Santa Fe: summer preview

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Sarah S. King

In addition to the internationally recognized SITE Santa Fe biennial opening in mid-July, Santa Fe is gearing up for a culturally rich series of events being billed as "Russian Summer in Santa Fe," a city-wide festival that explores Russian culture through the performing, visual and literary arts. Along with the annual Spanish and Indian markets, the city will also serve as host to an international folk-art fair, touted as the first of its kind in this country. The following are selected highlights from this season's exhibitions and art events taking place in and around Santa Fe.

Santa Fe's Russian festival, sponsored by the city in partnership with the state of New Mexico and the Museum of New Mexico, centers around the exhibition "Nicholas & Alexandra: At Home with the Last Tsar and His Family," on view through Sept. 5, which makes its U.S. debut at Santa Fe's Museum of Fine Arts and then travels to several venues around the country before ending in Russia. Organized by the American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation, Washington, D.C., the show features over 250 items from the Romanovs' personal collection at the Alexander Palace, near St. Petersburg, including paintings, decorative-art objects, architectural drawings, books, photographs and letters. Many of the items have never been exhibited before. In conjunction with the festival, a number of Santa Fe's commercial galleries are presenting Russian-themed shows comprising both traditional and contemporary art.

Under the festival's umbrella, the Museum of Fine Arts will also present a show of recent works by Moscow-born conceptual artists Komar and Melamid (July 9-Oct. 3). On display will be recent examples from their "Symbols of the Big Bang" series, as well as new collaborative pieces to be initiated between the Russian duo and other artists who will take part in a series of workshops at the Santa Fe Art Institute, beginning in June. The Institute's summer exhibition, titled "Transmit + Transform" [June 7-Oct. 23], also derives in part from the summer workshops. The show will feature multimedia investigations of sound and light by Laurie Anderson, Dara Birnbaum, Gary Hill, Christian Marclay, Shirin Neshat, Peter Sarkisian, Richard Tuttle and James Turrell, among others.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum has organized "Georgia O'Keeffe and New Mexico: a Sense of Place"; it runs from June 11 to Sept. 12, before traveling to the Columbus Museum of Art and the Delaware Art Museum. Presenting 50 works made between 1929 and the early 1950s, it is the first exhibition of O'Keeffe's work to emphasize her depictions of the Southwestern landscape. The show also includes pictures taken by contemporary photographers of the actual sites she painted, which illuminate the artist's gradual shift from abstraction toward representation.

Santa Fe's best-known alternative art space, the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA), will hold a group show [July 9-Aug. 22] of regional artists selected from its annual invitational that inaugurates its main building's new exhibition room. Concurrently showing in the center's adjacent warehouse space will be "Tomb of the Red Queen," an exhibition of large-scale abstract paintings by Mexican artist Ricardo Mazal inspired by a recently discovered ancient Mexican tomb in which a woman was found buried in powdered pigment.

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture's new wing--the Masterpieces Gallery--will also be inaugurated in July with the exhibition "Beauty Within," which runs July 2 through June 2005. The show, which spans 1,000 years, features over 100 Native American artworks and decorative art objects culled from the museum's collection. Highlights include a Socorro bowl dated ca. 950-1400 A.D., pre-Columbian pottery, Navajo weavings and silverwork, a selection of Pomo baskets dating from the early 1900s, and vessels produced by 20th-century San Ildefonso Pueblo potter Maria Martinez.

A two-day event--July 17 and 18--coinciding with SITE Santa Fe's opening weekend, the First Annual International Folk Art Market is organized by the Museum of New Mexico Foundation and the Museum of International Folk Art; the site is the folk art museum's adjoining plaza. It will feature over 75 artists from 40 countries--including Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Haiti, Nigeria, Rwanda, Spain, Sweden and Thailand--as well as a UNESCO-sponsored program, which will bring 10 prizewinning folk artists to Santa Fe. Representatives of art cooperatives and visiting artists from around the globe will also occupy booths, along with international and local Santa Fe dealers. The wide range of works on display will include South African bottle-cap sculptures, Brazilian woodcuts, Japanese ceramics, Tibetan Thangka paintings, Tuareg nomad artifacts, Lithuanian metal works and East Indian textiles.

The nonprofit organization Art Santa Fe Presents chose Hilton Kramer, editor and publisher of the New Criterion, as this year's speaker for its highly anticipated annual summer lecture. His talk, "My Adventures in the Art World," takes place on July 15 at the Museum of Fine Arts. And in the performing-arts arena, the National Dance Institute and the Santa Fe Opera and Chamber Music Festival are offering both contemporary and traditional Russian musical programs throughout the summer.