History of early digital art with art historian and author Patrick Frank
In the late 1960s, the University of New Mexico played a key role in bringing together creativity and technology in what was then the nascent field of computer art. Now a new book from Museum of New Mexico Press offers the first in depth account of this early digital creativity — “Sharing Code: Art1, Frederick Hammersley, and the Dawn of Computer Art.”
Frank says it was a unique period in the evolution of digital art, and in 1968 New Mexico was the perfect place for it to happen.
The project is aiming to break ground in spring 2020, with the first units coming available in Winter 2021 and full buildout of the housing that following summer.
Inter-Faith Housing nonprofit just learned it will get a $10 million grant for its Midtown development, the Siler Yard Arts and Creativity Center.
Affordable live-work rental project for artists on Siler Road… the idea has been in the works for quite some time. Inter-Faith Housing applied in two other funding cycles. A variety of other costs have been covered by other interested parties, such the National Endowment for the Arts and the city itself, which donated the land and promised to cover the costs of utilities like sewer lines and water. Creative Santa Fe is a project partner.
The 65-unit development is slated to include performance, exhibition and “micro-retail” space, a shared workshop and a classroom with programs such as entrepreneurship training to help residents transition to sustainable living and find connections to social services.
The grant received on Thursday has always been the missing piece, comprising 60% of the development’s total construction costs – and now it’s in place.
The most affordable unit in the development will cost $390 per month, and all the homes and community spaces will be powered by solar energy. Individuals who earn less than 60% of the area median income, about $28,000 or less for an individual, will qualify, and for families, the bar is lowered.
Five Santa Fe arts organizations hauled in a combined $170,000 in National Endowment for the Arts grants announced Wednesday..
The Santa Fe Art Institute got the lion’s share, an $85,000 grant from the NEA’s Our Town program, which supports partnerships between arts organizations and municipal governments to revitalize neighborhoods. This money will go toward “culture asset mapping” and community events geared toward future redevelopment of the city-owned former college campus property off St. Michael’s Drive.
“The NEA Our Town grant will help us to connect the arts and local culture with equitable development of the midtown campus,” said Jamie Blosser, the institute’s executive director. “We will invite the community to deeply engage in imagining new possibilities for the midtown district.”
The art institute was one of 57 awardees nationwide to receive shares of $4.1 million in Our Town grants, which ranged from $25,000 to $200,000.
“With asset mapping, instead of looking for problems, you look for assets,” Blosser said. “You recognize all the assets you do have and how they can come around to support the midtown campus.”
The institute, a tenant on the campus for 20 years, has played a role in shaping a community vision for the property that once housed the College of Santa Fe and subsequently the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
original article from Artsy,
Alexxa Gotthardt, May 17, 2019
For generations, artists from Georgia O’Keeffe to Ken Price have followed New Mexico’s magnetic pull, finding inspiration in the high desert’s expansive vistas, quietude, and respite from social and market pressures.
Several months after photographer-gallerist Alfred Stieglitz presented O’Keeffe’s first New York solo show, in April 1917, the 29-year-old painter embarked on a trip across the American West with her youngest sister, Claudia. While they’d planned to head straight from Texas to Colorado, their train detoured to Santa Fe. New Mexico’s vast, mercurial skies and incandescent light mesmerized the artist. “I’m out here in New Mexico—going somewhere—I’m not positive where—but it’s great,” she gushed in a letter to Stieglitz, dated August 15th. “Not like anything I ever saw before.”
“There is so much more space between the ground and sky out here it is tremendous,” she continued. “I want to stay.” By 1949, O’Keeffe had made the New Mexican high desert her permanent home, indelibly tattooing its landscape to her work, identity, and legacy.
Portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe in Abiquiu, New Mexico, 1974. Photo by Joe Munroe/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
The Santa Fe University of Art and Design will be closing in the spring of 2018.
SFUAD during outdoor vision fest 2015
School administrators cited ongoing financial challenges and the need to offer their roughly 650 students more clarity about the school’s future. Still, administrators say they are considering other options, such as public-private partnerships that can keep the school open.
The school is owned by Laureate International Universities. The city of Santa Fe leases the campus to the university for $2.2 million a year. Laureate had hoped to sell its assets to Raffles Education Corp. of Singapore, but the deal fell through.
The school has transfer arrangements with several accredited institutions. Administrators say the goal is to see eligible students transfer with as little financial or academic disruption as possible. Freshman and Sophomores will not have a school to come back to next Fall. Juniors and Seniors will have a skeleton faculty and facilities to finish their degrees. Marketing and outreach departments at SFUAD have already closed up shop.
The 2016 biennial, dubbed “Much Wider Than a Line,” is the second edition of a rethinking of the event.
Xenobia Bailey, Sistah Paradise’s Great Wall of Fire Revival Tent (1993–ongoing). Courtesy of the artist
Margaret Randall, self-described “feminist poet, writer, photographer and social activist,” was born in New York City in 1936. Amid a life of many peripatetic adventures, she found herself in Mexico City during the 1960s, where she co-founded the pioneering bilingual journal of poetry and art, El Corno Emplumado (“The Plumed Horn”), with the Mexican poet Sergio Mondragón. The journal, which prided itself in showcasing work by “communist guerrillas, Catholic priests, indigenous poets,” and “consecrated masters,” according to Randall, will be celebrated next week by an installation in the SITElines biennial in Santa Fe, which opens July 16. Indeed, it can be thought of as one of the muses for the show.
The editors of El Corno Emplumado took a stand for the Mexican student movement, which faced violent repression in 1968. The ensuring scrutiny from the Mexican government effectively marked its end. “When the repression hit us and I had to go underground, that was the end of the magazine,” Randall recalls in a video dedicated to its history.
Randall’s subsequent life took her to post-revolutionary Cuba, through the social upheaval of Nicaragua, and back to the United States in the 1980s, where she was nearly ejected again for the anti-imperialist sentiment of her writings. Today, she lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
With a continent-spanning creative significance but at a right angle to the typical globe-trotting paths of the art circuit, her story serves as a precedent for the kind of energy that SITE Santa Fe’s biennial is attempting to capture.
Two years ago, the organizers of Santa Fe’s venerable biennial (founded 1995) decided to rethink the project amid a glut of international art events. They committed themselves to a six-year cycle of events, called SITElines, that would focus on “New Perspectives on the Art of the Americas,” a remit that performs a balancing act between expanding the focus of a regional biennial, while still telling a specific story.
“Part of why we set out to change the biennial in the way we did was to create a platform for many voices that were not included in the traditional biennial circuit, especially in the United States,” explained Irene Hofmann, director and chief curator of the new biennial’s organizing institution, SITE Santa Fe.
Graciela Iturbide, Self Portrait with the Seri Indians, Sonoran Desert, Mexico (1979). Courtesy of the artist
“You will recognize names on the list,” she continued, “but we are also bringing forward a number of artists who haven’t been a part of the conversation, partly because they are indigenous, or because they are artists who often pigeonholed in strictly Latin American, or Caribbean exhibitions.”
As part of its rethinking, SITElines has ditched the model of superstar curator, employing instead a collaborative team. For 2016, the five curators represent different geographies and specialties—even if at least three of the five work for New York institutions: Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, curator at New York’s El Museo del Barrio; Kathleen Ash-Milby, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian; and Pablo León de la Barra, curator of Latin American art at the Guggenheim.
Rounding out the roster are Pip Day, director and curator at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art in Montréal, and Kiki Mazzucchelli, an independent curator who splits time between London and São Paulo.
Over the course of a year and a half of collaborative discussion and reading, this group honed the theme. Each contributed four to six artists representing their interests.
The title of the biennial, “Much Wider Than a Line,” is cribbed from Indigenous poet and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s book Dancing on our Turtle’s Back, which looks at the traditions of the Nishnaabeg people as a resource for contemporary thinking about society.
Cildo Meireles, The Southern Cross/Cruzeiro do Sul (1969 – 1970). Courtesy of the artists, Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paolo.
All told, the event features 36 participants, from Brazilian art great Cildo Miereles to “social practice” star Pablo Helguera.
“It is certainly not the usual suspects,” Hofmann told me. “At the same time, even the artists you do know, it frames them in ways that create important new connections.”
Below, the full list:
Jonathas De Andrade (b. 1982 Maceió, Brazil; lives in Recife, Brazil)
Xenobia Bailey (b. 1955 Seattle, Washington; lives and works in New York)
Lina Bo Bardi (b. 1914 Rome, Italy; d. 1992 São Paulo, Brazil)
Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946 in Cairo, Egypt)
Margarita Cabrera (b. 1973 Monterrey, Mexico; lives in El Paso, Texas)
Raven Chacon (b. 1977 Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, Arizona, lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Benvenuto Chavajay (b. 1978 Guatemala City; lives in Guatemala City)
Mariana Castillo Deball (b. 1975 Mexico City, Mexico; lives in Berlin)
William Cordova (b. 1971 Lima, Peru; lives in Miami/New York/Lima)
Lewis deSoto (b. 1954 San Bernardino, California; lives in Napa, California)
Aaron Dysart (b. 1975 Minneapolis, Minnesota; lives in St. Paul, Minnesota)
Carla Fernández (b.1973 Saltillo, Mexico, lives in Mexico City)
Miguel Gandert (b. 1956 Espanola, New Mexico; lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972 Colorado; lives in Hudson, New York)
Jorge González (b. 1981 San Juan, Puerto Rico; lives in San Juan)
Maria Hupfield (b. 1975 Georgian Bay, Ontario, Canada; lives in New York)
