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New Mexico Museum of Art
Santa Fe, NM

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The New Mexico Museum of Art
107 West Palace Avenue,
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501
24 Hr. Recorded Message: (505) 476-5072; Front desk: (505) 476-5041
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The Governor's Gallery is located on the fourth floor of the State Capitol


www.nmartmuseum.org

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Exhibitions

The Nature of Glass

Manuel Carrillo: Mexican Modernist

Selections from the 20th Century Collection

Shadow and Light

Rick Dillingham: To Make, Unmake, and Make Again

Events

The Nature of Glass
Through Dec. 31, 2023

Organized from the New Mexico Museum of Art’s growing art glass collection, this exhibition explores how artists working in glass have engaged the natural world as content for their work. It also examines the nature of glass as a medium, exploring the technical and material nature of glass, the natural qualities of the medium and the process of how artists work with glass.

Nature, on the one hand, refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and to life in general. As glass can often allow us multiple views of the same thing at once, the idea of nature is examined through both of its facets in this exhibition. This includes plants, animals, and the landscape, but also the universe more broadly, and of course the human body, as we too are integral parts of the natural world. Artist in this exhibition use glass to explore and celebrate the natural world, through literal representations of plant and animal life, striking features of the meteorological or geographic phenomena, explorations of the human figure, cycles of life, and heavenly bodies.

Glass is a profoundly elemental medium. At its core, glass is the result of a volatile marriage of fire and earth in an almost alchemical process. Extreme temperatures are required to melt sand and other natural elements and turn them into liquid glass. With the addition of a variety metal oxides or metal powders to the smoldering crucible of molten glass, dazzling colors are achieved. As the glass cools, the malleable semi-liquid is transfigured into one of the most durable and resilient, yet at the same time delicate and fragile, solids on earth.

Nature also refers to the inherent features of something, especially when seen as characteristic of it. This exhibition features a broad representation of artistic approaches to glass, and the unique qualities of glass as an artistic medium. Techniques include blown glass, hotwired glass, etched glass, assemblage with glass, sand carved-glass, cast glass, kiln-formed glass, stained glass, and other techniques, with an eye to how these various methods of working glass inform the aesthetics of the art object.

- ‘The Nature of Glass’ Explores the Medium through a Variety of Techniques, Albuquerque Journal, May 28, 2023

Manuel Carrillo: Mexican Modernist
Through February 4, 2024

Mexican photographer Manuel Carrillo (1906-1989) turned to the camera fairly late in life, joining the Club Fotográfico de México at the age of 49. He quickly found his voice by making images of everyday life throughout Mexico, celebrating local culture and the human spirit. His work is an extension of Mexicanidad, a movement begun in the 1920s to forge a Mexican national identity free of foreign influence. Stylistically, however, Carrillo was inspired by Mexican artists trained abroad and international artists who converged on Mexico during that fertile period. His interest in indigenous cultures and his use of bright sunlight to create compositions with dramatic shadows and bold geometric forms has roots in the photographic work of Edward Weston and Paul Strand, American modernist photographers active in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s. Rather than idealizing, estheticizing, or moralizing, Carrillo portrays Mexico from the perspective of an affectionate observer, transforming ordinary moments into expressions of quiet eloquence

Selections from the 20th Century Collection
Through December 31, 2022

After more than a century of collecting, the New Mexico Museum of Art has become home to some of the finest examples of Southwestern. Art by the regions most beloved artists. On the second floor of the Museum’s history building, find treasured classics and new surprises in our permanent installation form the Museum’s collection of 20th Century Art. Featuring work by members of the Taos Society of Artists, members of the Santa Fe art colony, prominent Modernists, and many others, this installation is a survey of the creative environment fostered in New Mexico over that past century.

Image: Peter Hurd, Portrait of Gerald Marr, 1952/1953, egg tempera on gesso and Masonite, 32 1/2 x 38 1/4 in. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Thomas Fortune Ryan III, 1993 (1993.38.1). © Hurd La Rinconada Gallery. Photo by Blair Clark.

Shadow and Light
Through April 28, 2024

Shadow and Light, the inaugural exhibition at the Vladem Contemporary plays upon the famed New Mexico light which is credited for attracting artists and photographers to the region for decades. More importantly, the theme illustrates one of the original notions behind the founding of the New Mexico Museum of Art—the belief that the impact of the arts is far greater than simple replication and illustration. The arts engage the big ideas and experiences of human life.

While the light of New Mexico is commonly associated with representational landscape paintings, the West has also nurtured and attracted artists who struggled to capture and express more than mere naturalistic representation in their artwork. Filling two galleries of the newly constructed New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary, the exhibition looks at artworks from the mid-20th century through the present day with an eye towards the West and Southwest, and this desire for a visual experience that could convey more than the empirical. Transcendental Painting Group members and acclaimed New Mexico artists Emil Bisttram and Florence Miller Pierce are at the start of an arc that unfolds to reinforce the connection between the work the Museum of Art has always supported and trends in contemporary art practice and art history. In this specific case, connections are drawn between the nonphysical realms the TPG aspired to, the perceptual experience of the light and space movement, physical engagement of early land art, and contemporary projects like the indigenous futurism of Cochiti artist Virgil Ortiz.

The following artists are included in this exhibition:
Larry Bell
Emil Bisttram
Lee Bul
Judy Chicago
Ron Cooper
Constance DeJong
James Drake
Angela Ellsworth
Joe Goode
Harmony Hammond
Nancy Holt
J P 제피 (formerly Jen Pack)
Jennifer Joseph
Yayoi Kusama
Agnes Martin
Florence Miller Pierce
August Muth
Virgil Ortiz

And in collaboration with:
Morgan Barnard
Soojin Choi
Elias Jade Not Afraid
Simon Levin
Justin Paik Reese
Kamden Storm

Helen Pashgian
Charles Ross
Leo Villareal
Erika Wanenmacher
Susan York
Norman Zammitt

Rick Dillingham: To Make, Unmake, and Make Again
Through June 16, 2024

A prominent fixture in the Santa Fe arts community, Rick Dillingham was a scholar, author, collector, curator, dealer, and ceramic artist who was firmly grounded in the tradition and canon of Southwest ceramics. After his death in 1994 due to complications from AIDS, Dillingham’s collection of ceramic artworks was distributed across multiple institutions in central New Mexico and the United States, with some of his works being homed as far as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, United Kingdom.

To Make, Unmake and Make Again brings works from Dillingham’s ceramic practice into conversation with his personal collection of artwork and Indigenous ceramics to examine the role collecting had on his artwork, and to tell the story of his evolution as a maker and community collaborator. This exhibition assembles the largest concentration of Dillingham works from across his artistic career, and will feature a number of works that have not been seen since his death. Alongside items from Dillingham’s personal collection of artworks, this exhibition will also feature ephemera from lectures and presentations given by the artist, letters from fixtures in the American craft and ceramic canons Hal Riegger and Charles Fiske, and correspondence from Dada artist Beatrice Wood.

To Make, Unmake, and Make Again will be on display in the New Wing at the New Mexico Museum of Art’s location on the Plaza from October 6th, 2023 to June 16th, 2024.

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