Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2024 i Art & Antiques

INTERSECT Aspen returns to the Aspen Ice Garden July 30-August 3, 2024. For the last decade, Intersect has been the area’s only major fine art and design fair. Organizers curate a dynamic and eclectic mix of modern and contemporary galleries from around the globe. This year’s fair will include work from over 100 artists represented by almost 30 top galleries. New this year, ‘design’ has been added to the event title. Exhibitors will include top contemporary design galleries such as Mastrangelo and BDDW. Todd Merrill Studio will present an exciting array of fine furnishings and high-end decorative objects. For over three decades, ceramicist Christopher Russell has been creating dynamic vessels rich in surface ornament. Statuesque Yellow Vessel II (2024) explores the architectural possibilities of hand-built forms and measures in at…

A NEW EXHIBITION at New York’s Anita Shapolsky Gallery features work by American post-war abstractionists who were impacted by past masters and modernist innovators. Living in the Moment of Abstract Art, on view through September 28, 2024, insists that abstraction did not develop in a vacuum and highlights historical connections. The exhibition devotes one full gallery to Amaranth Ehrenhalt (1928-2021). A consummate colorist, she was known for her expressive palettes and bold, gestural canvases. Ehrenhalt trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Barnes—a collection that almost certainly shaped her love of color. She moved to New York in the early 1950s at the height of Abstract Expressionism’s rise but relocated to Paris where she spent almost four decades, fostering friendships with young American expats and members of…

FAMILY, Identity, & Culture: Paintings By John Hunter, on view at Queens College’s Godwin-Ternbach Museum through August 8, 2024, details the artist’s life. From his travels in Africa to family snapshots, gay life and culture to contemporary injustice, Hunter provides a glimpse into his own life while also providing a poignant take on memory, self, and modernist painting. After training as a painter in the late 1960s and 1970s at Wayne State University, Hunter completed a stint as a museum educator and then pursued a doctorate in Renaissance art and a career in academia. Following his retirement in 2003, Hunter returned his attention to painting. Since then, he has worked in series, imbuing his work with a profound understanding of the Modernist canon. His rich colors, purposeful simplification and flattening…

FOR OVER 25 years, King Galleries has remained committed to representing the best in Pueblo pottery. This August, the Santa Fe location will debut two special shows, coinciding with the city’s Indian Market. On Saturday, August 10th, Reflections of Stories Told presents signed works by renowned artists Tony Da, Margaret Tafoya, and Maria Martinez. Da’s Black and Sienna Jar and Red Clay bear are indicative of the artist’s position as the first Pueblo “rock star,” merging San Ildefonso tradition with modern stylization. His signature bear form features inset turquoise along an incised heartline. On Friday, August 16th, the gallery will host 15 artists along with special demonstrations, allowing visitors to speak directly with these contemporary legends. Les Namingha’s In Flight is an excellent example of the Hopi-Tewa and Zuni…

TURNER CARROLL Gallery + Art Advisors presents two exciting summer exhibitions at their primary Santa Fe gallery and at CONTAINER, their innovative contemporary space opened in 2022. Hunt Slonem: Il Giardino Zoologica runs July 5-August 4, 2024 at the original Turner Carroll Gallery with recent paintings featuring the artist’s well-known, whimsical animals and playful patterns. Broadly inspired by Pop, Slonem’s canvases include birds, butterflies, and rabbits—a stand-in for self as he was born in the year of the rabbit—as a mode of meditative worship that borders on obsession. New work, including Lunas (2019) and Pink Hombre 2 (2021) become more than simple representation. The loose expressive figures dissolve into joyous fields of color and revelatory repetition. Virgil Ortiz: Revolt 1680/2180: Daybreak of the Resistance, a new immersive installation, opens at…

Eileen Agar’s Surrealism and Storytelling “My life is a collage,” writes Eileen Agar (1899–1991) in the first chapter of her autobiography, A Look at My Life. The metaphor is particularly apt for the surrealist artist—and not just because collage was a key medium in her oeuvre. In her writings, Agar lays out her biography as a series of proximate experiences. She writes about people who were adjacent to her, who came and went, who stuck with her. Her worlds overlapped. People and places seem to be cut and pasted repeatedly; personal and professional lines were constantly blurred. A Look at My Life was originally published in 1988, fell out of print, and Thames & Hudson reissued the autobiography this year, with dozens of glorious illustrations. The new edition offers an…

A NEW EXHIBITION at the Albuquerque Museum examines life in the era of the Anthropocene. Vivarium: Exploring Intersections of Art, Storytelling, and the Resilience of the Living World, on view through February 9, 2025, includes multiple works from seven contemporary artists who utilize rich and imaginative narrative as a means to explore environmental conflict. Latin for “place of life,” Vivarium emphasizes the human causes of climate crisis, juxtaposing our own struggle to survive with that of our animal counterparts. Eloy Torrez creates uncanny narratives in work that draws broad inspiration from Surrealism. Meat (2010) feels DalÍ-esque with its desolate landscape and a fading clock along the horizon. A beautiful woman is as much “meat” to be consumed as the pile of steaks and terrifying carnivore that flank her. In El…

A NATIONAL leader in contemporary American and classic Southwestern, Western, and Native American art, Santa Fe Art Auction returns this summer with two sales: New Mexico Now: Spanish Colonial to Spanish Market, presented July 24-25, and American Indian: Classic to Contemporary scheduled for August 13-14. The July sale—the nation’s only auction with an exclusive focus on both historic and contemporary Hispanic and Pueblo art—includes spectacular finds, each object a rich amalgam of the area’s cultural heritage. Religious objects such as retablos, crucifixes, and devotionals figure heavily. The auction will also include work from celebrated Taos wood carver Patrociño Barela (1900-1964). The self-taught artist originally produced bultos, a form of religious sculpture, but later expanded his repertoire to incorporate secular themes. Figure with Staff (est. $1500-2500) projects an air of peace…

Located in a beautiful historic adobe on Canyon Road in the heart of the Santa Fe art district, Morning Star Gallery has built its reputation on quality, authenticity, and integrity. The gallery presents the finest selection of antique Native American art available to the market. This August, the gallery will host a special sale and exhibition focused on Ledger Art with an opening on Saturday, August 10, 2024. Beginning in the mid 19th century, Ledger art developed among Plains peoples as a means of visually recording oral histories. Related to earlier pictorial formats on rock or hide surfaces, the drawings derive their name from the pages of ledger books, acquired from settlers, on which imagery was recorded. Many drawings detail a contemporary history of conflict and forced assimilation. As the…

ON VIEW AT the New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary through early May 2025, Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970-2000 examines artists with ties to the state. With five partial rotations scheduled for the run, curators emphasize the compelling breadth of the state’s creatives with a focus on three thematic groupings: Place, Spectacle, and Identity. An accompanying oral history project will help further enliven work on display. David Bradley paints satirical narratives that investigate commercialism and the diverse make-up of Santa Fe. El Farol: Canyon Road Cantina (2000) captures a lively interior scene at the city’s oldest bar and restaurant. People from all backgrounds dine and carouse. Scattered throughout, he includes working artists and area royalty, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Juan Hamilton seated in the back corner. Born in…

THE HARWOOD Museum of Art presents important exhibitions on two artists with connections to Taos. Luchita Hurtado: Earth & Sky Interjected opens in late July and examines the Venezuelan-born artist’s spiritual connection to Taos. A ‘TIME 100’ honoree in 2019—one year before her death at 99—Hurtado is known for her unconventional techniques and her emphasis on universality and the landscape. Opening in late September, Nicholas Herrera: El Rito Santero is the first major solo exhibition for the master santero painter. Born just outside Taos, Herrera felt the call to art after a life-changing car accident at 26. The exhibition tracks his use of traditional modes, such as bultos and retablos, to record his complicated history and mestizo identity.…

Al Held is having a moment—again. Best known for his punchy, hard-edged geometric abstractions, often prodigiously scaled, Held was always a contender in the New York art world (and beyond) although his work never quite received the critical acclaim it deserved, at odds with the prevailing commandments (Thou shalt worship flatness at the top of the list) haloing advanced art as laid down by critic Clement Greenberg. But with the renewed interest in abstraction—of the third kind, Held’s kind, one that deployed geometric forms in novel ways that included implications of the representational (or not)—he and his prescient, against-the-grain, eye-jolting paintings are finally aligned with the Zeitgeist, a swipe-right match for our post-millennial age. That substantial uptick in visibility includes “Al Held: About Space,” a welcome survey exhibition of the…

AFTER A ten-minute bidding frenzy, Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s Les Distractions de Dagobert sold for a stratospheric $28.5 million at Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction in New York this spring. Selling well above its estimated $12 to $18 million price tag and smashing the artist’s 2022 Sotheby’s record of $3.3 million, the painting places Carrington (1917–2011) alongside the likes of Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keefe, making her one of the top five most valuable women artists. The record auction sum also situates her among the four most valuable Surrealist painters, surpassing Salvador Dalí and her one-time lover Max Ernst. The winning bidder and well-known art collector Eduardo Constantini is also the founder of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA). “This masterpiece will be part of a collection where…

On view through January 5, 2025, the Redwood Library and Athenaeum’s new exhibition,  This Drop of Earth: American Landscape Miniatures 1840-1890, examines small-scale work in the genre from an important private collection. These portable pictures reconfigure nature’s immensity making it both understandable and possessable, all while capturing regional complexities, natural beauty, and the impact of settlement. Miniatures, often written off as studies for larger canvases, are here recognized as a separate, lucrative commodity, designed for display in small cases from which they derive the name “cabinet pictures.” At just 6 ¼ inches in diameter, Aaron Draper Shattuck’s tondo painting Through the Trees (1857) is an excellent example of the mode. The New Hampshire born artist places the viewer in a forested area looking out toward a placid river, pasture land,…

A NEW MONOGRAPHIC exhibition at the Clark Art Institute sheds light on littleknown, Caribbean-born artist Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832). A well-respected académicien, Lethière charted a successful career during the French Revolution and the later Napoleonic era. A team of curators and researchers at the Clark and Paris’ Musée du Louvre worked diligently for five years to reconstruct the artist’s life and bring new attention to his considerable body of work. Born enslaved in Sainte-Anne, Guadeloupe, Lethière was the child of Pierre Guillon, a white plantation owner, and Marie-Françoise Pepeye, an enslaved woman of mixed race. Raised on the plantation, he traveled to France with his father at 14 and enrolled at a school in Rouen that specialized in training artists. Successes in drawing competitions led to attendance at Paris’ Académie royale…

CHICAGO’S McCormick Gallery has moved after 24 years in the West Loop. The new location at 2251 W. Grand Avenue in the West Town area is near other area gallerists including Rhona Hoffman, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Patron, and Andrew Rafacz. The gallery will reopen September 12, 2024 with a show of work by Chicago painter John Santoro. Mud Time—And Other Forces of Nature derives its name from a Joni Mitchell painting and the Robert Frost poem that inspired it. Santoro is best known for his landscapes that use methods similar to the Abstract Expressionists. His thick impasto yields a connection to place that is almost tangible. Poseidon’s Sneaker Wave (2023) describes the rush of a rogue wave crashing on the shoreline. A range of blues, frothy white, and shimmering, sunshine…

A SPECIALIST in American Modernism, Santa Fe’s Addison Rowe Gallery has long celebrated artists who blended mysticism with modern approaches. Their latest exhibition, Transcendental and Beyond: The Essence of Art (June 28-October 31, 2024), focuses on women artists working in this mode. Owner Victoria Addison notes, “I am driven to highlight the formidable contributions of female artists whose dynamic and distinctive canvases serve as evocative expressions of both earthly and celestial imagery.” The Being: A Transcendental Vision (1934), a recently-acquired canvas by Transcendental Painting Group co-founder Agnes Lawrence Pelton, serves as the exhibition centerpiece. Enrobed in concentric arcs of golden light, a buddha-like figure meditates with hands raised. The gesture, similar to the abhaya mudra, evokes peace. Pelton, a practitioner of Theosophy, used her art as a means to invoke…

LOCATED SEVEN blocks southwest of Santa Fe’s downtown plaza, the Railyard Arts District (RAD™) provides a space for discerning collectors, artists, and art enthusiasts of all interests. Selected as one of the “10 Best Arts Districts” by USA Today readers, it is steps away from the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market, arts cinemas, boutiques, breweries, and eateries. A vibrant component of the rich, multicultural Santa Fe art scene, the RAD is a must-visit location. The Railyard Arts District is home to eight leading contemporary galleries all within walking distance of each other. These include Blue Rain Gallery, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Evoke Contemporary, form & concept, LewAllen Galleries, Tai Modern, Art Vault, and Zane Bennett Contemporary Art. The district is anchored at the northern end of the Railyard by New Mexico…

OPENING THIS July, SITE Santa Fe presents Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson (July 5-October 28, 2024). Co-curated by Fernández and Lisa Le Feuvre, Executive Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, the exhibition provides an intergenerational dialogue on the artists’ shared conceptual approaches and connection to the landscape. A founding figure in Land Art, Smithson erased the divide between space and place and forced the viewer to reckon with cosmic forces. His early “Nonsite” sculptures, including Red Sandstone Corner Piece (1968), reconfigure precise displacements of earth—here from a rapidly industrialized area of New Jersey—in the gallery. The work is at once indoors and outdoors, here and there. Spiral Jetty (1970), a staggering 1500-foot coil of earth arranged in Utah’s Great Salt Lake, stood as evidence of man’s ability to reform the landscape. But, as…

THE EXPANDED Whitehawk Antique Indian & Ethnographic Art Show takes over the Santa Fe Convention Center August 9-12, 2024. Over 120 exhibitors, including those formerly associated with the Objects of Art show, will highlight handpicked offerings in Native American and world Indigenous art alongside work from Western artists. Ticketed entry provides access to special exhibits. Art of Timeless Beauty, the Navajo Child’s Blanket, curated by Robert Parsons, will feature Diné textile weaving from the 19th century. Miniature Native American Baskets - A Lifetime Collection, curated by Jan Duggan, presents more than 200 fine examples of Akimel O’odham (Pima) basketry. Thomas Cleary LLC brings a Lakota Adolescent’s Pictorial Vest from the late 19th century that includes images of the American flag and warriors on horseback with feathered headdresses—a signifier of rank…

CALIFORNIA artist Millard Sheets (1907–1989) was thrice blessed. His parents recognized and encouraged his talent early on; he excelled in a number of media; and, as a prominent and beloved instructor, his legacy lives on, as is evident in “Millard Sheets: California Master,” now on view at the Hilbert Museum in Orange, California, through August 3, 2024. Perhaps best known for watercolors that emphasize California and other American landscapes rendered in strong, outlined shapes defined with waves of color, Sheets was also a superb illustrator, mosaic muralist, and architect. That he is not better known outside of California and does not rank with American luminaries like Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton is, perhaps, a result of an essential optimism that pervades his work, an optimism born of a belief…