Santa Fe Arts Journal

Showing artwork together is a familiar and enjoyable experience for Barbara Justice and Adriana Barrios, who have presented three previous duo exhibits and been a couple for close to 10 years. They spent three years living in Santa Fe and got married in town last July.

Their show “Here Nor There” opening at No Land on August 19 includes work that Barrios, who is working on a master’s degree in printmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Justice, a photographer who grew up in southern New Mexico, have been creating in Wisconsin. [Read More…]

The Shakespeare Guild, Shakespeare in Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Botanical Garden are joining forces to present “The Tempest” in the Santa Fe Botanical Garden’s recently opened Ojos y Manos Garden amphitheater.

“The Botanical Garden envisioned Shakespearean productions taking place in this wonderful amphitheater when they built it,” explains Rachel Kelly, artistic director of Shakespeare of Santa Fe. “They reached out to me and John Andrews (founder of The Shakespeare Guild) about doing a production.”

“The Tempest” by William Shakespeare is presented from August 23 through 27 and from August 29 through 31 and directed by Nagle Jackson, a nationally-known director who had worked with Shakespeare in Santa Fe from 1997-2002. [Read More…]

New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble, a two-year old group of professional musicians based in Albuquerque, recently put together the multi-media project “Industrial Foundations” to present at the Albuquerque Railyards, a former railroad complex and hub of industrial activity located south of the city’s downtown area.

When the musicians decided to take their music and dance project on the road, they approached the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Santa Fe. “Industrial Foundations” is presented at CCA on August 26, in the presence of Tom Joyce’s exhibit “Everything at Hand.”

“The project is centered around industry and metal, so when we found out that CCA is hosting a show of metal works by Tom Joyce, we knew that performing there was a great fit for us,” says clarinetist Clara Byom. [Read More…]

For more than 30 years, Timothy Nero’s art has expressed his thoughts about how the mind is altered and influenced by thoughts and substances and the nature of human consciousness.

Nero’s latest work, motivated in part by subconscious thoughts about what he describes as “the rampant madness in this political scene,” is featured in his upcoming show at 5.Gallery titled “Everything is Gone Except Silence” that opens on August 11.

“I took the titled from lyrics from a Jefferson Airplane song,” he explains. “All that could be left is silence.” [Read More…]

The most recent jewelry designs out of the Zobel studio in Konstanz, Germany are on exhibit in the show “Tonal Elegance: The Jewels of Atelier Zobel” opening on August 11 at Patina Gallery.

Created by Peter Schmid and his team, the new pieces on display have an emphasis on color.

“This year I’m really drawn to color,” explains Schmid. “I feel that we all deserve a little lightness right now. I wanted to create a collection about joy to remind us of the small pleasures in life. It’s hard to look at a pink tourmaline without smiling or a Paraiba tourmaline without sailing off to the Caribbean Sea, at least in in your mind’s eye.” [Read More…]

French heroine Joan of Arc (1412-1431) has been captivating and motivating Santa Fe artist Sandra Filippucci for close to 30 years. Filippucci’s passion for everything related to Joan of Arc began 28 years ago after she entered a church in Les Genettes, France.

Filippucci strongly felt Joan of Arc’s presence as she wandered around the little-known church. “I decided then and there to get acquainted,” she says.

Joan of Arc has been the primary subject in Filippucci’s art since that pivotal experience in the late 1980s. Filippucci’s cozy studio on the east side of Santa Fe is filled with images of Joan of Arc, many of which are hand worked archival pigment prints. “I have thousands of 3-D images of Joan of Arc on my computer,” she adds. [Read More…]

Art meets craft in Melinda Rosenberg’s upcoming show featuring sculptural wall pieces made out of a variety of wood materials. “Found and Made” opens at Tansey Contemporary on August 4.

“Collecting the materials has become a community effort,” explains Rosenberg, who uses everything from old wooden chairs to croquet mallets in her pieces and often scours beaches, flea markets and parking lots in search of the right stuff. “My friends have saved shutters when remodeling. I have approached farmers with dilapidated barns and asked for wood. My sister-in-law on Cape Cod has helped me bundle up large boxes of driftwood to ship home.”

Rosenberg loves how wood holds the memory of its growth within its grain. Once she finds wood with the right grain, she tries to highlight the nature of the wood as she constructs her pieces. [Read More…]

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…]

Ninety-year old painter Wolf Kahn won’t be able to travel to Santa Fe from his farm in Vermont to attend the July 28 opening of his show “Wolf Kahn: Light and Color,” but approximately three dozen of his oil paintings created from the 1990s through the present have been shipped from his Vermont studio to LewAllen Galleries.

“To plan the show, I went to his farm to look at paintings with him,” says LewAllen Galleries’ director of modernism Louis Newman, who has been friends with Kahn for years. “Selecting works was a collaborative effort.”

Most of the paintings-some of which have never been seen outside of Kahn’s studio-are scenes from the greater New England area where Kahn has lived since 1968. [Read More…]