Other artists, who are more recently entering the prime of their careers, round out the offering, including ceramist Virgil Ortiz and installation artist Leo Villareal. The exhibition goes on to trace how the natural light of New Mexico may have influenced artists that followed, and includes a slew of well-known names, including Agnes Martin, Larry Bell, Judy Chicago, Ron Cooper, Nancy Holt, and Charles Ross, all of whom lived, worked, or traveled at least part-time in New Mexico. The group show is a wide survey that takes a step back in time, starting with work from artists affiliated with the Transcendental Painting Group, which formed in 1938 and included names like Emil Bisttram and Florence Miller Pierce, who integrated an ethereal spirituality into their portraits and landscape paintings. The new museum’s opening exhibition, Shadow and Light, makes the most of that space, and takes an early stand toward defining what makes a piece New Mexican. It is more of what curators call a “white cube,” a space that retreats into the background and “lets the work speak for itself as a singular piece that doesn’t necessarily exist within or rely upon the context of the building for its success,” according to Assistant Curator Katie C.
The art and the ornate, detailed architecture are inseparable.īy comparison, Vladem Contemporary’s exhibition rooms are open and free-flowing, with high ceilings and walls to accommodate art that is in vogue today, such as multi-media, three-dimensional installations that can take any shape, or video art that can be projected on walls.
Shadow era art series#
The original museum’s galleries, a series of modest spaces with relatively low ceilings, divided between multiple levels, were made for an era when two-dimensional works, like paintings and weavings, dominated what was shown in museums. That building, with its stucco walls and protruding vigas, was designed by Isaac Hamilton Rapp and William Mason Rapp to resemble the adobe churches that have long existed throughout the region. Vladem Contemporary stands in contrast to the main headquarters of the New Mexico Museum of Art, a Pueblo Revival-style structure that opened for business on the Plaza back in 1917. Curators will also have the opportunity to program art in the 2,800 square feet of courtyard, roof deck, and entryway space that are part of the project. It helps that Vladem Contemporary, which will bring nearly 10,000 square feet of new indoor exhibition space to Santa Fe’s Railyard Arts District, gives the New Mexico Museum of Art plenty of room to work through the concept. White puts it.īut how that answer is refined over time will define the institution and how visitors and residents alike connect to it and how everyone from critics to casual art fans come to regard the stature of New Mexico’s art-or at least its contemporary art, which would include, under another impossible-to-pinpoint term, anything made in the later part of the twentieth century and right up to the current moment. It will use all of those criteria to fulfill the institution’s ambitious mission of showing “the art of New Mexico to the world,” as Executive Director Dr. That is an essential question for curators at Vladem Contemporary, the satellite space for recent work that the New Mexico Museum of Art will open on September 23, 2023.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR A PIECE OF ART TO BE NEW MEXICAN?ĭoes it have to be created in the state? Or made by an artist who was born, or spent significant time, in New Mexico? Could it be produced somewhere far away by someone who never set foot within the state’s borders, but qualify because the subject matter is a person or place or idea connected to its centuries of history?
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