EXHIBITIONS & EVENTS

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  has now been extended to run through February 12, 2012.

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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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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Blending an eclectic mix of Eastern and Western poetry and printing techniques, From a Distant Road features hand-colored Japanese albumen prints and original haiga by Santa Fe poet John Brandi. The exhibit runs Sept. 16-March 4, 2012, in the John Gaw Meem Room.

The exhibit includes: Eighteen of Brandi’s contemporary haiga (haiku poems accompanied by brush art work) that find their source in the poet-painters of 17th-century Japan. The haiga will be displayed on papers marbled by Palace Press Curator Tom Leech in the Japanese technique of suminagashi (black ink floating).  Six hand-tinted albumen photographs from a collection of late 19th-century images of Japan from the Photo Archives at the Palace of the Governors, paired with excerpts from the travel diaries of 17th-century haiku master Matsuo Basho. A new marbled broadside from the Palace Press featuring a prose poem by Brandi.

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A permanent collection of works by one of New Mexico's legendary creative forces.
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Considered the Sistine Chapel of the modern era and overseen by the Benedictine monks at Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota, Illuminating the Word: The Saint John's Bible features portions of the first modern-day Bible entirely handwritten and illuminated in 500 years. World-renowned calligrapher Donald Jackson, senior scribe to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Crown Office at the House of Lords, serves as the project’s artistic director from his scriptorium in Wales. Also on exhibit will be a page from an original Gutenberg Bible. A series of lectures, musical performances and calligraphy workshops accompany the exhibit, which serves as a companion to Contemplative Landscape.

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Set on our mezzanine level, The Letter, the Word & the Book is a small exhibition that complements Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible by highlighting other 20th- and 21st-century practitioners of a centuries-old craft. Using calligraphy, engravings, enameling and more, the artists featured put a  contemporary twist on documents ranging from handbills to Bibles.
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One-person exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art

Throughout his career, James Drake has examined the theme of humanity in all of its triumphs, failures, and follies—including war; love and desire; greed, gluttony, and vanity; and the realities of life along the U.S.-Mexico border. The New Mexico Museum of Art exhibition James Drake: Salon of a Thousand Souls includes 19 sculptures and works on paper by the Santa Fe-based artist spanning nearly 25 years. The exhibition opens with a free reception on Friday, October 28, 2011. It remains on view through April 22, 2012.
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Repeat After Me brings together 21 prints, primarily from the museum’s collection, that relate to repetition on two different levels: as process and as image. Included are works by Garo Antreasian, Polly Apfelbaum, Charles Arnoldi, Frederick Hammersley, Joyce Kozloff, Sol LeWitt, Sheryl Oring, and Marie Watt, among others.
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From a Spanish government that never quite knew where to draw its northern colony’s borders to a Mexican government that disagreed with where the lines eventually were drawn to a Texas Republic that wanted to claim the Rio Grande, Santa Fe, and much of eastern New Mexico, the U.S. government eventually managed to carve out the trusty rectangle we now know as New Mexico.

Between the Lines: Culture and Cartography on the Road to Statehood opens Thursday, January 5 and will be on view through May 4, 2012, in the Governor’s Gallery on the fourth floor of the state Capitol. The exhibition, part of the state’s 2012 Centennial celebration, explores explores how cartographers interpreted New Mexico’s land, its physical and political boundaries, and the cultural minglings of Native, Spanish, Mexican, and American people.

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The Arts of Survival: Folk Expression in the Face of Natural Disaster explores how folk artists helped their communities recover from four recent natural disasters: the Haitian Earthquake; Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. Gulf Coast; Pakistani floods; and the recent volcanic eruption of Mt. Merapi in Indonesia.

Opening July 3, 2011 in the Museum of International Folk Art’s ‘Gallery of Conscience’ running through May 3, 2012.

The Arts of Survival opens during International Folk Arts Week and culminates with the 8th Annual International Folk Arts Market running July 8 – 10, 2011. Highlights of the week will be artist demonstrations, artist talks, lectures, and more. A full schedule of events is on on the MOIFA website

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Since the Civil War, photographers have aimed to capture the lives of Native peoples in the Southwest, resulting in some of the most beautiful and elegant portraits in the collections of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. From May 20 to November 4, 2012, Native American Portraits, a selection of these images, will be on display in the History Museum’s Mezzanine Gallery. Together, they document the changing perception by photographers of Natives over a span of almost 170 years.

The exhibition showcases exquisite examples by some of the most prominent photographers of their days, from the post-Civil War period to about 1935.

Included are the rigid and formal ethnographic portraits of visiting Native dignitaries to Washington, D.C., following the Civil War by photographers such as Delancy Gill and Zeno Schindler; the overly romanticized and staged photos of Edward S. Curtis and Karl Moon; and the elegant but casual at-home photographs of New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians by T. Harmon Parkhurst and others.

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From January 6 through November 25, 2012, the New Mexico History Museum commemorates New Mexico's 1912 entry into the Union with 47 Stars, a collection of exhibits that includes the officially unofficial 47-star flag. 47 Stars includes long-term exhibits and a tongue-in-cheek front-window installation to help celebrate the state’s Centennial.
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Contemplative Landscape is a photographic exploration of how people have responded to and interacted with New Mexico’s landscape through art, architecture and sacred rituals. Drawing on works from the Photo Archives at the Palace of the Governors and contemporary photographers, the exhibition prominently features the work of Tony O’Brien, whose 1994-95 sojourn at a New Mexico monastery forms the heart of his new book, Light in the Desert: Photographs from the Monastery of Christ in the Desert  (Museum of New Mexico Press), debuting with the exhibition. A companion exhibit to Illuminating the Word: The Saint John's Bible.

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Macedonian ethnic dress has it all – it is full of meaning and significance, visually stunning, quite possibly overwhelming, and embodies the skill, expectations, hopes and fears, creative use of materials, and aesthetic sense of the individuals who made and wore it. Saturated with cultural meaning, these many-layered ensembles rank among the best examples of textile art anywhere.
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Folk Art of the Andes opens Sunday April 17, 2011. This will be the first exhibit in the United States to feature a broad range of folk art from the Andean region of South America, showcasing more than 850 works of Andean folk art primarlity from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exhibit runs through September 9, 2012, in the Hispanic Heritage Wing, and through March 10, 2013 in the Bartlett Wing.  The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog,
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Margarete Bagshaw: Breaking the Rules features more than 30 paintings (some on sculpted wood panels), bronze and clay as wall art and multi-colored ceramic vessels that demonstrate the breadth and multi-dimensionality of Margarete Bagshaw's work.
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Woven Identities features baskets woven by artists representing 60 cultural groups in six culture areas of Western North America: The Southwest, Great Basin, Plateau, California, the Northwest Coast, and the Arctic.

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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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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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Now 400 years old, Santa Fe was once an infant city on the remote frontier.  Santa Fe Found: Fragments of Time, on long-term exhibit in the Palace of the Governors, explores the archaeological evidence and historical documentation of the City Different before the Spanish arrived, as well as at the settling of the first colony in San Gabriel del Yungue, the founding of Santa Fe and its first 100 years as New Mexico’s first capital.

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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Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now, the main exhibition of the New Mexico History Museum, sweeps across more than 500 years of stories - from early Native inhabitants to today's residents - told through artifacts, films, photographs, computer interactives, oral histories and more. Together, they breath life into the people who made the American West: Native Americans, Spanish colonists, Mexican traders, Santa Fe Trail riders, fur trappers, outlaws, railroad men, scientists, hippies and artists.

 

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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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