Tuesday, June 18, 5:30 p.m.
A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
At last—-a place for art and book lovers to meet, discuss books and enjoy art. Join us for a provocative spring read in conjunction with Bound Together: Seeking Pleasure in Books.
For more information and to sign up please contact Sara Otto-Diniz at: sodiniz@unm.edu or 277-4010
 
 

Meeting of the Minds

Wednesday, June 19, 12 p.m.
Photographing Vernacular Architecture, Justin Nolan, TA

Wild Things Day

Thursday, June 20, 2013 from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Where the Wild Things Are (for children of all ages; click here for schedule of events and to register)
 
 

Friday After Hours

Friday, June 21, 4 – 5 p.m.
Jump-start your TGIF celebrations with a social hour of art and music in the galleries.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Photo by Juli Cardozo

On view in the Main Gallery September 13-December 14, 2013

In Life’s a Beach, one of Britain’s most beloved photographers takes us on a color-saturated journey through a place loved by all, the seaside, with its general absurdities and local quirks. Martin Parr has been photographing this subject for many decades, documenting all aspects of the tradition, including close-ups of sunbathers, rambunctious swimmers caught mid-plunge, and the eternal sandy picnic underway. His international career, in fact, could well be traced to the launch of The Last Resort, a 1986 book depicting the seaside resort of New Brighton, near Liverpool. What may be less known is that this obsession has led Parr to photograph beaches across the world. This exhibition presents photos of beachgoers on far-flung shores, including in Argentina, Brazil, China, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Japan, the United States, Mexico, Thailand, and of course, the U.K.

Martin Parr, Margate, UK,1986.  © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos.

Martin Parr, Ocean Dome, Miyazaki, Japan, 1996. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos.

Martin Parr, Lake Garda, Italy, 1999. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos.

This exhibition is organized by Aperture Foundation, New York

Main Image: Martin Parr, Italy, Rivadel Garda, 1999. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos.

We build and shape our landscapes and terrains—gardens, bridges, truck stops, quarries, canals and dams—to suit both our physical and emotional desires. Yet this is not without consequences. This exhibition presents a selection of potent images from a larger body of work that Martin Stupich has explored and recorded since the 1970s. These images of some of our most ambitious, often permanent structures are breathtaking to behold yet also pose questions about what it is we are leaving behind as the “remnants” of our culture and time. As the photographer has remarked “These remnants of the first world are the evidence, the trail of clues we leave as we plow ahead….” Stupich clearly works within a historical sphere which harks back to the nineteenth-century and includes some of the great camera artists of that era such as Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins and Darius Kinsey.

Martin Stupich NV Hoover Dam Cable Tower Pigment inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist

Martin Stupich Derby Dam on the Truckee Pigment inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist

Martin Stupich Bridge over canal, Venice, California, 1974 Pigment inkjet print Courtesy of the Artist

Main Image: Martin Stupich, Limestone blocks at quarry, Nevada, 1989, Pigment inkjet print

On February 8, the UNM Art Museum will open Bound Together: Seeking Pleasure in Books, an exhibition that celebrates the book, from nineteenth-century photographic albums to limited edition and unique artist books, elaborately illustrated works of literature, unusual pop-up books, mediaeval manuscript facsimiles and architectural folios, to name just some of the objects in the exhibition. Though the digital age is very much upon us, carrying with it many publishing casualties, books continue to be produced and cherished as they have for millennia. The dichotomy that books present is that they are simultaneously private objects meant to be held in one’s hands and read often in private, yet are also objects mass produced, available to large audiences and viewed and or read in very public arenas.
Some of the works in the exhibition include Henri Matisse’s Le Florilege des Amours, Some Memories of Drawing by Georgia O’Keeffe, a first edition of An Autobiography by Frank Lloyd Wright and The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, illustrated by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and printed at Kelmscott press by William Morris. Select contemporary artists in the exhibition who have used the book as a vehicle of expression include Kara Walker, Robert Heinecken, Ed Ruscha, Barbara de Genevieve, Julie Chen and Enrique Chagoya.

Enrique Chagoya
Les Aventures des Cannibales Moderniste, 1999
Eight panel accordion fold codex
Lithograph, woodcut, chine collé
Edition 18/30
Purchased with funds from the Friends of Art

Henri Matisse
Le Florilège des Amours de Ronsard, 1948
Lithographs
Purchased with funds from the Friends of Art

Georgia O’Keeffe
Drawing # 12, 1917 from Some Memories of Drawing, 1974
Offset lithography
Edition 78/120, Atlantis Editions, New York
Gift of Doris Bry

Main Image: Unknown Anonymous Photographic album, n.d. Lacquer, silk painted pages Private collection, Lent in memory of Mary and Joe Putnam.

The La Familia cartel exploded onto the scene in 2006 with the brutal murders of five men in Michoacán. The sign left at the scene said, “La Familia doesn’t kill for money, it doesn’t kill women, it doesn’t kill innocent people — only those who deserve to die. Everyone should know: this is divine justice.”

That a drug cartel thinks its brutal business is a form of divine justice is, to say the least, surreal. But such a contradiction gives us an idea of the kind of atmosphere that Alice Leora Briggs aims for in her portrayals of the violence in Juárez. With expressionist bravado and technical cool, Briggs’ remarkable sgraffito (literally “scratch”) drawings capture the Inferno that the city has become. Freely appropriating Renaissance prints and paintings of the Last Judgment, the Crucifixion and other martyrdoms, public executions, tortures, and wars by artists from Holbein to van der Weyden, and immersing herself in literature of Dante and Cormac McCarthy, Briggs merges old world fears with present-day realities to create a disturbing yet compelling picture of the human condition

Alice Leora Briggs, Spit, 2007, Sgraffito on wood panel. Collection of the Artist, Courtesy of Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM.

Alice Leora Briggs, Reach, 2009, Sgraffito on wood panel. Collection of the Artist, Courtesy of Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM.

Alice Leora Briggs, Experiment II, 2005, Sgraffito on wood panel. Collection of the Artist, Courtesy of Evoke Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM.

Main Image: Alice Leora Briggs, Abecedario de Juárez, 2010, Sgraffito on 32 wood panels. Collection of the Artist, Courtesy of Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ

Ligia Michelle Bouton
Postcards from Rome, 2012
Single channel video, 37 min.

Both inspired and overwhelmed by master works from art history’s Renaissance canon, Ligia Bouton uses such basic artist’s materials as paper and charcoal combined with simple video editing techniques to address issues of scale and appropriation alongside the ubiquitous vernacular postcard. As the main character in these five vignettes, her presence also suggests the universal struggle artists endure in their creative endeavors.

Recent exhibitions that she has curated for the CU Art Museum include archiTECHtonica; Peter Wegner: Wall-To-Wall-To-Wall; Liliana Porter: Fox in the Mirror; Luis Cruz Azaceta/Ambulatory: Museum Plan; In and Out of Time: Selections from the CU Art Museum’s Video Collection; Barbara Takenaga: Micro/Macro; Günther Gerzso and Octavio Paz: Palabras Grabadas/Graven Words; Techno/Sublime; Vestige/Vestigio: Laura Anderson Barbata, Betsabeé Romero, and Oscar Muñoz; Paul DeMarinis: Gray Matter and Enrique Martinez Celaya: Poetry in Process. She is also the co-curator of major landmark CU Art Museum exhibitions such as David Maisel/Black Maps: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime; Because the Earth is 1/3 Dirt; Waves on the Turquoise Lake: Contemporary Expression of Tibetan Art, and Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, which is currently on view in New York City.

In 2005 Ms. Becker curated the American artists in Strata, an exhibition at the former Nobel Factory in Stockholm, Sweden. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Art in America, Time Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal, amongst other publications. Her other accomplishments at the CU Art Museum include significant growth of its permanent collection, conservation of many major works of art from across time-periods and cultures, and the development of an exhibition and catalogue program that has achieved regional, national, and international recognition. Selections of Ms. Becker’s previous curatorial projects include Mary Lucier: Bodies of Light; Julio Galan and Roberto Juarez: Marks of Transcendence; Visual Worlds: Visuality in the Age of Globalization (co-curated); and Alice Street Revisited: The Palace at 9 a.m. and Related Works by Robert Arneson. Ms. Becker has also lectured widely at art museums, galleries, and universities across the United States and abroad. Lisa Tamiris Becker earned her B.A. (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her M.F.A. in Studio Art and Art Theory from the University of Texas at Austin. She was born in Leeds, England in 1967.

The Roadcut is an historical record of our effects on a place over time.  Intersecting geologic persistence with human transience, its sectional cut through time in space exposes the synergy between land and machine that drives Predock’s understanding of architecture as a form of landscape. Closing the gap between human experience and modern technology, Predock returns architecture to its original, sacred purpose of marking our place in the world in a poetic and lasting way. Through ten case studies of his design process, from La Luz in Albuquerque to his contemporary work in Asia, this exhibition traces the architect’s investigation of place over more than forty years of practice. On view in the Main Gallery

Like a Signature: Sketches and Models

Predock’s sketches record impulsive exchanges between the act of looking, of sighting something in a line, and the act of drawing, of the hand’s intuitive rush across a surface. Internalizing what he sees as a graphic signature, these sketches look beyond individual buildings to visualize architecture’s reciprocity with landscape through their equivalence of line, plane, light and shadow. Cut and shaped with a knife, Predock’s clay models translate the gestural act of drawing into another medium without losing any of its intuitive fluidity. Using a sculptural medium to painterly effect, these clay models transform the landscapes visualized in his sketches into three-dimensional prototypes for actual buildings. On view in the Van Deren Coke Gallery.

Christopher Mead, Guest Curator, With Mira Woodson

The publication Roadcut: The Architecture of Antoine Predock (University of New Mexico Press, 2011; 224 pp; hardbound, black and white and color illustrations, $75.00) is available at the Museum Book Shelf. Written by: Christopher Curtis Mead.>>

The exhibition includes nineteen seminal and rarely seen paintings by renowned  artist, Eva Hesse (1936-70). Created when Hesse was 24 years old, and following her graduation from Yale School of Art, this group of semi-representational oil paintings stands in contrast to her later minimalist structures and sculptural assemblages, yet constitutes a vital and telling link in the progression of her mature work. There are two distinct campaigns within the series: loosely rendered figures are standing or dancing in groups of two or three; and, a range of distorted depictions resembling the artist may be considered self-portraits.

As Luanne McKinnon, director of the UNM Art Museum and curator of the exhibition notes, “Looking inwardly and outwardly and with paint as her guide, she began to paint herself out and away and ahead.” The procession of paintings under examination here represents a rupture that, once completed (not as a formal solution but rather as a psychological denouement), settled back into solving the problems presented in abstraction, eventually evolving into the constructions that Hesse is lauded for. Eva Hesse Spectres 1960 aims to further an understanding of the development of Hesse’s artistic voice and contribution, as the spectre paintings demand an historical reconsideration of when Hesse became “Hesse.”

Eva Hesse Spectres 1960 was organized by the University of New Mexico Art Museum and made possible by the FUNd Endowment, the Julius Rolshoven Memorial Fund, and the Robert Lehman Foundation.

The American tour of the exhibition will continue to the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum from September 16, 2011 to January 8, 2012. brooklynmuseum.org

The publication Eva Hesse Spectres 1960 (Yale University Press, 2010; 90 pp; hardbound, full color, $39.95) is available at the Museum Book Shelf. Contributors: Helen Molesworth, Elisabeth Bronfen, Louise S. Milne, and E. Luanne McKinnon.

Eva Hesse, No Title, 1960, oil on canvas, Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland

Eva Hesse, No Title, 1960, oil on canvas, Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland

Eva Hesse, No Title, 1960, oil on canvas, Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul, Chicago, Illinois, USA

An Inquisitive Eye provides visitors an occasion to view significant prints and printed books from the museum’s permanent collection which numbers over ten thousand, and spans the history of printmaking from 1493 to the present. Prints possess a multi-valent nature—both the subject and technique embodied in an image must be considered on equal footing, one not privileged over the other. The idea expressed on paper depends upon the printer’s abilities and particular materials to realize successfully the artist’s vision.

Woodcuts from the Weltchronik (World Chronicle), Albrecht Dürer and Wassily Kandinsky, etchings by Rembrandt van Rijn, Man Ray and William Kentridge, lithographs by Honoré Daumier, George Grosz, and Robert Motherwell and screenprints by Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin and Matthew Barney illustrate the extent of the exhibition and the breadth of the museum’s collection which continues to serve as an important research and teaching resource for the university and the community at-large.

Reviews of the Exhibition in the Albuquerque Journal, September 11, 2011, in Pasatiempo, Art in Review, September 23-29, 2011, in UNM Today page 3, November 14, 2011, and in THE Magazine, December 2011

Wassily Kandinsky, Illustration from Klänge, 1912, woodcut

Andy Warhol, Electric Chair, 1971, screenprint. Gift of Vernon Nikkel, Clovis, N.M., in memory of Frank F. Nikkel, Anna Zielke Nikkel, Ruth Nikkel Hutchinson, Martha Nikkel Critelli, and Ralph Jacob Critelli

Man Ray, Blue Hand, ca. 1972, etching. Purchased with funds from the Friends of Art