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One of the staples of desert life is the presence—or scarcity—of water. Its importance can be seen across eastern New Mexico, where the Pecos River strives to quench a fragile, 926-mile riparian environment. In Along the Pecos, photographer Jennifer Schlesinger and the late composer Steven M. Miller use images and sound, respectively, to impart an emotional sense of the river, with a goal of highlighting issues of ecology and our relationship to place.
Daniel Kosharek (opens in a new tab) is a writer and former photo curator at the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum.
How many times had I passed through the doorway into the Neutrogena galleries at the Museum of International Folk Art barely noting what registered only as a handsome architectural decoration on either side? Then suddenly, emerging from the exhibition The Red That Colored the World, with my eye attuned to seeking out the color, I focused on the red elements of the 7-foot-tall carved and painted doors that flanked the entrance.
Penelope Hunter-Stiebel was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, and recently curated Mirror, Mirror: Photographs of Frida Kahlo for the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum.
Summer, especially those without the cooling monsoon rains, can be long and hot in New Mexico. The sun sears your skin, and the dirt beneath your feet can scorch right through the soles of your shoes. For centuries it has been the time of year when native peoples dance and pray devoutly for rain, and when farmers and ranchers of other cultures do the same, following their own traditions.
Frances Levine (opens in a new tab) is the president of the Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, and the former director of the New Mexico History Museum. Levine holds degrees in anthropology: a PhD and MA from Southern Methodist University and a BA from the University of Colorado. Among a list of distinguished professional honors and awards, she received the Fray Atanasio Dominguez Award for Historical Survey from the New Mexico Historical Society in 2000 for her book on Pecos Pueblo. She also has published extensively on New Mexico history and archeology and is an active contributor to numerous professional associations and committees.
Love Letter to the World, a social-art project, was performed at The PASEO art festival in Taos in September 2015 and in Santa Fe at Everywhere Night Market in August 2015. The project included a letter-writing component and a performance in which Edie Tsong broadcast these letters to the world via bullhorn from atop a 12-foot ladder.
[wonderplugin_slider id=”81″]Edie Tsong (Taiwanese American) (opens in a new tab) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician. She is a Blackburn Fellow at the Randolph MFA in Creative Writing program and plays in the improvisational quartet Lost Time.
Michael Lorenzo Lopez is the cofounder of Vecinos Artist Collective, a collaborative of New Mexican artists, enjoys tinkering with what it means to form relationships. Interactions such as stringing a 300-foot garland of handmade paper flowers through a stranger’s second-story window take on fabricated high stakes. He currently lives in the hand-built aluminum camper used in Love Letter to the World, which was commissioned by the City of Albuquerque’s InSight: Temporary Public Art installation initiative.
Chances are you didn’t notice the seismic shift on September 30, 2015. I did, but only because I happened to be standing in the New Mexico History Museum’s Fray Angélico Chávez History Library. Its full force nearly buckled my knees.
“See these?” Librarian Patricia Hewitt asked, waving a narrow stack of cards at me. “These are the last cards we’ll ever get for the card catalog. The company that makes them is never going to print them again.” (more…)
Kate Nelson (opens in a new tab) is a longtime New Mexico journalist who retired as managing editor of New Mexico Magazine where she earned numerous awards from the International Regional Magazine Association.
Lloyd Kiva New: Art, Design, and Influence, at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), celebrates the work of the famed Cherokee artist, designer, and educator, who is still discussed and admired for his modern and innovative foresight and artistry one hundred years after his birth.
[wonderplugin_slider id=”78″]Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer (Choctaw/Hopi) is the curator of collections at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe, NM. She holds a BFA in Fine Arts Administration from the University of Arizona, Tucson. Lomahaftewa-Singer has more than thirty years of experience with contemporary Native American Art. She has authored catalogue essays in Action/Abstraction Redefined: Native American Art, 1940s to 1970s (2018), 50/50: Fifty Artists, Fifty Years (2012), and Lifting the Veil: New Mexico Women and the Tri-cultural Myth (2007). She currently sits on the New Mexico Capital Arts Foundation Board and the Terra Foundation Indigenous Advisory Council, and she has juried numerous art programs including the Forge Project Fellowships, Southwestern Association for Indian Arts Fellowships, and the Santa Fe Art Institute Visual Arts Review Committee.
A New Century: The Life of Cherokee Artist and Educator Lloyd “Kiva” New, at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, commemorates the 100th anniversary of the birth of a Native pioneer in fashion design, entrepreneurship, and cultural art education. He blazed a trial that many are just beginning to tread.
[wonderplugin_slider id=”77″]Tony Chavarria (Santa Clara Pueblo) has more than thirty years of experience collaborating with tribes and curating Native material culture. He is curator of ethnology at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture and has developed several exhibitions including Comic Art Indigène and What’s New in New 2. In 2018, Tony also co-curated Creating Tradition: Innovation and Change in American Indian Art, the first Native exhibition at Epcot in Orlando, Florida. He is also an occasional potter and artist.
In the collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, a group portrait by Fritz Scholder, based on a ca. 1966 photograph, depicts early faculty members who helped shape the curriculum, mission, and direction of the newly established Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.
[wonderplugin_slider id=”76″]Carmen Vendelin is a former curator of art at the New Mexico Museum of Art. She organized Colors of the Southwest and O’Keeffe In Process in 2015 and is curated Stage, Setting, Mood: Theatricality in the Visual Arts as a complement to the traveling exhibition First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare.
When the American Academy of Poets made April National Poetry Month, they must have had T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land in mind (“April is the cruellest month”). During April we celebrate poetry as practiced not only by career poets but also by the man and woman on the street, in the American vernacular. (more…)
Tom Ireland (opens in a new tab) served as the editor of El Palacio from 2015 to 2016. He is an author known for his books Mostly Mules, a travel journal with photos by Molly Mehaffy; Birds of Sorrow: Notes from a River Junction in Northern New Mexico; Our Love Is Like A Cake, true-life romance in post-Soviet Poland; The Man Who Gave His Wife Away, an essay collection about relationships; and The Household Muse, a collaboration with Anne Valley-Fox. He was awarded a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Jeffrey E. Smith award in nonfiction from The Missouri Review. Two of his essays were chosen to appear in Best American Travel Writing.
