Santa Fe Arts Journal

Music

Performance Santa Fe’s executive director Jonathan Winkle first listened to 24-year-old jazz singer Veronica Swift last January when he was visiting New York. “Quite frankly, she blew me away,” says Winkle, who spends a great deal of time researching and identifying emerging talent. “I rarely have that kind of immediate visceral response to an artist. So, I booked her.”

Swift is Performance Santa Fe’s guest artist on November 9 for an evening of jazz tunes that includes bebop, swing and selections from the Great American Songbook.

“Veronica Swift is an extraordinary jazz vocalist,” Winkle continues. “Her maturity on stage and her stylistic sensibilities immediately set her apart from other talented, young singers. In addition, her vocal control, scat singing and interplay with her side men function at an extraordinarily high level.” [Read More…]

Visual Art

East of West marks its final regularly-scheduled exhibition in Santa Fe by presenting “BORDERLAND,” a show of 12 large-scale photographs taken by Yemeni/Bosnian/American multimedia artist Alia Ali. 

Opening on October 20 and running through November 9, “BORDERLAND” is a series of photos in which Ali looks at artificially-imposed, human-made borders between countries and examines how pronounced and perceptible these demarcations can be.

Ali traveled for nine months across 11 regions of the world to connect with textile artists living in communities that have beens scarred by the imprints of power and destruction. Each photograph depicts an individual artisan posing beneath their own creation. Stories and cultures are expressed through color, texture and pattern. [Read More…]

Visual Art

Three artists explore various relationships between memories and the forming of personal identity in Freeform Art Space’s show “Reperception,” which runs from October 20 through November 3 and is curated by Jane Gordon.

A New York-based artist whose work emanates from drawing, Lindsey Wolkowicz displays four small mixed media works on panel and four works on paper that revolve around the relationship between us and the spaces we occupy. Figures and architecture are key elements in her work.

Wolkowicz enjoys portraying the human body in an interior space. The work is not about representing a location but instead about presenting what is found there, she says. [Read More…]

Visual Art

“My latest series of paintings continues my exploration of the boundaries of realism in figurative painting,” says Erin Cone, who displays new figurative work in the show “Boundless” that opens at 5 p.m. on October 12 at Nuart Gallery.

Cone’s work is about visual impact rather than narrative content. She’s interested in walking a fine line between realism and abstraction and enjoys the push/pull energy she feels during the painting process. 

She wants her work to feel real and unreal at the same time. She calls it “orchestrated realism.” [Read More…]

Music

“Low Tide,” Tracy Grammer’s 11th album and the first one to contain her original songs, is a milestone for this veteran folksinger.

“It feels like a new beginning for me,” explains Grammer, who sings tunes from this 2018 release at GIG Performance Space on October 27. “I’m telling my story. It’s really personal, but I believe that the personal is also universal.”

Grammer had been part of a successful duo with singer/songwriter Dave Carter until his death from a heart attack in 2002 during the duo’s tour with Joan Baez. [Read More…]

Theater

The Oasis Theatre Company presents four plays focusing on trust issues during its 2018-2019 season, which kicks off on October 11 with the production of Anton Chekhov’s play “Uncle Vanya” that was first published in 1898.

Adapted by David Mamet from a translation by Vlada Chernomordik, “Uncle Vanya” begins with the visit of an elderly professor and his attractive and much younger second wife, Yelena, to the rural estate that supports their urban lifestyle. The play is about a man, his best friend and the woman they love. 

“Uncle Vanya reveals the brilliance of Chekhov’s perception of the human struggle with day-to-day living,” says director Brenda Bynum. [Read More…]

Visual Art

“Although I have painted balls exclusively for more than 25 years, I don’t really care that much about them,” says artist John Gibson, who exhibits his recent paintings of balls during a solo show at Gerald Peters Gallery.

An artist who retired from teaching drawing and painting at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts in 2017, Gibson has been working non-stop in his studio for the past 18 months preparing work for shows around the country. 

After experiencing extreme frustration with everything revolving around his exhibit in New York last spring, he cut up much of the show’s work into small pieces. “It was a creative, not a destructive, act,” he adds. [Read More…]

Visual Art

“I’ve always enjoyed the ‘kitsch’ of pirates, their costumes and such,” says Albuquerque artist Juliana Coles, whose show of mixed media paintings “Pirate Queen; Piracy is a Feminist Act” opens at the Jean Cocteau Cinema Gallery at 5:30 p.m. on October 4.

Female pirates are the subject of Coles’s show. To date, Coles has found the names of close to five dozen women pirates who have lived in countries around the world throughout history.

Coles’s interest in pirates began a decade ago during a retreat she led in Florida. [Read More…]

Visual Art

Peter Harrington’s drive to find his perfect symbolic expression through combining geometric forms with organic elements in totemic ways motivates this Jemez Springs painter every time he enters his studio.

“I began this series of paintings about 25 years ago,” explains Harrington, who shows some of his latest pieces during a two-artist show at Ellsworth Gallery that opens on October 5. “Up in My Grill: Explorations in Sublime Irreverence” features Harrington’s paintings and ceramic sculptures by Gena Fowler.

Harrington’s background as a practitioner of Buddhism informs his work. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University who also studied art in a master’s program at Purdue University, Harrington spent five years living in Zen monasteries.  [Read More…]

Visual Art

Matthew Mullins’s interest in the connections between people and nature has resulted in a body of work that encompasses paintings, photographs and sculptures. 

A selection of pieces representing several sub-bodies of work within one main body of work are on display in his show “The Sun in our Bones,” which opens on September 28 at form & concept. 

While there are many paintings in the show, Mullins is also exhibiting photos with long pinhole exposure from four days to eight months. [Read More…]