Santa Fe Arts Journal

In GVG Contemporary’s first show of the season “See How It Feels,” which opens on May 25, the four participating artists use abstraction as a way of exploring the emotive qualities of space, place and material. 

“The thread that connects the work in the show really has to do with layering; layering material, layering emotion, the layers of memory that get compressed over time,” explains curator and artist Renée Lauzon.

“And yet, with each layer we get a cross-section of experience, one that we can see and feel, with each new affective event related to the previous one.” [Read More…]

“Mike is a natural painter, he was born that way,” said painter Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) about his studio assistant Michael Fitzhugh Wright, according to Wright.

Now living in Santa Fe, 86-year old Wright continues to paint and allow his work to evolve. A group of his paintings created in town from 1998 through 2014 are on display in the show “Jazz Numbers” at Ellsworth Gallery.

“I met Michael about a year and a half ago,” explains gallery owner Barry Ellsworth. “He’s currently doing landscapes, but I saw his abstract pieces from his jazz series and asked him if I could show them. They haven’t been on exhibit before, so they’re new to market.” [Read More…]

Many Santa Feans know Zuleikha as the evocative dancer who presents an annual concert celebrating the poetry of the 13th century Persian Sunnin Muslim poet Rumi at the Lensic Performing Arts Center. Along with poet and translator Coleman Barks and musicians such as Glen Velez, Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Dawn Avery, Eugene Friesen, David Darling and Jai Uttal, Zuleikha brings Rumi’s poetry to life through her unique storytelling.

But behind the scenes, Zuleikha is a globe-trekking, multi-talented movement specialist who calls herself a “storydancer.” Through working with her own body, she has developed a movement vocabulary that is understood throughout the world.

“My own performance is a type of communication,” she explains. “It feels very exalting to me. I try to bring something about the human experience to others when I perform.” [Read More…]

In 2015, Cherokee actor, performance artist, writer and activist DeLanna Studi took a 900-mile, six-week long journey with her father Thomas Studi along the path her great-great grandparents took in the 1830s when they were forced by the U.S government to relocate from their homeland. 

Their journey started in North Carolina and was part of the Trail of Tears, which forcibly relocated thousands of Native American peoples from many nations in the Southeastern United States, including 17,000 Cherokee, to areas west of the Mississippi River that had been designated as Indian Territory. During these forced relocations, thousands of Native peoples died from disease and starvation while en route to their new home. 

Studi, who was a company member of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for two seasons and has appeared on television, off-Broadway and in films, has written and performs in the two-act dramatic memoir “And So We Walked,” which is presented at the Lensic Performing Arts Center on May 23. [Read More…]

Curt Sullan began creating glass and steel sculptures as a form of stress-relief from his job as a construction lawyer. He bought kilns and was sketching ideas for pieces years before he started working with glass.

“I’ve been drawing concepts since 2000 and am now on my 22nd book,” explains Sullan, who has lived in Denver since 1985. “Each book has between 500 and 700 ideas in them. My initial ideas weren’t very practical. As time went by and I had developed more experience working with glass, I saw how I had to curb my ideas to fit what would actually work with glass. I’ve had lots of failures over the years.”

Sullan shows more than a dozen of his most recent glass and steel sculptures, in which steel is behind and in front of the glass, in a solo exhibit at Globe Fine Art that opens on May 11. His show coincides with the gallery’s openings of shows by painters Stephanie Shank and Richard Potter. [Read More…]

OTA Contemporary celebrates its first anniversary with a special show featuring paintings, monotypes and digital works by artist/owner Kiyomi Baird and steel and bronze sculptures by New Jersey artist Robert Koch.

Koch, a native of Pennsylvania who studied art education in college, is new to exhibiting work in Santa Fe. He’s bringing large-scale pieces and small-scale sculptures to the show.

“My materials are the same materials used in the construction of buildings,” says Koch. “My goal is to try to give the steel some life or have it capture a split second of movement.” [Read More…]

Norbert Peshlakai’s first solo museum exhibition at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, “Peshlakai Vision,” opens on May 13. On display are more than 100 pieces of work made in silver, including jewelry and small pots, jars and sculptural works.

A master Navajo silversmith (Towering House Clan) born in Arizona whose career spans more than 40 years, Peshlakai almost took a different career path in the late 1970s when he attended Haskell Indian Junior College in Kansas.

“I mainly did painting in college,” Peshlakai recalls during a recent phone conversation. “My college advisor told me I needed another art class and suggested I take a siversmithing class. I didn’t like it at first, and I wasn’t good at it in the beginning.”

Peshakai stopped attending class until he bumped into the instructor and was sternly told to make a series of pieces before the semester’s end. “So I got busy and discovered I liked what I had made,” he adds. [Read More…]

In Donald L. Coburn’s two-person, two-act play “The Gin Game,” Weller Martin and Fonsia Dorsey, two elderly residents at a nursing home for senior citizens, strike up an acquaintance. 

After Weller teaches Fonsia how to play gin rummy, they play a series of games together while engaging in lengthy conversations about their families and lives outside the nursing home. A relationship that starts as friendly and congenial escalates into conflict.

The New Mexico Actors Lab presents “The Gin Game,” starring Suzanne Lederer and Jonathan Richards and directed by Robert Benedetti, at the Teatro Paraguas theater from May 10 through 27. Although Benedetti has directed both Lederer, who appeared in the television series Remington Steele and Hunter, and Richards, who had guest roles in the television series Manhattan and Breaking Bad, in multiple productions during the past five years, he’s never worked with them in the same play. [Read More…]

Scavenged objects, picked up in New Mexican arroyos and along the San Francisco Bay waterfront, form the basis of new sculptures created by Gina Telcocci that are on display in City of Mud’s two-artist show opening on May 5.

“These materials have distinctive characters, with their surfaces hinting at former lives and the power of time and the elements,” says Telcocci, a native Santa Fean now living in Oakland, California. “Most of my work is primarily about form, contours and textures. Weathered wood is used to build forms or as accents on larger forms. I also use simple weaving techniques to create pieces that are subsequently plastered, collaged and sanded down. These are processes that imitate aging and eroding forces.” [Read More…]

Painter Jono Tew and photographer Cody Brothers met years ago when both artists were represented by the same Canyon Road gallery.

After they discovered that visiting wide open spaces in the West, and national parks in particular, was important to both of them personally and professionally, they started taking camping trips together. “We realized that our work complements each other,” says Tew, who has often provided Brothers with an extra pair of hands for holding and setting up photographic equipment.

On May 4, Tew and Brothers celebrate the grand opening of their new gallery, Modernist Frontier, which happens to be in the same Canyon Road space in which their work had been shown together more than five years ago. [Read More…]