EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS

Native Couture II: Innovation and Style opens at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture on Sunday, August 30, 2009. This exhibition explores the history of Native fashion from hand-made clothing and accessories of the 1880s that influenced the development of a Santa Fe Style, to today’s contemporary Native couturiers. At its root, Indian art is the quintessential original American art. This centuries-long influence of Native American art requires the buyer, or wearer, and the American public in general to ponder the origins of a truly unique American style.
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This holiday season Lloyd's Treasure Chest has a very special display highlighting winter celebrations.  Objects include menorahs and dreidels from Israel, nativities, cookie molds and a delightful selection of Tigers for Chinese New Year.  Lloyd's Treasure Chest is located in the basement of the Neutrogena Wing, where visitors are invited to take a closer look at collection items, and learn about how Museums care for collections.
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Wayang kulit performance of Indonesia, among the oldest and greatest story telling traditions in the world, is said to lie at the heart of Javanese culture. Wayang kulit are flat, elaborately painted and intricately carved and perforated leather shadow puppets that cast dazzling shadows through a cotton screen. Traditional performances last all night, beginning in the evening and lasting to dawn. Wayang Kulit performances are always accompanied by a gamelan orchestra—a traditional Indonesian musical ensemble that includes a variety of instruments such as gongs, drums, metallaphones, xylophones, stringed instruments, and vocalists.

Dancing Shadows, Epic Tales: Wayang Kulit of Indonesia introduces the distinct form of wayang kulit found in Central Java. Various aspects of this performance art will be explored, including gamelan, artistic techniques involved in making shadow puppets, the cast of characters, and regional variations of wayang. A puppet workshop, where Visitors of all ages can make and play with shadow puppets is complemented by computer kiosks to learn more about Gamelan instruments and Shadow puppets.

The Museum is open daily from Memorial Day, May 25 through Labor Day, September 7, 2009.

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"Fashioning New Mexico," the inaugural exhibition in the New Mexico History Museum's Changing Gallery, explores the clothes we wore over nearly two centuries of life's milestones -- christenings, weddings, military service, opera openings and more. A variety of interactive stations challenge visitors to tie a corset or check out a virtual image of themselves in one of the collection's outfits. The clothing and accessories have been collected for the last century. This exhibition marks the first time they have been on display.

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Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Daniel Libeskind, Tadao Ando, Spacelab’s (Peter Cook/Colin Fournier), Rafael Viñoly, and Yoshio Taniguchi are members of a pantheon of architects regarded for their original, innovative, and groundbreaking designs. In common, they were all commissioned between 2000 and 2010 to design museums – some realized, others in progress, and a few indefinitely on hold.
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Two major rivers and their tributaries - the Colorado River and the Rio Grande - have shaped both the landscape and the distribution of indigenous villages. Neighboring New Mexico pueblos on the banks of the northern Rio Grande - just a river apart - the communities of Cochiti and Santo Domingo share a ceramic tradition extending back almost 1,500 years. This permanent collection - A River Apart - preserves these iconic cultural representatives.
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The exhibition Harry Fonseca: In the Silence of Dusk  focuses on four series of paintings that explore the transformative and mythic forces that Fonseca perceived in himself and the world around him. The painting series include In the Silence of Dusk, Stone Poems, St. Francis of Assisi; and Seasons. While not a retrospective, the exhibition explores Fonseca’s body of work as it changes focus from stylized but representational studies based on his Native American heritage to more abstract explorations of his world to non-objective compositions celebrating color. All of the works in the exhibition are courtesy of the Harry Fonseca Trust. The exhibition opens at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture on Sunday, February 14, 2010, 1:00-4:00 p.m. and runs through January 2, 2011.
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Each year, the National Endowment for the Arts honors folk artists, storytellers, performers, and musicians throughout the United States for their contributions to traditional art forms. The National Heritage Fellows demonstrate artistic excellence and a commitment to their art forms through their processes, techniques, and transmission of the knowledge to others that strengthens and enriches their communities.

New Mexico residents are well-represented in this distinguished group of talented artists, especially given the size of the state's population. The Museum of International Folk Art holds examples of the works of all the Fellows from New Mexico in its collections, from weavings, colcha embroidery and silversmithing, to pottery, tinwork, straw appliqué, hide painting, retablos, and woodcarving.

“The quality and range of artworks created by New Mexico’s National Heritage Fellows is impressive. The exhibit will stand as testimony to the dedication and skill of these talented artists;” said Dr. Joyce Ice, former Director of the Museum of International Folk Art.

A Century of Masters opens September 27, 2009 and is scheduled to close January, 2011; and celebrates the Museum of New Mexico’s 100th Anniversary.

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For the first time, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology presents a significant collection of Huichol art from the early part of the last century in Huichol Art and Culture: Balancing the World. The exhibition opens at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture April 11, 2010 and will run through March 6, 2011.

There are important ties between Huichol work and Native American, prehispanic, and Hispanic art histories and cultures. Known today for colorful, decorative yarn paintings, the origins of modern Huichol art are found in the earlier Huichol religious arts of the Robert M. Zingg ethnographic collection at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

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Opening May 23 at the New Mexico History Museum, Wild at Heart: Ernest Thompson Seton dedicates itself to telling the often overlooked story of the conservationist, author, artist, lecturer and co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America. Ernest Thompson Seton’s impact on America’s conservation movement was immeasurable but, today is largely forgotten. Wild at Heart: Ernest Thompson Seton sets out to change that.

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Now celebrating its 400th anniversary, Santa Fe was once an infant city on the remote frontier. A new exhibition, opening Nov. 20, 2009, at the Palace of the Governors explores the archaeological evidence and historical documentation of Santa Fe before the Spanish arrived, the first colony in San Gabriel del Yungue, the founding of Santa Fe and its first 100 years as New Mexico’s first capital.

A symposium and lecture series supports the exhibition.

Co-curated by Josef Diaz of the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors and Stephen Post of the DCA/Office of Archaeological Studies, Santa Fe Found collects more than 160 artifacts from four historic sites, along with maps, documents, household goods, weaponry and religious objects. Together, they tell the story of cultural encounters between early colonists and the Native Americans who had long called this place home.

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Material World presents a tantalizing glimpse into the Museum of International Folk Art's largest collection of textiles and costumes stored in 57 closets and numerous trunks and drawers. The 138 rarely-seen items in this exhibition highlight the remarkable breadth and depth of 20,000 objects ranging from everyday household articles to elaborately detailed ceremonial wear in the Museum's textile collection. Photo: Man's Wedding outfit, c. 1910 Mesokovesd, Hungary, Matyo group. Gift of Florence Dibell Bartlett.

The exhibition opens at the Museum of International Folk Art on December 20, 2009 in the Cotsen Gallery of the Neutrogena Wing and runs through May 23, 2011.
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The Buchsbaum Gallery features each of the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona in a selection of pieces that represent the development of a community tradition. In addition, a changing area of the gallery, entitled Traditions Today highlights the evolving contemporary traditions of the ancient art of pottery making.
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Here, Now, and Always is a major exhibition based on eight years of collaboration among Native American elders, artists, scholars, teachers, writers and museum professionals. Voices of fifty Native Americans guide visitors through the Southwest's indigenous communities and their challenging landscapes. More than 1,300 artifacts from the Museum's collections are displayed accompanied by poetry, story, song and scholarly discussion.
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A permanent collection of works by two of New Mexico's legendary creative forces.
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How the West Is One:The Art of New Mexico, organizes key objects from the museum’s collections so that they outline an intercultural history of New Mexico art, from the arrival of railroads in 1879 to the present.

This long term exhibition presents 70 works by Native American, Hispanic, and European-American artists which illustrate the changing aesthetic ideals that have evolved within southwestern art over the last 125 years.

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Though the source of the Segesser Hide Paintings is obscure, their significance cannot be clearer: the hides are rare examples of the earliest known depictions of colonial life in the United States. Moreover, the tanned and smoothed hides carry the very faces of men whose descendants live in New Mexico today...
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Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now, the core exhibition of the New Mexico History Museum, is divided into six sections. Five represent chronological periods from the pre-colonial era to the present. The sixth offers a panorama of New Mexico today, presented primarily through the voices and stories of its people. As the section titles imply, each is set apart by time frames and contrasting views from first-person accounts of the people who lived during the different periods.
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Treasures of Devotion/Tesoros de Devoción contains bultos, retablos, and crucifijos dating from the late 1700s to 1900 which illustrate the distinctive tradition of santo making in New Mexico introduced by settlers from Mexico.
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"I believe we should preserve this evidence of the past, not as a pattern for sentimental imitation, but as nourishment for the creative spirit of the present."

- Alexander Girard

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