Santa Fe Arts Journal

José Sierra, whose work is part of a two-person show opening at Santa Fe Clay on July 28, learned the basic skills of mixing clay and glazes as well as wheel throwing when he studied at the University of the Andes in Mérida, Venezuela. After he moved to the U.S. in 2000, he was able to devote himself to ceramics full-time.

“The images and memories of coffee mills, intensely colored mountains, dramatic landscape, pre-Columbian art and architecture as well contemporary design all combine to influence and inspire my work,” says Sierra, who recently moved to Albuquerque.

“I like to make simple forms using imagery that’s common to the Inca, Mayan and Aztec cultures. All these cultures were influenced by geometry, which is a universal language.” [Read More…]

The process of painting inspires Blair Vaughn-Gruler, who shows her latest work at her gallery GVG Contemporary in a show titled “Compulsive Organization.”

“My practice is built around process: mark making, repetition, accumulation, erasure and the viscosity of the paint itself,” says Vaughn-Gruler, whose show opens on July 21 and runs through August 18. “I’m also concerned with my physical relationship to paint, including the motions inherent in the process of mark making. Sometimes I feel as if I am putting a giant puzzle together.”

The show’s title refers to the sense of order that Vaughn-Gruler personally experiences and communicates through her oil on canvas and oil and mixed media on clayboard paintings created with a subdued palette featuring a wide range of whites, grays and other subtle hand-mixed colors. [Read More…]

In keeping with its mission of presenting a wide range of choral music from around the world, the Santa Fe Desert Chorale has programmed four distinct concert programs for its 35th Anniversary Summer Festival, which runs from July 19 through August 13 and is presented at venues in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

Music director Joshua Habermann conducts “Liberté (music of resistance and revolution), “Music From a Secret Chapel” and “The Hope of Loving,” while guest conductor André J. Thomas leads the group in the program “Justice.” [Read More…]

Painter Maurice Burns, who moved to Santa Fe in 1975 to set up visiting artist and artist-in-residence programs at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), fell in love with Santa Fe as soon as he arrived.

“I don’t like big cities, and I was fed up with city life,” explains Burns, who had lived in London prior to relocating to Santa Fe.

Although he has always loved to draw, Burns hadn’t initially planned to become a painter. He was designing computer systems for Chicago City College in the late 1960s-earning a salary substantial enough to drive a Porsche-when he attended his first life drawing class. [Read More…]

For internationally-known photojournalist Doug Menuez, who has worked on assignment for newspapers, magazines and businesses in places including the North Pole and the Amazon, the years he spent photographing Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and other movers and shakers in Silicon Valley from the mid 1980s through 2000 were life-changing.

Patina Gallery has created the exhibit “Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley,” a show of a select group of Menuez’s Silicon Valley photos with insightful captions, to complement the Santa Fe Opera’s world premiere of “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs.”

The photos in the show represent 15 years of work that led Menuez to publish the book “Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley, 1985-2000” in 2014. The exhibit opens on July 14 and runs through August 13. [Read More…]

Maggie Taylor’s photomontages are like photographic collages, filled with all kinds of mundane and fascinating things. Think flying elephants, dogs wearing goggles and bicycling birds.

“I’m influenced by so much of what I see,” says Taylor, who displays approximately 30 photomontages at photo-eye Gallery from July 7 through September 2. “A lot of items I buy at thrift and antique stores make it into my work.”

In her image “First the Fish Must Be Caught,” Taylor combined an 1840s etching of a fish with an 1880s photo of a child she purchased at an antique store. The child wears a hood that was on a porcelain doll bought at another antique store. [Read More…]

Patricia Aaron relishes the opportunity to participate in artist residencies in the U.S. and abroad. During the late spring of 2016, she traveled to Iceland to spend a month absorbing Icelandic culture and communicating her experiences through encaustic paintings.

“I lived and painted in a renovated 1926 dairy barn about 20 minutes outside Reykjavik (the country’s capital and largest city),” says Aaron. “Instead of bringing encaustics with me, I decided to paint in oil on paper and make encaustic paintings based on my works on paper back in my Colorado studio.”

“Giving Way to Still,” Aaron’s new show of works reflecting her time in Iceland, opens on July 7 at The Globe Gallery. [Read More…]

The natural world, and in particular the ocean floor and seismic events, is a source of inspiration for the work of Philadelphia-based artist Rebecca Rutstein.

In “Fault Lines,” her first solo show in New Mexico opening at form & concept on June 30, Rutstein focuses her attention on seismic events that occur deep in the Earth’s crust.

“I took a geology class as an undergraduate that had a huge impact on me,” Rutstein says. “Recently, I looked back at the geology textbooks I used in college. The collision of the Earth’s plates, which has inspired the work in my Santa Fe show, seems like a metaphor for what has happened in my life and other people’s lives.” [Read More…]

The New Mexico History Museum’s exhibit “Syria: Cultural Patrimony Under Threat,” which opens on June 23, shows how objects and places of cultural, traditional or historical importance in Syria have been destroyed or adversely affected by the country’s ongoing civil war.

The heart of the exhibit is seven albums of photographs of historic sites in Syria taken between 1899 and 1909 that are part of the Palace of the Governors’ photo archives.

“I found out about these photos from Khristaan Villela, the current director of the Museum of International Folk Art,” explains the New Mexico History Museum’s director Andrew Wulf. “Khristaan wrote a comprehensive article that brought this photo collection back to light. Most of the sites in these photos don’t exist any more. They’ve been blow to pieces in the war.” [Read More…]

Encaustic works by Lorraine Glessner are part of the special show “Taking Wing,” which opens on June 16 at Ellsworth Gallery.

Encaustic painting, which involves the use of heated beeswax and colored pigments, has been practiced by artists for more than 2,000 years. Glessner, an assistant professor at Tyler School of Art at Temple University, enjoys incorporating colorful contemporary abstract imagery into this traditional process.

“I am drawn to loss, the void within an abandoned area or individual,” Glessner says about her work. [Read More…]