Sitting Still for Beauty
mateo
Plain Geometry
Amish Quilts
BY BOBBIE SUMBERG
In 1971 the quiet power of dark colors and large, simple shapes seen in Amish quilts exploded into the art world in the Whitney Museum exhibition Abstract Design in American Quilts. (more…)
Copper Pots Get Hammered
Master Metalsmith to the Rescue
BY CYNTHIA BAUGHMAN
Several years ago curator Nicolasa Chávez was in Trujillo, Spain, conducting research and shopping for her exhibition, New World Cuisine: The Histories of Chocolate, Mate y Más, which opened at the Museum of International Folk Art in December. (more…)
At The Corner of Lincoln and Palace
Probably one of the most photographed buildings in Santa Fe is the New Mexico Museum of Art, on the northwest corner of the plaza at Palace and Lincoln Avenue.
To the casual observer, the building could be as old as its 400-year-old neighbor across the street, the Palace of the Governors. But in fact it has only been there since 1917. Here once stood the headquarters for the Fort Marcy military compound (established in 1846), and Lincoln Avenue was lined with officer’s quarters, barracks, and corrals. The fort, on a hill above town, and its buildings were sold in 1894, ending the parades, processions, and other military activities in downtown Santa Fe and setting the stage for construction of the museum.
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.
New Mexico Through Its Maps
BY DENNIS REINHARTZ, PH.D.
What is a map? The answer to this apparently simple question is wide-ranging and laced with complexity. (more…)
Dennis Reinhartz is a emeritus professor of history at the University of Texas at Arlington, and has taught at Rutgers, New Jersey Institute of Technology, James Madison University, Bridgewater College, University of London, and Oxford University. He is the author and editor of nine books, including The Art of the Map: An Illustrated History of Map Elements and Embellishments (Sterling, 2012), and numerous book chapters and scholarly articles relating to transatlantic history and cartography. Reinhartz curated the exhibition Between the Lines: Culture and Cartography on the Road to Statehood for the Governor’s Gallery at the New Mexico State Capitol.
Learning New Mexico, Finding Home
Jack Parsons with Carmella Padilla
Jack Parsons’ latest book, Dark Beauty: Photographs of New Mexico, includes a photo of a dirt road that cuts a slender path toward a scarcely snow-capped Taos Mountain. (more…)And La Bruja Brought The Sunflowers
The Benefits and Costs of Anglo Arts Patronage
BY LOIS P. RUDNICK
La Bruja The sunflowers of northern New Mexico are one of the sumptuous visual delights for residents and visitors in summertime. But they are also an invasive weed. (more…)Lois P. Rudnick is professor emerita of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a resident of Santa Fe, and author of Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds; Cady Wells and Southwestern Modernism; and The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture(University of New Mexico Press, 2012).
Portraits From The Pen
Photographs of Prisoner in Territorial New Mexico
BY SIBEL MELIK
Convicted murderer José D. Gallegos, Inmate No. 637, stares out of the frame with a haunted, angry look in his pale eyes. He wears an ill-fitting prison uniform, and his large hands rest heavily on his lap. (more…)Under The Moon I Saw In Exile
Santa Fe’s Issei Poet Prisoners
BY BRIAN MINAMI
“My father was here during the war.” On a family vacation in Santa Fe in the late 1990s, my grandmother broached a subject which had gone unmentioned for decades. (more…)The Art of Gaman
Creativity in the Japanese Internment Camps