Roxanne Swentzell was destined to be a talented artist. Her family is full of renowned potters and sculptors. Her talent was recognized early and she was given the opportunity to spend two years at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe before graduating from high school. She then went on to the Portland Museum Art School.
Her first piece of art was a clay dog at the age of four. After formal training and the development of her own style, Swentzell began to create full-length clay figures that represent the complete spectrum of the human spirit. She feels that many people are out of touch with their environment and hopes relating to her expressive characters will help them get back in touch with their surroundings and feelings. Her figures represent a full range of emotions and irrepressible moods. Swentzell focuses a lot on interpretative female portraits attempting to bring back the balance of power between the male and female, inherently recognized in her own culture. Additionally, she increasingly uses a powerful sense of humor to communicate.
Her work is in such high demand that people line up by the dozens at her booth at shows like Santa Fe Indian Market where she won Best of Sculpture in 1999 with a larger-than-life bronze. Though steeped in her own culture, Swentzell’s work demonstrates an astounding universality, speaking to people of all cultures.
Santa Fe Collective creates an opportunity for people to afford unique, smart, handmade things, and it creates direct support to the artists who think up and make those things. All about affordable art, craft and design conceived and produced in the high desert of Northern New Mexico:
Santa Fe Collective brings together the work of some really bright artists who are living and working in the high desert of Northern New Mexico.
Jennifer Joseph/Trinket Company: Artist, designer, occasional curator, and organizer of people, places, and things. www.jenniferjoseph.com
Chris Collins/Natureboy Studios: An expert in the lost wax process, he is a prolific sculptor with multiple bodies of work that draw from such themes as play, nature, science and technology. www.chriscollinssculpture.com
Edie Tsong/Radiant Animal: Visual artist, writer, and yoga instructor, the founding director of their project Snow Poems Project, and on the board of New Mexico Literary Arts. www.edietsong.com
Yuki Murata/moderngoods: Specializes in contemporary fine bone china tableware, some of which is hand-painted. www.moderngoods.com
Yon Hudson: He makes unique and custom clothing items from reclaimed couture and other vintage fabrics. He is a founding member of the fashion and art collective, Tete de Veau.
Adam Rosen: Custom metalwork. The focus of his current exploration is the male fetish. The fetishes are meant to be fun but also meaningful in some way, to some people, sometimes.
In her own words. Mother Jones releases audio of Susana’s graphic attacks on women, Hispanic business and teachers [graphic audio]
Behind closed doors, Susana Martinez played along when her staff laughed and shamed Spanish speaking families, used an overabundance of profanity, and showed a vindictive nature
One Republican state legislator described her tactics thusly: “Nastiness, misinformation, innuendo, and flat-out lies have created a toxic political environment.”
Just a week after Martinez released her first highly-polished campaign ad denouncing her national ambitions and promoting her warm and fuzzy side, new audio recordings from inside her 2010 campaign show the sexist, belittling and vindictive nature of Susana Martinez behind closed doors.
On Teachers & Hiding Her True Positions During the Campaign
Martinez told campaign staffers she would hide her opinions on teachers during the campaign, but she didn’t like teachers who “already don’t work,” referring to summer school breaks.
She then laughs with her chief campaign strategist, Jay McCleskey, about ways to avoid accusations that she hid her true anti-teacher feelings during the campaign
On Democrats as “Little Bitches” and “Little Retards”
Susana Martinez laughs and plays along as an aide calls Ben Lujan (former Speaker of the House and father of NM Congressman Ben Ray Lujan) is a “little retard”
Reminder: Governor Martinez has actively promoted her own advocacy for her developmentally disabled sister in campaign ads, media pieces and slickly-produced profiles of her. “Retard” as a descriptor of people like her sister has long since been considered inappropriate.
Belittling Hispanic Business Group and Women’s Job Program
Belitting the Hispano Chamber of Commerce and the Commission Helping Women Learn Job Skills and Equal Pay
Martinez dismisses the role of the “Hispano Chamber of Culture, or I don’t know what the hell it was” and Commission on the Status of Women which helps women learn job skills and advocates for policies including women in the workplace.
She laughs and agrees when her campaign manager, Jay McCleskey, makes a sexist comment suggesting one of their male campaign staffers wants to run that commission to “study more women.”
February/March 2013 issue of DestinAsian. DestinAsian is an award-winning travel magazine in the Asia-Pacific region. Article by Aaron Gulley, Photography by Jen Judge.
You can expand and flip through the flash version or download the PDF of the article “The Soul of Santa Fe”: DestinAsian Santa Fe
DestinAsian Santa Fe
Excerpt from the article:
Notwithstanding food and architecture— and even writing— there’s an undeniable romance and import to painting, which is why I take a friend’s advice and contact Willy Bo Richardson, a rising star in contemporary art. “Come over to the studio and we can talk,” he replies when I e-mail him. Unlike New York, in Santa Fe there is a generosity of space and time.
Richardson, 38, lives in a diminutive adobe with his wife, Kim, and five-year-old-daughter, Audrey, and he paints in a bright, cramped attached garage that he’s converted to a studio. Though he’s shown in galleries from New York to London and sells paintings for more than most people spend on a car, Richardson is boyish, friendly, demure. His biography is startlingly similar to Emily henry’s: his parents moved to New Mexico in the ’60s and raised him on a commune; he moved to the East Coast to make his name (New York in this case), but returned to Santa Fe because he simply couldn’t stay away.
“People come here for the light and the space. It’s a good place to work out ideas and to think,” he says when we meet. He tells me that he couldn’t produce the works he does if he didn’t live in New Mexico. “Coming from New York, you fill yourself up with information. This is a good place to actually look at that information and let it settle in.”
It’s a side of Santa Fe that I take for granted. Cocoa brown hills stippled by dark green piñon trees loom east of town, while to the west scraggly empty desert rolls off as far as you can see. The landscape is sublime, but it’s the emptiness that’s truly affecting. The forever blue emerald sky is so wide and open that sometimes it feels like it could swallow you. On nights that I write into the silent hours, when I’m at a loss for words, just walking out into the desert and sitting a while beneath the stars can free up my mind and help me find my voice. It seems like a small thing but I realize now how powerful this place can be. Richardson adds, “You can’t live here without grappling with this incredible, vast expanse.”
Richardson paints wall-size canvases in fluid, vertical strokes of bold color. He shows me an orange and blue diptych, and you can feel Santa Fe’s spaciousness in the movement of the paint as well as the town’s struggling influences and incongruities in the contrasting tones. The painting, one in a series called “Music to drive To”, is nothing like Vigil’s exodus. And yet the two live side-by-side and somehow manage to blend under the wide umbrella of Santa Fe art.
Lately, Richardson tells me, in addition to painting he’s been teaching at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. “I have a student, a 60-year-old Hopi man,” Richardson says. The idea of a young, Anglo, contemporary painter instructing an older Native American in abstract art strikes me as a juxtaposition fit for Santa Fe. Richardson continues, “At one point he was making his art, and his gallery stopped him and said, ‘No, we like the buffalos and the eagles.’ He could sell a painting for US $400 because it has a buffalo on it, but I say screw that. I told him to learn the real story and sell it for a couple thousand.”
A thousand years after people first inhabited the town site, four hundred years after it was founded, and one hundred years after the decision was made to market its cultural heritage, Santa Fe continues to evolve and continues to grapple with what’s true. It’s impossible to say for sure, though I feel a little more certain when I wake at dawn a few mornings after visiting Richardson. As the black horizon line of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east sharpens with the approaching sun, ribbons of cloud glow pumpkin and coral and tangerine against strips of indigo and periwinkle sky— just like Richardson’s canvas. The color and intensity is something I’d have sworn couldn’t exist in nature, and yet here it is. And my first instinct, the only thing I can think about doing, is to sit down and write.
Willy Bo Richardson, known for his vertical strokes of color, was born in Santa Fe NM. His father was a master wood-worker, and his mother founded the first mediation center in the Southwest, the Santa Fe Mediation Center. Both parents lived creative lifestyles and were artists as well. After spending 15 years away, in 2007 he returned to Santa Fe with his wife and soon to be born daughter.
In Austin TX in 1994 – 1996 he studied with Peter Saul and Linda Montano. He moved to Austin after living in India for 6 months. Montano helped him through his culture shock, by pointing out the bridge between the realm of the artist and the realm of the shaman, and Saul introduced Richardson to the concept that high and low art can exchange in dialogue and reverse. Saul’s luxurious paint surface qualities, separated from content in an almost transcendental manner remain an influence.
He followed his current wife Kim to Philadelphia in 1997. At the time, he was deciding between writing and painting. He states, “I wrote a really bad coming of age novel, and the next year I checked myself in to graduate school for painting at Pratt Institute”.
Richardson had been looking into different MFA programs in New York in 1998 when “painting was dead”. When he visited the School of Visual Art studios, a grad student, who was tying her shoes and other personal objects to her studio floor told him, “If you want to keep painting, don’t get an MFA here.” It reminded him of a zombie film where all the painting students became installation and video artists. “Get out, while you can,” was her warning. So he went to Pratt Institute instead, the only school where the painting studios were filled with painters. Brooklyn was still a dusty neighborhood with boarded up crack houses and rent was still under $1000/month.
Richardson graduated from Pratt Institute in 2000. He worked as a painting technician at Cooper Union from 2001-2007, where he sat in on lectures, hung out in the studios with students and exchanged ideas with the teachers. He lived in New York City for a decade with his wife Kim Richardson.
Richardson is currently an adjunct Faculty member at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
Katy Crocker graduated from the College of Santa Fe with a degree in Art History, where she focused on art since roughly 1940. In the spring of 2010, she moved to Austin, Texas. From there, she focuses on contemporary art and cultural history and issues as editor & writer for Adobe Airstream. Katy (owner of Cavasphere) is an independent curator, arts writer, and avid accomplice to visual artists.
