A few days remain to see the exhibit of works on paper by Nelleke Beltjens at Hosfelt Gallery. Betljens draws in ink on paper, following a rigorous procedure. She lays down a straight guide on the paper, and makes short strokes perpendicular to its edge. The strokes are all two or three millimeters long, and roughly evenly spaced, making a line of irregular density. Placing the guide again, she makes another More …
In 1938, Life Magazine called Georgia OKeeffe “the worlds most famous woman artist.” Intended no doubt as a compliment, this anointment was a stigma that had already been with OKeeffe for 20 years, and would be with her for the rest of her life, and beyond. OKeeffe would struggle with the accepted notions that her work was irrepressibly sexual, or that her flower paintings and desert landscapes were hopelessly pretty. More …
In a landscape architecture show recently closed at UTEP, Snagged underscores the grim cultural and aesthetic repercussions of an issue as pressing to inhabitants of Ohios verdant plains as to those accustomed to New Mexicos flinty austerity: each day the average American expends roughly 100 gallons of water. Land Arts key practitioners — including Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer and James Turrell — pioneered an art form that outsized the More …
A greater percentage of adults attend arts events in the Mountain Region than the US average artgoer, but arts attendance has declined 10 percent in the region between 2002 and 2008. The bright side? Increased participation via technology. The National Endowment for the Arts has released its 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and the results are not good. Approximately 35 percent of all U.S. adults (78 million More …
Art Santa Fe Presents (Charlotte Jackson) and the Museum of New Mexico Press have just published Frederick Hammersley, a monograph covering the work of the Albuquerque artist who died age 90 last June. Book signings will be were held Saturday at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, and Sunday at the New Mexico Museum of Art. Frederick Hammersleys painting first struck me at Graham Gallery in 1989. Subsequently, the computer drawings show More …
As bank misadventures hold the unemployment rate at 10 percent and companies cut costs mercilessly to survive the shock waves, Jason Reitman serves up the flavor of the month, i.e., the collapsing economy and its human toll, in Up in the Air. The comedy premiered in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. Up in the Air is now the flavor of the week among movie critics. Michael Moore took More …
The Road is a walk-through a post-apocalyptic landscape of rags, grey skies, and desperate survivors eating the flesh of other survivors. Is it a coincidence that The Road opened in New York the night before Thanksgiving? Cormac McCarthys grim spare novel of the same title, The Road, from which the film is adapted, is a meditation on the crises that can face humankind, and on the horrifying ways that characters More …
For cinephiles, Broken Embracess story, told by a movie director who was blinded in a car accident that killed his lover, is rippling with film references to challenge the most serious of nerds and scholars. For the uninitiated, Penelope Cruz as Lena the secretary/prostitute/concubine/actress keeps you with the plots hyperbolic leaps through time and credibility. Think of Audrey Hepburn here. Shes an unfortunate whos destined to bring misfortune on her More …
“Society is basically not interested in art,” Donald Judd said. “Art has a purpose of its own.” That purpose can be discovered in Marfa, Texas, where this weekend marks the annual celebration of Judd and lectures about Judds re-opened works in concrete that will be live-streamed from the Chinati website. Marfa, a remote town, with a rundown ex-Army base and old Army barracks, specifically, is where Judd installed 100 sculptures More …
It is not easy to explain the Burning Man experience. This is something I have wanted to attend for 10 years. Having read regularly about the event I thought had a good idea of what it is – but upon arrival it was a hundred times more than imagined. It cannot be fully explained; it can only really be experienced. But I will try and build a modest word-bridge to More …
The Whitney Museum opens Georgia OKeeffe: Abstraction, a new look at the artists abstract works. Works include photographs of the artist such as “Hands, Georgia OKeeffe” (1918) by Alfred Stieglitz. Lifetime TV premiered the OKeeffe biopic September 18. I cant help but find this an interesting coincidence. September 18, the same day that Huffington Post led its living page with a story about the declining happiness of women (Part 1 More …
Forbes, the magazine that loves to categorize things, came out with a new ranking August 20th – The top 10 American cities for cultural tourism. The results. Not surprising? New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Washington DC are the consecutive top 5. This report based its results on numbers of overnight visits to these cities in 2008, and the number of cultural institutions AOL City Guides lists for each More …