New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs welcomes you to subscribe and support our state’s cultural treasures.
The mystery of the Hermanos or Penitentes that belong to the Cofradía de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno has baffled and fascinated scholars, journalists, Protestant missionaries, and the local Catholic clergy for decades. The story of the Hermanos Penitentes begins in the Santa Cruz Valley in Northern New Mexico at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Charles M. Carrillo (opens in a new tab) is an artist, author, and archaeologist known particularly for creating art using Spanish colonial techniques that reflect 18th century Spanish New Mexico. Carrillo has blended craft, conservation, and innovation throughout his career as a santero — a carver and painter of images of saints. Carrillo holds a doctorate in anthropology / archaeology from the University of New Mexico, but his true commitment to tradition has led him to work as an artist and advocate within the religious community of northern New Mexico.
Felipe R. Mirabal is a writer and former curator of collections at El Rancho de las Golondrinas Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also notably co-authored This Blessed Space: 200 Years of Pilgrimage at the Santuario de Nuestro Senor de Esquiplas about the famed Santuario de Chimayo with co-author Charlie Carrillo.
New Mexico is a magical place during the holiday season. Farolitos (little lanterns made of a candle in sand in a paper bag), luminarias (bonfires), biscochitos, and tamales abound, and locals and tourists alike enjoy centuries-old traditions unique to our state. Some of the most beloved are dramatizations, often accompanied by music, of the Nativity. Each ceremony has its own regional adaptation unique to the setting in which it is celebrated, but the central messages remain the same.
Nicolasa Chávez (opens in a new tab) is the curator of Latin American & Nuevomexicano Collections at the Museum of International Folk Art. She is a respected historian, curator, and performance artist and previously served as the Deputy State Historian of New Mexico. Her past exhibitions at the museum include New World Cuisine: The Histories of Chocolate, Mate y Más, The Red that Colored the World, Flamenco: From Spain to New Mexico, and Música Buena: Hispano Folk Music of New Mexico.
Trauma forms people. It frames their actions and reactions. It determines what a person believes and how they move through the world. That the artist Agnes Pelton grew from a frail, sickly, quiet child into a frail, sickly, deeply introspective young woman prone to depression becomes less of a surprise when her personal and family history is explored—and the complexity of her seminal paintings can be appreciated all the more with a clear knowledge of this history. Pelton’s work is on exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, through January 5, 2020.
Dr. Nicole Panter Dailey is a psychologist who splits her time between Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and Santa Fe. Panter Dailey also teaches screenwriting at California Institute of the Arts. She grew up in Palm Springs in the shadow of Mt. San Jacinto.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, artists of European descent have been continuously drawn to New Mexico, captivated by everything that we still treasure as unique to our region: the stunning light, the rich multicultural tapestry, the dramatic natural vistas. But as often as they filled their canvases with Indigenous subjects, golden aspens, or sun-drenched mountains, they were equally fascinated with the Hispanic community that has called New Mexico home for centuries. An enigmatic group commonly referred to as the Penitentes was particularly alluring subject matter for artists new to the region.
Cameron Gay (opens in a new tab) is a professional photographer.
Christian Waguespack is the director of curatorial affairs and curator of Northwest Art at the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington. He is a former head of curatorial affairs and curator of twentieth-century art at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. Waguespack received an MA in Museum Studies with an emphasis on Curatorial Studies and Museum Education and an MA in Art History with an emphasis on Modern + Contemporary Art, both from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. He holds a BA and BFA from the University of New Mexico.
In the fifties and sixties, Alexander Girard’s status as both a Modernist designer and a prolific consumer of folk art might have seemed hopelessly irreconcilable. After all, what could Mad Men-era commercial design possibly have in common with, say, clay totems or weavings produced in the Peruvian highlands, Mexican pueblos, or remote villages of India or Poland? It would have required some vigorous leaps of the imagination, a forensic eye for detail, lots of travel, and intimate knowledge of Girard’s accomplishments as creator and collector to develop a unified theory for the seemingly far-flung spheres of his aesthetic vision. Nowadays, though, all it takes is a tour of a trio of exhibitions at the Museum of International Folk Art that limn Girard’s creative genius for synthesis between worlds that fifty or sixty years ago had neither yet been linked by globalization nor subject to the critiques of cultural imperialism that accompanied it.
Dave Herndon (opens in a new tab) is a writer and editor based in Santa Fe.
Photographs taken in the Southwest before 1866 are exceptionally rare, which is why this stunning but unidentified quarter plate ambrotype—with vigas and corbels—caught our attention. Ambrotypes, collodion positive images on glass, became popular in the 1850s but were supplanted by tintype and glass negative processes by the mid-1860s. The cased image hadn’t aged well, but inspection by conservators suggested the problems were superficial. A new black backing revealed the emulsion’s pristine condition, and ghostly white highlights now pop against dark shadows and hand-painted red uniforms.
Hannah Abelbeck (opens in a new tab) is the photo archivist in the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum and is actively working to increase access to its photographic collections.
More than one bell has graced Acoma tower over the St. Francis Auditorium, ringing in key moments in the New Mexico Museum of Art’s history. These bells have their own stories to tell. One bell is steeped in myth wrapped inside a legend.
Michelle Gallagher Roberts is the deputy director of New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs and previously served the department as Chief Registrar then Head of Registration and Collections at New Mexico Museum of Art, and also served as the Acting Registrar at the Museum of International Folk Art. Prior to moving to New Mexico, Michelle was the Collections Manager at Palm Springs Desert Museum/Palm Spirits Art Museum, Curatorial Assistant at Foothills Art Center in Golden, Colorado, Assistant Registrar at the University of Denver Museum of Anthropology, and an Archaeologoist at Central Washington Archaeological Survey in Ellensburg, Washington. She has written multiple publications on museums and cultural institutions and received the “Heritage Preservation Award: Architectural Heritage” from the Cultural Properties Review Committee in 2018. She was a Next Generation 2017 Fellow at the Getty Leadership Institute, Claremont Graduate University and holds both a BS in Anthropology from Central Washington University and a MA in Anthropology/Museum Studies from University of Denver.
The North American Southwest is desert country, a vast mosaic of dry habitats where elevation, longitude, geography, and weather patterns interact to determine the nature of prevailing life-forms. Most life-forms are indigenous, but a few others roll in like tumbleweeds, like I did one night during the summer of 1957 by human reckoning. I camped in my car by the side of the road and woke up to blazing sun in the Mojave Desert, alien country to a native West Virginian. I was a private first class in the United States Army, ultimately bound for Camp Irwin, where for the next fifteen months I would play my trumpet in the 433rd Army Band.
Jack Loeffler has produced more than four hundred documentary radio programs based on his original recordings, authored or co-authored eight books, written dozens of essays for diverse publications, and has produced numerous sound collages for major museums including the Museum of International Folk Art and the New Mexico History Museum. In 2017 and early 2018, he co-curated, with Meredith Davidson, the Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest exhibition at the New Mexico History Museum.
How do you design an exhibit about exhibits? In late 2017, Museum Resources Director David Rohr came to us at Exhibit Services with a new project: Create a meta exhibition that would showcase the long history and ongoing development of public exhibitions within the Museum of New Mexico. Usually, our process for creating exhibits involves collaborating with curators and other museum staff, who draw from works in their collections, or borrow objects from other museums. But how well would our usual process work if that process was part of what we were putting on display?
Matt Celeskey has designed exhibits for various New Mexico museums since 1998, and recently retired from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs as the head of exhibitions for the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. He is also an experienced paleoartist whi creates illustrations of prehistoric life based on scientific discoveries.
Música Buena: Hispano Folk Music of New Mexico, at the Museum of International Folk Art from October 6, 2019, to March 7, 2021, tells the history of New Mexican Hispano folk music (and related dramatic interpretations) that developed over four hundred years, from the Colonial era to the present day. Master musician and instrument maker Cipriano Vigil, recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian Institution, serves as guest curator; his book New Mexican Folk Music: Treasures of a People (University of New Mexico Press, 2014) was a catalyst for the exhibition.
Nicolasa Chávez (opens in a new tab) is the curator of Latin American & Nuevomexicano Collections at the Museum of International Folk Art. She is a respected historian, curator, and performance artist and previously served as the Deputy State Historian of New Mexico. Her past exhibitions at the museum include New World Cuisine: The Histories of Chocolate, Mate y Más, The Red that Colored the World, Flamenco: From Spain to New Mexico, and Música Buena: Hispano Folk Music of New Mexico.
