Spring 2017

A group of football players in red and white uniforms huddle together against a purple background with orange swirls and white and red paint splatters. [gen-ai]

A Certain Point of View

I’ve noticed that we don’t witness anything firsthand any longer. Our first reaction to anything that happens in real life is to record it, post it, snap it, share it.

By Frank Buffalo Hyde (Onondaga/Nez Perce)

Categories: Featured, Staff favorites, Visual art

A young man in military uniform stands smiling beside a vehicle with sandbags stacked in the background. [gen-ai]

Vietnam, the televised war, the war that divided us, the war we did not win. Some of us unavoidably served in it, others protested it, many young men died. There is no shortage of photographs documenting the horrors of this “police action.” Military photographers and the free press took millions of photographs of the Vietnam conflict between 1962 and 1975.

By Daniel Kosharek and Herbert Lotz

Categories: Framework, New Mexican history, Southwestern history, Visual art

Three rectangular panels feature intricate, symmetrical black cutout designs with abstract and possibly mythological figures against a light background. [gen-ai]

Trunk Show

I have watched as visitors to the Museum of International Folk Art stop in their tracks before a wall of cut-paper silhouettes, intrigued and perplexed. Perhaps they are recalling the snowflakes they made in grade school by folding and snipping paper in simple patterns. They recognize that this is something else, not only in the complexity of design, but also in the content of the imagery.

By Penelope Hunter-Stiebel

Categories: New Mexican history, Southwestern history, Visual art

Several broken porcelain doll parts, including limbs, a torso, a head, and a fragment of an arm, are scattered on a flat surface. [gen-ai]

The Past in Play

The Archaeology of Lost Toys

By Dr. C.L. Kieffer Nail and Paulina F. Przystupa

Categories: New Mexican history, Southwestern history

Illustration of a woman in a hat riding a dark horse in a western landscape with Miss West text in the background. [gen-ai]

Beyond Labels

A tour through Out of the Box: The Art of the Cigar

By Tom Leech

Categories: New Mexican history, Southwestern history, Visual art

A person wearing gloves and a mask examines a painted ceramic pot with red, black, and white geometric and bird designs on a table. [gen-ai]

Falling Apart and Coming Together

Making pots whole doesn’t necessarily mean filling holes.

By Peter BG Shoemaker

Categories: Landscape and environment, New Mexican history, Southwestern history, Visual art

Two people wearing animal costumes, one as a cow in a green dress and the other as a wolf in a suit with rainbow suspenders, sit on a couch against a red background. [gen-ai]

Lloyd’s Treasure Chest

After a four-year hiatus, our special open-storage gallery, Lloyd’s Treasure Chest, is reopening with a fresh face. Visitors can take the Vehicle to the Vault (formerly known as the elevator) to the new Treasure Chest, a place for visitors to explore, interact, and create folk art.

By Felicia Katz-Harris

Categories: Visual art

People sit and display goods for sale under the portico of a historic adobe building with wooden beams, with flags flying above. [gen-ai]

Flex Time

BY CANDACE WALSH I can stand outside of the Udall Building, throw a rock, and hit Old Santa Fe Trail (and hopefully not someone’s car in the process). That’s how close my office and my orientation are to this end of it. But in the spirit of 2017, a very disorienting year so far, this issue offers multiple doses of the good kind of disorientation.

By Candace Walsh

Categories: Editor's Letter