messiah was revered as a religious leader among his Sioux tribe.
RoryWagner.com
Michael Wigley Galleries, Ltd. 1101 Paseo De Peralta • Santa Fe, NM 87501 • 505-984-8986 MichaelWigleyGalleries.com • LaurenceSisson.com • The Estate Of Eric Sloane
OUT OF THE BOX
Simon DeDeo, former Omidyar Fellow and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, looks at how natural and manmade systems compute information.
By Bill Rodgers | Portraits by Alex Traube
Complex Thinking
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othing exists in isolation. Complexity theory understands all systems, natural and otherwise, as ever-shifting wholes of many parts engaged in changing relationships. It’s a wildly creative process happening spontaneously all around us. Complexity scientists use a combination of mathematics and computer simulation in an attempt to understand the unpredictability of various systems. So could they anticipate what will happen in the American West, say, if a drought continues for many years? The trouble is that one small change in input can have dramatic results. Thirty years ago, this intriguing theory caught the attention of a group of Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers, and the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) was born. Today, the SFI team studies complex adaptive systems in order
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to better understand the myriad ways they interact and adapt. Each scientist approaches the subject of sustainability differently, but to most, it’s less about harmony with nature than it is about understanding why systems continue or abruptly end. While one scientist looks at cities to map economic links, social demographics, and energy consumption, another takes a webbed approach to analyzing the modern power grid or the collapse of an ancient civilization. But the goal’s the same: to understand systems in a more holistic way. SFI isn’t a think tank or policy advocate, and doesn’t offer solutions to the problems it investigates, but the research that emerges could help societies better understand what it takes to keep themselves running. For ecologist Jennifer Dunne, SFI’s vice president of science, sustainability means the ecosystem’s ability to maintain its
COURTES Y OF SANTA FE INSTITUTE
It’s said that nature abhors a vacuum; as it turns out, a group of complex systems scientists in Santa Fe do, too
Jennifer Dunne, vice president of science at SFI, studies the patterns and principles of ecological networks with computational modeling.
richness through change. Dunne studies food webs, and by using computational models and network theories (think Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon), she’s able to paint a picture of how ecosystems adapt to new dynamics, such as the introduction of humans. In the case of Sanak, an island off the coast of Alaska, she learned that hunter-gatherer societies first introduced to the region 6,000 years ago were linked to every species on the food chain without detriment through a tactic called prey-switching. “Humans were poised to have really big impacts on that system, potentially negative ones,” she says. “However, over the course of 6,000 years, there’s no evidence of long-term extinctions.” She believes the systems in Sanak thrived because the hunter-gatherers would consume whatever species were most available, like a food-chain buffet. By switching prey, humans
allowed less populous species to recuperate and minimized their own impact. Dunne is now studying a group of islands in Polynesia that were settled by humans about 1,000 years ago. Some settlers were hunter-gatherers, others brought species to farm, and a number of them traded. Some of the groups thrived while others didn’t, and Dunne wants to know why. “If we’re talking about sustainability with humans and the islands, ideally we’d like to be able to say something about how ‘if you do this, it’s going to have this kind of impact.’ But that’s a huge challenge,” she says. Dunne differentiates her work from environmentalism. SFI isn’t a sustainability center, she says, but what she can offer is a grounded scientific foundation that draws from social, computational, and ecological research. “That’s the kind of approach we trendmagazineglobal.com 191
OUT OF THE BOX
Jeremy Sabloff, president of SFI since 2009, reminds us that a system changes every time we interact with it. His studies include urbanism and ancient Mayan civilization.
COURTESY OF SANTA FE INSTITUTE
Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows gather at SFI for the annual complex-systems summer school.
need if we’re going to grapple with some of these sustainability issues,” she says. Dunne’s interested in developing new network research methods, such as an increasingly accurate computer simulation of a food web that maps countless synergistic interactions in the flow of energy within an ecological network. This could be of interest to ambitious cities like Seattle, where an interdepartmental food action plan has made strides bringing local, sustainably grown food to all its residents. Archaeologist and SFI president Jeremy Sabloff is also interested in how ancient cultures responded to shifting systems. He teamed up with B.L. Turner II, the Gilbert F. White professor of environment and society at Arizona State University, to look at population decline in major Mayan cities in the Yucatán Peninsula during the eighth and ninth centuries. People often place the blame for this depopulation on a drought, but Sabloff says that’s an oversimplification. “What’s emerged in recent decades is a complex interplay of factors,” he says. “These include increased population, significant ecological changes as more and more land was put under cultivation to feed the growing population, and all kinds of intercity warfare and conflict. Then, as these are coming to a head, you have a significant drought.” In an attempt to feed their expanding population, the Maya had been clearing old-growth forests, which reduced the soil’s moisture and lowered the phosphorous content, in order to farm. Depopulation followed as people left in search of a more hospitable settlement. “You assume that if you do your due diligence, that if you do A you’ll get result B,” Sabloff says. “That might be true if the system remains static, but as soon as you do A the system changes. Even with all of your homework that doesn’t mean that B follows. It may be C, which is worse rather than better.” His takeaway is that one shouldn’t assume a state of equilibrium, and
he’s inclined to prepare for the unexpected. It’s the hope that places like California—where a sustainability alliance has achieved aggressive targets for energy efficiency, climate action, and smart growth—will avoid the fate of the Mayans, however, and some researchers at SFI do try to anticipate how sustainability issues may play out. Physicist Luis Bettencourt, a professor of complex systems, analyzes human development in cities. He’s interested in urban data from a system that’s built on billions of interactions. He says cities have the ability to improve people’s lives without degrading the environment through improved building practices, energy use, and transportation systems. “We haven’t really taken the next step,” he says, noting that we still get most of our energy from the ground by drilling. But Bettencourt’s also responsible for data that suggest urban areas are prime candidates for adaptability. When he teamed up with José Lobo, an economist at Arizona State University, and Dresden University of Technology professors to write a paper on how cities vary in personality according to size, they found that in any city, individuals become more economically productive as the population grows. If a city doubles in size, everyone becomes 15 percent more productive on average. The study also found that within that city, major innovation cycles must be generated at an accelerating rate in order to avoid stagnation or collapse. Paul Hines, associate professor of engineering, computer science, and complex systems at the University of Vermont, is interested in innovation cycles. He’s part of a group researching power grids at SFI and was cohost of the recent conference titled “Reinventing the Grid: Designing Resilient, Adaptive, and Creative Power Structures,” which explored how a decentralized infrastructure could transform future power systems. Hines says sustainability is tough to define. “My preference is trendmagazineglobal.com 193
OUT OF THE BOX
Physicist Luis Bettencourt analyzes urban data and indicates that cities could be hotspots for sustainability innovation.
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OUT OF THE BOX
to think about environmental impact,” he says. “When the environmental impacts are high, we run out of water, climate, and clean air, which is obviously bad. The transition to renewables, which was the underlying assumption for our workshop, is an effort to reduce environmental impacts from the grid.” But, as Sabloff has pointed out, changing the system may present unforeseen consequences. The transition needs to be stable, or new systems could falter. Hines agrees, and says his group is looking at what’s most reliable and cost-effective when it comes to remapping the future of energy sourcing and distribution. Bettencourt warns that it’s important to be Socratic about what we don’t know as we add to the greater body of knowledge. But he’s still excited by the idea that brought him to the study of cities in the first place. “I’m interested in that process [by which] we, as intelligent beings—but, yes, with limits—can create things much beyond what we can do individually,” he says. Of course, SFI is for scientists. The rest is up to us. R
SFI lectures are free and open to the public. The season’s highlights include “Understanding Genius: The Neuroscience of Extraordinary Creativity” on July 15 and “Food Webs: A Guide to Our Future,” Jennifer Dunne’s two-day community event starting September 15. The Institute offers a short course on complexity, held this year in Santa Fe August 25–27, as well as an application-based camp for high school students each summer. For MOOC enthusiasts, the next Introduction to Complexity course starts in September and is available at complexityexplorer.org.
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Santa Fe Spirits
Tour our Distillery See where we make our award-winning spirits from local ingredients! Learn about craft liquor, stay for yummy cocktails. We’re only 15 minutes from downtown.
We’re not far, WE’RE FUN
Distillery: 7505 Mallard Way, Santa Fe, 87507 Off Airport and 599 behind Tractor Supply
Downtown: 308 read street, Santa Fe, 87501 Just east of Tomasita’s near the Railyard
www.SantaFeSpirits.com
It’s a grand Santa Fe tradition! YOUTH SHELTERS AND FAMILY SERVICES CORDIALLY INVITES YOU TO ATTEND THE 4TH ANNUAL
Boots, Bolos & Boogie Ball Thursday, August 27, 2015 At the Eldorado Hotel, Santa Fe (309 West San Francisco)
v
Featuring American Pop Legend 5:30 reception and silent auction with hosted wine, beer, appetizers and sushi bars. 6:45 dinner followed by an exciting live auction and concert by Tommy Roe to boogie the night away!
MAKE YOUR RESERVATIONS TODAY
Call Youth Shelters and Family Services at (505) 983-0586 and ask for Dan Bailey.
TOMMY ROE
Performing His Greatest Hits – Sheila, Dizzy, Jam Up and Jelly Tight and many more!
Our Mission for Over 35 Years: To deliver life changing and life saving services to at-risk, homeless, runaway and in-crisis youth by providing shelter and addressing health, safety, education and workforce opportunities so that they may lead independent and meaningful lives. Please visit our website for additional information about our many programs and services at www.youthshelters.org
A PREMIER BENEFIT TO SUPPORT YOUTH HOMELESSNESS IN SANTA FE
In 1930 Ernest Thompson Seton bought 2500 acres of land outside of Santa Fe. In purchasing this land Seton sought to create a context where humans and wildness and plants and soil interacted in the landscape. Seton’s dream of wildness was not a pastoral fantasy. It was grounded in reality and served by his lifetime of learning in and from nature. In 2004 The Academy for the Love of Learning acquired Seton’s home and his last 86 acres. The Academy’s work on this land began with the restoration of a property that had become wounded and imbalanced. This fragile place had become bereft and separate from its own regenerative capacity, well-being, and community. We had to clear it, we had to see it, and we had to give it the space to become itself. Then and only then could we grow buildings, cultivate learning landscapes, and create activities and programs. The Academy’s work on this ground continues with a stewardship philosophy that encompasses the way we use the space and place buildings on the land. Our buildings incorporate state-of-the-art water conservation practices and green energy processes. Adjacent to every structure we have created swales that restore the natural flora and wildlife corridors to welcome back the birds, snakes, rabbits, lizards, and other community creatures, making this not just a landscape that we learn in but a landscape we learn from. It is a living landscape being cultivated and stewarded in a way that utilizes the Academy’s learning practice. We understand what Seton was telling us – that the ground we stand on matters. That restoring this land to harmony is the foundation of any learning philosophy. We tend to the ground we stand on so it can hold all that can happen here. This landscape is capable of promoting reflection and provoking disorientation. This makes it a perfect learning lab for how to live and transform in harmony. The mission of the Academy for the Love of Learning is to awaken, enliven, nurture, and sustain the natural love of learning in people of all ages. To achieve our mission, the Academy has developed transformative curricula and methodologies – our learning field inquiry approach – offered through our integrated set of programs, conferences, organizational practices and research. Photo Credit: Kate Russell
The Academy hosts free monthly Evenings of Exploration and ongoing programs include Leading by Being, Teacher Renewal, El Otro Lado in the Schools and Lifesongs. The intent of our work is to help stimulate and support the rebirth and renewal of learning and education in America.
® www.aloveoflearning.org
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505.995.1860
ART MATTERS
BY SETH BIDERMAN | PHOTOS BY BYRON FLESHER AND CHRISTINA PROCTER
Creativity has become an engine of Santa Fe’s economy. Can it reach the public schools?
It’s been more than ten years since Richard Florida announced the rise of a powerful new social class: artists, designers, writers, and others who make money creating ideas. The economist’s best-selling book, The Rise of the Creative Class, didn’t mince words: CEOs and city leaders must meet the needs of these Americans or “wither and die.” Santa Fe, which has long had more than its share of artists and scientists, is paying attention. From subsidized cocktail mixers to the attempted urbanization of its Railyard District, the city is hustling to attract and retain creators. But what about the schools? Creative Class members do get around to creating offspring sooner or later, and many want their kids in classrooms as vibrant and creative as their own workplaces. Like public school systems around the nation, Santa Fe’s has been known as a bastion of bureaucracy. But has it begun to adapt to the Age of Creativity?
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t’s not surprising that Edie Tsong had qualms about sending her daughter to public school. A writer and artist, she’s built her life around creativity. As part of the Cut+Paste society, a creative women’s collective, she’s posted giant poems on public windows across town, and this fall she’ll release
love letters to the world via bullhorn. Having attended public schools in Pennsylvania, she wondered how her daughter, Che Kuzov-Tsong, would respond. “It’s just that they’re so big,” she says. “They need so many rules, so much structure. Individual expression can get lost.” Her doubts increased when she began
researching Santa Fe Public Schools (SFPS) and learned about the abysmal national ranking, 40 percent dropout rate, and the overworked, poorly paid teachers and short-lived superintendents. But other parents told her about the district’s bright spots, including Wood Gormley in the historic South Capitol area. Tsong wasn’t impressed with the school’s high test scores (or the fact that realtors advertise it when selling nearby houses). What sold her were descriptions of an engaged parent body, experienced teaching staff, and warm environment. Teaching Artist Gasali Adeyemo gives workshops on the traditional tie-dyeing techniques he mastered in his home country of Nigera. Here he works with students at the bilingual Cesar Chavez Elementary School, part of the ARTSmart program, which brings artists to public schools. Opposite: Rebekah Duda raises her hand during a midday meeting at the Homeschool Classroom. trendmagazineglobal.com 199
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Che Kuzov-Tsong and her mother, Edie Tsong, at home. Right: The Duda family, from left: Robyn, Joseph, Myriah, and Rebekah, along with their pets.
Rather than brave the district’s lottery transfer process, she and Che moved into a one-bedroom rental a few blocks from the school and hoped for the best. It’s four years later, and so far so good. Che’s grown into a gregarious third grader who loves her teachers, reads above grade level, and gets along well with her classmates. “Wood Gormley’s been a good place for Che,” Tsong says. “The art teaching is excellent, and there are some impressive community-building events. Even with all the rules, it really is a caring environment.” 200 TREND Summer 2015
But when asked how the school fosters creative expression, Tsong measures her words. “Che’s teachers do what they can,” she says. “They’re good about adding individual touches. But the standardized curriculum and testing are stifling.” She pauses. “It’s complicated. People think the answer is more arts classes, and of course it’s great to have more. But that’s not what the schools need. It’s deeper than that—it’s about supporting teachers to bring their creativity into the classroom more, no matter what subject they’re teaching. That’s what’s getting lost.”
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harles Gamble couldn’t agree more. He’s manager of a program based out of the Santa Fe Opera called ALTO (Active Learning Through Opera), which promotes an arts-integration approach to teaching that takes the arts out of the elective classes and infuses them into core subjects. “Students and teachers use the arts to enter into a deep learning process with reflection and revision, critique and collaboration,” he explains. “The art form becomes the primary approach to learning—bread and butter instead of icing.” Based on methodologies out of the
recently adopted an entire school, Nava Elementary, and is training everyone in the building on how to appreciate and relate to the arts on a deeper level. Other programs inspiring creativity in Santa Fe include the Academy for the Love of Learning’s El Otro Lado in the Schools, which pairs community artists with classroom teachers in a yearlong artistic exploration of self and identity, and Youth Media Project, which transforms teenagers into powerful storytellers and radio show producers. Organizations outside the art world have joined in, too: the Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) Foundation, for example, has an extensive professional development program that’s transforming textbook science lessons across Santa Fe into openended, material-rich discovery sessions. Each of these programs—and at least a half dozen others—brings bursts of creativity. But what happens when the
programs end? Often, teachers report that their approach changes, as in the case of Maria del Mar Martinez, who after working with an El Otro Lado teaching artist said she began to “communicate in a different way with her students” and connect with them more. Greeley tells of teachers using the arts to reach students they’d never reached before, or interrupting a math lesson to listen to a sudden thunderstorm outside and write a poem. But keeping the creativity alive is not always easy. “Teachers are inspired by our workshops and get the methodology,” says Gamble, “but many get dragged back into more traditional ‘sit and get’ teaching when our work is over. It’s not because they aren’t passionate or creative or whipsmart. But trying something new can be risky, with all the high-stakes testing and strict teacher evaluations. It’s a tricky educational climate right now.”
CREDIT
Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., ALTO is just one program nudging local schools into the Age of Creativity. Meanwhile, the nonprofit Partners in Education facilitates ArtWorks, a program that’s modeled on the Lincoln Center Institute for Aesthetic Education in New York and guides classes through units that integrate arts exploration. “We arrange for the kids to visit a museum or watch a performance,” explains Ruthanne Greeley, director, “but it’s not a one-shot deal. On either side of the visit, a trained teaching artist spends time with the teacher and students as they create their own art. They learn self-esteem, observation skills, and selfexpression. They take ownership of their own learning.” Greeley’s program reaches 90 teachers and 1,800 students a year—more than ten percent of the 14,000 students in SFPS. Even more remarkable is that ArtWorks
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ART MATTERS
From left: Ashley Hernandez and her parents, Jose and Maria, and brothers Michael and Eduardo. Although they’ve had to advocate for their children, the Hernandezes are impressed with the education they’ve ultimately received in Santa Fe. Right: Michael Hernandez at a Saturday NDI rehearsal.
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or parents Joseph and Robin Duda, the climate’s more than “tricky.” It’s intolerable. “We’ve found we have a different value system than the district,” Robin says. “We believe a school should nurture individual expression and keep children’s love of learning alive. I know plenty of teachers and principals believe the same. But the district forces them to focus on other things.” Doubts about SFPS began to surface after their daughter Myriah’s first day of first grade at their neighborhood elementary school. “She came in and said, ‘They’re crazy! They make us eat at a certain time, don’t let us get up when we want to walk around.’” Joseph laughs. “What could I say?” It’s not that Joseph and Robin were naïve about what happens in schools— both attended highly structured schools
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as children. But that was back east. Here in Santa Fe, where the Dudas found fertile ground for the innovative work they do coaching people toward more holistic lifestyles, they’d hoped the city’s schools would focus on the whole child, not just academic skills. It didn’t happen. They watched as Myriahs’ recesses kept getting shorter and shorter and her projects more intense and stressful, eating away weekends without providing any deep learning. “I don’t put it on the teachers,” Robin says. “They’re trying to do their best. But there’s this incredible pressure to get through so much material.” Myriah, now 14, has found a better environment at the New Mexico School for the Arts (NMSA), which, as a state-chartered school, is still public, but outside the district purview. The challenging academic
material comes at a manageable pace, and she spends her afternoons immersed in what she loves most: theater. But the district school was an even worse match for her sister Rebekah, who began crying every morning before school. Though they were not keen on the idea of private school, when Robin and Joseph overheard a couple families talking about the Homeschool Classroom, an all-ages, come-when-you-like program run by former public school teacher Rebecca Cohen, they decided to give it a try. Rebekah immediately took to the smaller, less restrictive setting. They’ve never seen her happier or more engaged. “I can turn a cartwheel if I need to, which actually helps me focus,” Rebekah says. “It’s like my old school was a box, and this one is a circle.”
Madrid in town gallery/home for sale by owner
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f course, not all Santa Feans are life coaches or community artists. Jose and Maria Hernandez, who immigrated to Santa Fe from Mexico City more than 20 years ago, own and operate their American Green Cleaning business. With three children, they have extensive experience with public schools, and although they speak with gratitude, they admit it’s been a mixed bag. On the positive side, their eldest son, Eduardo, loved Agua Fria Elementary School (now El Camino Real Academy) and went on to become a two-sport varsity athlete and honors student at Santa Fe High School. He’s now 20, taking college courses, and is an assistant baseball coach at a charter school. Less positive was the experience of their middle son, Michael. When he started to react negatively to his preschool trendmagazineglobal.com 203
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program—the same one that had served Eduardo well—Jose and Maria set up a meeting with the teachers and suddenly found themselves on the defensive. “As we say in Spanish, they ‘flipped the tortilla’ on us,” Jose says. “They made us feel like it was our fault, that we weren’t raising Michael right.” They consulted with a psychiatrist, who dropped by the school for a visit and informed them it was not their fault—the school was not offering a proper environment for their son. From that day forward, the Hernandezes grew more vigilant. They recently transferred Michael, now 13, into a smaller magnet school, and they’re considering doing the same for their youngest, Ashley, who’s 11. The Hernandezes are quick to praise the many inspiring teachers that made differences in their children’s lives. They’re delighted with Michael’s new school. But when asked where their kids really shine, they point to NDI, a nonprofit dance program one might not
expect from a family with two baseballloving boys. “NDI is amazing,” Jose says. “Those dance classes have taught my kids so much—hard work, discipline, and confidence. I watch them go in front of those huge audiences and perform. I know if they can do that, they can do anything.” NDI New Mexico is a powerhouse of creativity in Santa Fe and statewide. Its school-based courses reach 9,000 kids a year, from tiny rural towns to busy Albuquerque neighborhoods, and another thousand or so attend courses in its impressive studio and performance space, the Dance Barns. Executive director Russell Baker explains that although NDI stands for National Dance Institute, the dance education program launched by Jacques d’Amboise in New York in the 1970s now goes by just NDI. “We’re more locally focused than ‘national’, and ‘dance’ makes people think we’re just about ballet. And
‘institute’—well, that just sounds kind of stuffy.” What NDI is really up to, Baker says, is bringing joy to schools and community, and using creative movement to help kids succeed. To be sure, NDI works with arabesques and tempo and puts on spectacular shows, but driving every class are the program’s four core values: work hard, do your best, never give up, and be healthy. “We tell kids if you do those four things, whatever situation you’re in, you’ll succeed.” Like other creative programs, NDI has met the challenge of today’s test-heavy schools by documenting how its courses help build academic skills. Younger children dancing in twos and threes organically grasp the mathematical concept of pattern; older dancers working on Romeo and Juliet pick up measurable language arts skills. NDI works hard to help parents and principals understand these benefits—which may explain why the program has been so broadly embraced by parents in and out of the Creative Class.
Left: Rio del Sol Maldonado, grade four, looks up from a math challenge at Rebecca Cohen’s Homeschool Classroom, where a small-group setting creates a cohesive environment. Center: Michael Hernandez (left) watches as his peers leap for their instructor Russell Banks at NDI. Right: Santa Fe Youth Opera performance.
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Beyond that, though, is how the place feels. Late afternoons and any Saturday, the Dance Barns are alive with activity. Think backstage Broadway. Music trickles out from behind closed doors. Kids of all ages—and from every corner of town— dash into the building with purpose, as disciplined as they are wild with imagination and play. It’s a vision of what schools could look like if our communities do indeed slough off the Age of Organization (the ringing bells, rows of desks, latest testing) and turn toward the Age of Creativity. Perhaps in ten years there will be campuses for ArtWorks and ALTO and LANL’s science inquiry, as well. Or maybe existing school buildings will be repurposed the way the Creative Class has repurposed dull office spaces into dynamic centers for invention. Such a transformation of our classrooms seems like something the Creative Class could throw its weight behind. And if Richard Florida’s right, they tend to get their way. R
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BY | PHOTOS BY ANTIQUES, HOME FURNISHINGS, RUGS & ACCENTS Casa Nova casanovagallery.com 505-983-8558........................................24–25 David Naylor Interiors davidnaylorinteriors.com 505-988-3170 .............................................40 Exteriors Santa Fe exteriorsshowroom.com 505-930-5523................................................9 House of Ancestors houseofancestorsantiques.com 505-490-2653 ...........................................145 Mediterránia mediterraniaantiques.com 505-989-7948 .............................................12 Molecule moleculedesign.net 505-989-9806 ...........................................142 Reside Home howyoureside.com 505-780-5658 .............................................16 The Raven Fine Consignments recollectionssantafe.com 505-988-4775 ...........................................144 Violante & Rochford Interiors vrinteriors.com 505-983-3912 ............................................2-3
ARCHITECTS, DESIGNERS & LANDSCAPE COMPANIES Archaeo Architects archaeoarchitects.com 505-820-7200..............................................23 Clemens and Associates clemensandassociates.com 505-982-4005 .............................................30 David Naylor Interiors davidnaylorinteriors.com 505-988-3170 .............................................40 Marc Coan Designs marccoandesigns.com 505-837-8888 .............................................46 Samuel Design Group samueldesigngroup.com 505-820-0239 ............................................4-5 Sofia Marquez Architecture architectsoutwest.com 505-603-7227.........................................42-43
ARTISTS & GALLERIES Barbara Meikle Fine Art meiklefineart.com 505-992-0400..............................................78 Casweck Galleries casweckgalleries.com 505-988-2966.........................................80-81 Charles Gurd Gallery charlescgurd.com 505-995-9677.........................................64-65 Christopher Thomson christopherthomsonironworks.com 505-470-3140 .............................................39 Elmore Gurd Gallery elmoregurdgallery.com 505-995-9677..............................................30 Ellsworth Gallery ellsworthgallery.com 505-989-7900..............................................57 Elodie Holmes Liquid Light Glass liquidlightglass.com 505-820-2222............................................143 Encaustic Art Institute eainm.com 505-989-3283..............................................56 Gerald Peters Gallery gpgallery.com 505-954-5700................................................1
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ADVERTISERS
GF Contemporary gfcontemporary.com 505-983-3707..............................................79
Santa Fe by Design santafebydesign.com 505-988-4111 ...................................................21
Nidah Spa Santa Fe nidahspasantafe.com 505-995-4535..................................................160
Glenn Green Galleries glenngreen.com 505-820-0008.....................Inside Front Cover
Statements in Tile, Lighting, Kitchen, Flooring statementsinsantafe.com 505-988-4440 ...................................................35
PHOTOGRAPHY
GVG Contemporary gvgcontemporary.com 505-982-1494.........................................76-77
Woods Design Builders woodsbuilders.com 505-988-2413 ...................................................13
Hunter Kirkland Contemporary hunterkirklandcontemporary.com 505-984-2111........................................14, 67
CITIES, EVENTS, MUSEUMS & EDUCATION
Century Bank mycenturybank.com 844-600-5800 ...............................................146
Academy for the Love of Learning aloveoflearning.org 505-995-1860..................................................197
El Centro 505-715-1858................................................111
In Art Santa Fe inartsantafe.com 505-983-6537..............................................48 Joe Wade Fine Art joewadefineart.com 505-988-2727............................................123 Karan Ruhlen Gallery karanruhlen.com 505-820-0807..............................................71 Lacuna Galleries lacunagalleries.com 505-467-8424..............................................11 La Mesa of Santa Fe lamesaofsantafe.com 505-984-1688..............................................70
Art Santa Fe artsantafe.com 505-988-8883....................................................53 Boots, Bolos, and Boogie Ball youthshelters.org 505-983-0586..................................................196 Glorieta Day Camp glorieta.org 505-757-6161..................................................205 On the Map abqonthemap.com.............................................20 Project Protect: Art is a Social Tool nativechildrenssurvival.org..............................134
Peter Ogilvie Fine Art Nudes nudesbyogilvie.com 505-820-6001 .................................................189
REAL ESTATE, BANKS & AUTOMOBILES
Los Alamos National Bank lanb.com 505-449-5100, 505-662-5171 .......................203 Madrid Home for Sale by Owner 808-315-1817 ...............................................203 Pacheco Park officespacesantafe.com 505-989-8484, 505-780-1159.................158-159 Windsor Betts Art Brokerage House windsorbetts.com 505-820-1234.................................................110
RESTAURANTS, FOOD, DRINK & LODGING Arroyo Vino arroyovino.com 505-983-2100................................................179
McLarry Fine Art mclarryfineart.com 505-988-1161..............................................72
Santa Fe Concorso santafeconcorso.com 505-577-5548....................................................22
Michael Wigley Galleries michaelwigleygalleries.com 505-984-8986............................................188
Santa Fe Independent Film Festival santafeindependentfilmfestival.com 505-349-1414..................................................147
Niman Fine Art Gallery namingha.com 505-988-5091..............................................10
Santa Fe Wine & Chile Fiesta santafewineandchile.org 505-438-8060..................................................175
Patina Gallery patina-gallery.com 505-986-3432..............................................27
FASHION, JEWELRY & ACCESSORIES
Galisteo Bistro galisteobistro.com 505-982-3700................................................184
Art.i.fact artifactsantafe.com 505-982-5000 .................................................143
Garduños Restaurant and Cantina hotelabq.com 505-222-8766................................................160
Beeman Jewelry Design beemanjewelrydesign.com 505-726-9100 ...................................................17
Gruet Winery gruetwinery.com 505-821-0055 ...................................Back Cover
Dancing Ladies 505-988-1100....................................................74
Heritage Hotels and Resorts hhandr.com 877-901-7666................................................161
Roland Van Loon rolandvanloon.net 505-670-6234..............................................55 Ronnie Layden Fine Art ronnielaydenfineart.com 505-670-6793..............................................66 Selby Fleetwood selbyfleetwoodgallery.com 505-992-8877..............................................29 Wiford Gallery wifordgallery.com 505-982-2403............................................111
ART & DELIVERY SERVICES Art Handlers arthandlers.com 505-982-0228............................................143 Creative Couriers facebook.com/Creativebikecouriers 505-920-6370............................................146
DC Knits dcknits.com 505-471-3640 .................................................122 Eidos Contemporary Jewelry eidosjewelry.com 505-992-0020 ...................................................41 John Rippel U.S.A. johnrippel.com 505-986-9115 ...................................................31 Karen Melfi karenmelficollection.com 505-982-3032....................................................75
BUILDERS, LIGHTING, FIXTURES & MATERIALS
Malouf maloufontheplaza.com 505-983-9241 ..................................................37
Allbright & Lockwood allbrightlockwood.com 505-986-1715 .............................................19
Pinkoyote pinkoyote.com 505-983-3030...................208, Inside Back Cover
D Maahs Construction (DMC) dmaahsconstruction.com 505-992-8382 ....................................156-157
Rockaway Opals rockawayopals.com 206-399-7272 ...................................................47
Dahl Lighting Showroom dahllighting.com 505-471-7272 .............................................15
Santa Fe Boots and Boogie santafebootsandboogie.com 505-983-0777 .................................................121
Destination Dahl destinationdahl.com 505-471-1811................................................8
Spirit of the Earth spiritoftheearth.com 505-988-9558...................................................6-7
New Mexico Stone newmexicostone.net 505-820-7625..............................................18
HEALTH, EYEWEAR, & BEAUTY Botwin Eye Group botwineyegroup.com 505-954-4442....................................................33
Compound Restaurant compoundrestaurant.com 505-982-4353.........................................164-165 Eloisa Restaurant eloisasantafe.com 505-982-0883................................................162
Midtown Bistro midtownbistrosf.com 505-820-3121.........................................166-167 Museum Hill Café museumhillcafe.com 505-984-8900................................................185 Pristina Water drinkpristinawater.com 505-216-1111..................................................47 Rancho de Chimayó ranchodechimayo.com 505-984-2100................................................181 Restaurant Martín restaurantmartin.com 505-820-0919................................................173 Santa Fe Bar & Grill santafebargrill.com 505-982-3033.........................................186-187 Santa Fe Spirits santafespirits.com 505-780-5906................................................195 Saveur saveur.com 505-989-4200................................................176 The Teahouse Restaurant teahousesantafe.com 505-992-0972................................................172 Vanessie vanessiesantafe.com 505-984-1193................................................174
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Ricardo Mazal’s Bután Abstracto (2015) exhibition in Mexico City. Photo by Kate Russell.
“No one behind, no one ahead. The path the ancients cleared has closed. And the other path, everyone’s path, easy and wide, goes nowhere. I am alone and find my way.” —Ancient SAnkSrit verSe AdApted by OctAviO pAz
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TEXTURES sweaters designed by Frank & Diane Marchetta for a PINKOYOTE kind of life