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.
If you’re in Santa Fe before March 5th, “Lowriders, Hopper and Hot Rods” is a must-see show at the New Mexico History Museum. The dramatic exhibition is darkly staged in a new section of the historic Governors Palace, built in 1609, and includes photos, memorabilia and 2 stunning lowrider autos. Lowrider cars have come into their own as a symbol of Hispanic (and especially New Mexican) cultural identity. Because of the size of the cars, entire families could enjoy a ride, moving at a slow and ceremonial pace much like a parade float or a religious procession. Also in this show are oral histories from community members that provide insight into the history and importance of the lowrider to the family.
Fred Rael in “Boulevard Legend,” a 1964 Chevrolet, Española, 2003. Photo by Jim Arndt.
The curator Daniel Kosharek contacted photographers to build the show; the result: contributions from over 30 of them who documented the lowrider community in its heyday from the 1970’s to the 90’s. And for the car geek in everyone there are hood ornaments, car models, even a “hopper” scale that measures how high the front end of a lowrider can rise or “hop” (that would be up to 9 feet).
Says Kosharek: “This exhibit could not have happened without the support of the lowrider community, best demonstrated by last year’s lowrider parade and car show on the Santa Fe Plaza in May. We had 130 cars registered for the event filling all available slots. On the day of the event over 4,000 people crowded the plaza and parade route”.
The city of Espanola, 30 miles north of Santa Fe, lays claim to the title of lowrider capital of the world. New Mexico even had its’s own magazine “Orlies Lowriding Magazine”, published by the “Godfather of Hydraulics” Orlie Coca. In homage to his Southern California roots, the magazine covers sported babes in bikinis leaning on dazzling lowriders in the unmistakable New Mexican desert.
Distinctly low tech, early low riders achieved their weighed down look by storing bags of concrete or sand in the trunk. But learning from their California cousins in the post war aviation industry, the New Mexican relations adapted aircraft hydraulics to cars turning them into the polar opposite of an airplane – something low and slow. To get around laws that dictated that no car part be lower than the bottom of the wheel rim, the ingenious creators adjusted the height of a car at a flick of a switch. Following suit, frame adaptations, creative custom treatments like see through hoods, dissected roofs, tiny chain link steering wheels and eye popping painting techniques contributed to the distinctive lowrider style.
A lowrider is more than a driving machine; it’s a plush family living room on wheels, a painted memorial, or an auto-robot that heeds commands to “dance” and “hop”. They are always however, a symbol of familial devotion. Some boys received their first car to work on at age 12, with the nuclear and extended family working together to make it a community project.
As proof of its broader stature and importance to American culture, one lowrider, “Dave’s Dream”, was acquired by the Smithsonian Museum. The car journeyed to D.C. but was blessed first with family and museum curators in attendance at the famous El Santuario De Chimayó, a popular pilgrimage site and national landmark in Chimayó, New Mexico. Include this experience on your visit and you might just see a real lowrider that made the pilgrimage too. As with any proud traveler, it’s a tradition to photograph the lowrider in front of the church after it arrives.
Eric Fischl is an internationally acclaimed American painter and sculptor. His artwork is represented in many distinguished museums throughout the world and has been featured in over one thousand publications. His extraordinary achievements throughout his career have made him one of the most influential figurative painters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
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)
(Santa Fe, April 11, 2016)—Sponge Bob Square Pants, Pac Man, and Curious George, all sporting a particularly Native American twist, are just a few images from popular mainstream culture seen in the exhibition, Into the Future: Culture Power in Native American Art.
Featuring nearly 100 objects by more than fifty artists from the museum’s collections as well as others borrowed from collectors and artists, the work on view in Into the Future will be in such various media as traditional clothing and jewelry, pottery and weaving, photography and video, through to comics, and on into cyberspace.
The free to the public opening for Into the Future: Culture Power in Native American Art at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture is on July 17, 2016 from 1 to 4 pm and the show runs through October 22, 2017.
“Culture Power”, in the exhibition’s title, is defined by exhibition curator Valerie Verzuh, as the unique power bestowed upon objects by a culture’s stories, traditions, and emotions – objects which define ourselves, our communities, and the world around us – and, in turn, determine how we interpret and understand others.
When Native artists reinterpret popular Western imagery through the lens of these culture stories the collision of meanings provides a springboard for often pointed commentary upon issues of identity, culture, and history. And, says Verzuh, these reimagined images elicit intense emotions, “As power resides both in the mind of the viewer and in the objects themselves. Having the authority to control objects and their meanings correlates with the power to define and control personal and cultural identities.”
Using humor, as a reaction to otherwise serious issues, serves an important role in tribal cultures, for instance the widespread Trickster tradition and Pueblo clown societies. In Into the Future we see work by artists who find the comic book aesthetic expresses perfectly their message. Turning the mainstream narrative on its head and re-interpreting it through the Native cultural lens, Larry McNeil’s “Tonto” in Tlingit-Nisga’a is transformed from a “dimwitted sidekick to the hero,” Jonathan Loretto’s, Star War Figure with Ray Gun is a Cochiti Storyteller “Bobble Head” figure, and Theo Tso developed Captain Paiute the Indigenous Avenger of the Southwest, “…after noticing that there weren’t any comics that were written, drawn or even created by Native Americans!”
Also featured in Into the Future: Culture Power in Native American Art, are Linda Aguilar, Keri Ataumbi, David Bradley, Ricardo Cate, Orlando Dugi, Jody Folwell, Susan Folwell and Les Namingha, Harry Fonseca, Dorothy Grant, Teri Greeves, Bob Haozous, Melissa Henry, Lisa Holt and Harlan Reano, Maria and Julian Martinez, Dallin Maybe, Jamie Okuma, Virgil Ortiz, Pat Pruitt, Cara Romero, Ramoncita Sandoval, Preston Singletary, Margaret Tafoya, Denise Wallace, Ken Williams, Will Wilson, and Bethany Yellowtail, among others.
Into the Future: Culture Power in Native American Art celebrates the vitality of contemporary Native North American communities. So when you see a “Native” Sponge Bob Square Pants living life out loud on the ocean’s bottom, Pac Man chomping through an imagined game world, and Curious George’s adventures in the big city, know that by redefining mainstream objects and their associated meanings, Native artists assure that their culture is both integrated into that of the world at large and proudly separate from it.
You’re invited! | SITE Unseen 9 A BENEFIT FOR SITE SANTA FE
Friday, April 8, 2016 Preview 5-6 pm Public Opening 6-7:30 pm
Tickets: $100 for Preview Ticket EXHIBITION CONTINUES APRIL 9-10
One of the most anticipated events in Santa Fe, this art-buying opportunity keeps collectors guessing (and dashing!) for their first picks.
A limited number of preview tickets are now available for SITE Unseen Santa Fe 9. Reserve your ticket here and be among the first to view the artworks for sale! Your preview ticket purchase includes a raffle ticket for a chance to win SITE staff-curated selections from the SITE Unseen archives.
How it works:
Artists are asked to create and donate works on identical 5.5”x 8” boards. All pieces are signed on the verso and exhibited anonymously. Only when the works are purchased are the artists’ names revealed. Preview tickets and artwork purchases directly support SITE Santa Fe’s vibrant exhibition program. With James Kelly as Honorary Event Chair, SITE Unseen Santa Fe has become an enormously successful event among both new and seasoned contemporary art collectors.
Participating Artists include:
Ellen Abramson, Terry Allen, David Kimball Anderson, John Andolsek, Carol Anthony, Polly Apfelbaum, Tom Appelquist, Valerie Arber, Stuart Arends, Jamison Chas Banks, Steve Barry, Tom Berg, Kevin Cannon, Roberto and PJ Cardinale, Susanna Carlisle and Bruce Hamilton, Matthew Chase-Daniel, Madelin Coit, Leonardo Drew, Joe Ramiro Garcia, Christy Georg, Cristina Gonzalez, Geoffrey Gorman, Allan Graham, Gloria Graham, Harmony Hammond, Rebecca Holland, Munson Hunt, Shirley Klinghoffer, Jane Lackey, David Leigh, Ric Lum, Lucy Maki, Dara Mark, Tom Miller, Mary Mito, Linda Montano, Richard Morrow, Nora Naranjo Morse, Jonathan Morse, Carol Mothner, Michael Namingha, Stacey Neff, Nancy Ziegler Nodelman, Marcia Oliver, Gay Patterson, Lisa Piasecki, Pascal Pierme, Purple Mountain Collective, Willy Richardson, Ed Ruscha, Abigail Ryan, Louis Schalk, Gerry Snyder, Brandon Soder, Nancy Sutor, Linda Swanson, Mary Temple, John Tinker, Mark Tribe, Trish Witcher, Jesse Wood and many more!
SITE Unseen 9 is sponsored in part by Il Piatto Italian Farmhouse Kitchen and Wilkinson & Co. Fine Art Framers. Official SITE event link here.
