Summer 2017

Dressed for Success in the West

In 1865, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley famously urged, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” The imperative suggested economic opportunity, and indeed boundless opportunities greeted the young men and women who struck out on wagon trains and horseback to make their fortunes in the West. But the young, restless, and unemployed also saw the opportunity as a chance to reinvent themselves by tossing off Eastern conventions. [...]

Rooted In History

As I enter the Palace of the Governors, I often stop at the doorway on the left. It opens onto an austere room—the Office of the Governors—where locally made wooden chairs sit around a table, representing long gone administrations: Spanish, Mexican, Territorial. [...]

Picturing the Future

Cultivating, weaving, and dyeing cotton were regular parts of Mo Aiqun’s childhood. Born in 1958 in the Zhuang village of Sanbao (Tian’e County, Guangxi), she began learning to sew and embroider when she was thirteen. Like many young women in her community, she arrived at her new husband’s home with quilts she made for her dowry. [...]

Remnants among the Ruins

The New Mexico History Museum and the Museum of International Folk Art Reflect on the Syrian Civil War [...]

In It Together

Becoming a conservator involves education, tradition...and channeling Macgyver. [...]

MAKING HISTORY

Cutting-edge, technology-driven operas may not seem like an immediate fit with the New Mexico History Museum, but if the goal is to explore emerging technology through the lens of history, this partnership is the solution. [...]

Negotiate, Navigate, Innovate

The exhibition Negotiate, Navigate, Innovate: Strategies Folk Artists Use in the Global Marketplace opens June 9 in the Museum of International Folk Art’s Gallery of Conscience. It explores the ways in which folk artists from around the world and in New Mexico work within the global market setting. [...]

Free to Be You and Me

BY CANDACE WALSH Once upon a time, I was a child in the seventies with hippie parents. Want proof? If I had [...]

The View from Out There

BY CHRISTIAN WAGUESPACK “I think New Mexico is the greatest experience I ever had from the outside [...]

Ages and Stages

The Museum of Art’s St. Francis Auditorium— a sanctuary for the soul of Santa Fe—turns 100. [...]

A Different Angle

Sleeping During the Day: Vietnam, 1968, curated by Daniel Kosharek, includes thirty-three black-and-white images on view through October 1, 2017. Kosharek is photo curator at the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, which has housed the Herbert Lotz Collection since 2008. A survey of Lotz’s personal letters from Vietnam accompanies the photographs. [...]

Headed into the Wind

BY JACK LOEFFLER I was a seventeen-year-old senior in high school when I received news that I had failed my [...]

Detail of Interior of a circular building, Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Drawing Near To The Divine

"SUPPOSE ONE COULD CATCH THEM BEFORE they become ‘works of art?’ Catch them hot & sudden as they rise in the mind.” In her diary, Virginia Woolf examined the stuff of thought, its shape and contours as well as its inherent slipperiness. While she was largely concerned with literature, her questions apply just as well to the visual arts. What does an idea look like before it is labored over, crafted, and shaped into a finished piece? [...]

The Art Of Listening

What is a need? Lama founder Barbara Durkee (now Asha Greer), speaking about the 1967 founding of Lama Commune just north of Taos, explains that she knew there was a need for water, and hot water at that; here in New Mexico there is always a need for water. Her needs did not extend much beyond that. Experiencing a back-tothe land lifestyle on the side of a mountain was the real need she was attempting to fulfill. The pursuit of this desire was one of the many products of the rise of the 1960s and 1960s counterculture in the American Southwest. [...]

El Palacio

The Magazine of the Museum of New Mexico