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Archive for March, 2010

Making the Most of Free

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 by Santa Fe Red

Having just had a great free viewing experience at the Cleveland Museum of Art, I set out to explore other free art options here in my hometown. While not all museums have the luxury of an endowment that allows for free admission all the time like the Cleveland Museum, most museums do have free hours if one just does the research and has the right free time. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe opens its doors at no charge on the first Friday of each month, and the New Mexico Museum system is free on Sundays to New Mexico residents. Even the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is almost free, if one understands that the admission fee is a recommended price and not a required one, meaning that struggling artists who love the Met can enjoy hours of museum-going for whatever they can afford.

Claes Oldenberg & Coosje Van Bruggen Free Stamp, 1982 Cleveland, Ohio

My sojourn in Ohio has been enhanced by the need to stay right downtown, which sent me out to explore some things in the city that came to pass long after I left. A warm and sunny day led me to the Oldenburg-Van Bruggen sculpture that echoed my hunt for free art and was located right in the heart of the city. This oversized piece has all the humor and craftsmanship for which these artists are known. My mission to see for free was hereby officially rubber-stamped and approved!

On a fresh spring morning, by driving a short distance from the Public Square area, I ended up at the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, conveniently at no charge on Fridays. I had known about this museum for many years, but despite many trips “back home,” I had never taken the time to visit. On this occasion, I am very glad I did! You never know when you are going to encounter a fresh artistic vision, but when it comes, it’s a treat! And when the artist works from an entire personal mythology, it’s even better. Having enjoyed the flat, deceptively complex quality of Native painters for years (which you can see in the Wheelwright Museum‘s current exhibit), I was captivated by a show of paintings which also had the same flat brightly-hued qualities. The work was by iona rozeal brown (sic), and what an inventive world she has created!

brown’s spirit beings begin their existence in a metaphysical realm in which they receive their purpose, then enter a pod that will transport them to be incubated and developed before birth as saplings and transport to HEZ (the humanic enterprise zone). Once in HEZ, the saplings are plagued by villains that use materialism and sex to coax them away from their principles. Deities watching from above dispatch various warriors to help the saplings stay firm and cling to a purposeful existence.

Her triptych “all falls down,” from 2008, introduces us to E.I.N. (Everything I’m Not), a ghostly presence that receives orders from unseen dark powers and colludes with demons to tempt and bully female saplings into materialism and promiscuity. Sound familiar? E.I.N. was once a woman and is much like the character of Tolkien’s Gollum, a creature who is transformed into a grasping fiend. E.I.N.’s dark transformation occurred through her insatiable yearning for material goods – this is a mythology for today! In another painting, “amidst black flowers and honky tonk angels, sphinxes run amok,” brown depicts Kaede, a sapling who has sadly fallen off her path and thus, without spiritual guidance or purpose, is alone, miserable and in desperate need of help.

iona rozeal brown: E.I.N. 2008

In this exhibition, we also meet the good spirits, such as the Unnamed Aid, a warrior who lives on HEZ and watches over the saplings as they mature. The Unnamed Aid resists the material concerns and superficial cravings of everyday life. Kaatchi, the incubator, watches over the saplings as they are injected with “the blues,” which help them resist the adversity and sorrow they are sure to encounter; some saplings receive more or less of these blues, depending on the difficulty of their path.

iona rozeal brown: Kaatchi, the Incubator (detail)

ana rogu, sentinel, decked out in headphones to silence noise and improve focus, is an elite divine being who, in a surging pool of water, a “wall of black creativity,” creates the pods that grow and transport spirits to HEZ. And the warrior Yoshi (yo, she!), is a feisty scrapper in sunglasses and a massive Afro, riding her Big Wheel and projecting the confidence, courage and commitment that brown hopes to impart to her younger viewers.

iona rozeal brown: ana rogu, sentinel

These helpful beings exist to aid the newborn spirits who are present in paintings like “…hold on..” from 2009, where we meet ana mei (anime?), a young sapling, i.e., a teenager, who is born with the knowledge and ability she needs for success, but who is inexperienced and easily led astray by dark forces like E.I.N. On first observance, this painting, in particular, reminded me not only of the Japanese art that brown obviously admires, but also of a katchina.

iona rozeal brown: ...hold on... 2009

The last part of the exhibit demonstrates how brown puts her mythology to use in her own life, with a residency project she organized in summer 2009. Eight students from the Progressive Arts Alliance RHAPSODY Summer Camp and Shaw High School’s Visual Communications Class worked together to create a mural depicting Yoshi, the hip-hop warrier, clothed in a flowing cape, parts of which were painted by the individual student artists. The detailed landscapes and thoughtful portraits they created are a vivid depiction of the visual interests and cultural life of Northeast Ohio teens.

iona rozeal brown:Yoshi (detail) from the Residency Project 2009

So my search for the free led me to a free-spirited vision of the world, courtesy of this talented artist who shares her vision with museum-goers and artists-in-training alike! It’s a good thing to take time to discover places that were always in your own backyard! There’s no place like home, eh, Dorothy?

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The Dale Ball Trails: Picacho Peak

Monday, March 29th, 2010 by The Santa Fe Naturalist

The view into the Santa Fe Range from Picacho Peak

It’s finally that time of year when a young man’s thoughts lightly turn to – hiking! Or for that matter the thoughts of anybody stimulated and made restless by the first warm weather we’ve had all year. The snow hasn’t let go yet; you can still do some great spring skiing at Ski Santa Fe – and in fact the trail I chose for a walk on Sunday had some thick patches of corn snow in the shady places. Not to mention some slippery mud. But the sun was bright and warm, and the sky intensely blue, and there was no way I was going to stay inside on such a promising day.

The hiking trails closest to downtown Santa Fe are the well-maintained Dale Ball Trails. They are accessible from a variety of trailheads, none of them more than two miles from the Plaza, and they are so well marked that you would really have to work hard to get lost. It’s almost like playing a big game of connect the dots:

Typical trail marker on the Dale Ball Trails

At least you don’t need to carry a map!

I chose to make the relatively easy climb to the summit of Picacho Peak, just south of the Nature Preserve parking on Upper Canyon Road. This is a trail I highly recommend to guests in moderately good shape who want to get a taste of the mountains and a splendid view of Santa Fe without taking too much time out of their day. The elevation of the small peak is 8577 feet above sea level, not very high by Rocky Mountain standards, but still about a 1250 foot gain from the trailhead near the Santa Fe River. You’ll feel the elevation – but the views are worth the exercise.

Most of the trail winds through the classic pinon-juniper forest that surrounds Santa Fe:

Along the Picacho Peak trail

The lower part of the trail enters a short segment of a shaded canyon that supports some magnificent Ponderosa pines:

Looking up into the branches of a "Grandfather" Ponderosa

You’ll be walking over the ancient crystalline rocks of the Sangre de Cristo uplift the entire time. Most of the rocks are very high grade varieties of gneiss (pronounced “nice“):

A beautiful banded gneiss - walking stick for scale

These are shot through with plenty of coarse pink granite, and in fact much of the ground is littered with the glittering fragments of these stones. In places the trail is built right on the massive rock:

The rocky path on the way to Picacho Peak

The view from the top is wonderful:

The summit of Picacho Peak, looking to the north

All of Santa Fe lies at your feet to the west, with the rounded peaks of the Jemez Mountains beyond. To the southwest you’ll be able to see the little Cerrillos Hills, the rugged Ortiz Mountains beyond them, and dominating them all, the great crest of the Sandia Mountains, with Albuquerque hidden behind. On most days you can see the distant mass of Mt. Taylor, a huge stratovolcano between Grants and Gallup – the sacred southern mountain, Tsoodzil, of the Navajo people. To the south the the Rockies die out in a series of progressively lower granitic peaks. To the north you may be able to see the distinctively mounded shape of San Antonio Mountain, on the furthest horizon – especially if there’s any snow – and will marvel to think this peak marks our distant border with Colorado. But I don’t doubt your eyes will be most strongly drawn to the ramparts of the magnificent Santa Fe Range and it’s snowy peaks north and east of your perch.

So the next time you come to visit us, ask about the Dale Ball Trails and the walk to the top of Picacho Peak. You’ll be well rewarded for the short investment of time it takes to make the climb. Bring a snack: there is a perfect outcropping of gneiss with a welcoming Ponderosa tree about half way up. You’ll know it when you find it. And wave to the ravens soaring over your head. They are waiting for you. . .

Posted in Beautiful Day Hikes, Santa Fe Day Hikes | 1 Comment »

Art Wants to be Free

Thursday, March 25th, 2010 by Santa Fe Red

The Cleveland Museum of Art: Always Free!

A Free Museum? That’s a novel concept! As it happens, however, it’s not so novel after all, as evidenced by the Cleveland Museum of Art, with free admission since the museum opened in 1916. Away from Santa Fe for a bit, I wandered back in some old stomping grounds, with the pleasant addition of sunshine and blue skies, something not typically encountered in Northeast Ohio at this time of year. While I would love to take credit for bringing the Santa Fe sun with me, in truth, I was just plain lucky. A further piece of luck was the exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of the Thaw Collection of America Indian Art, on tour from the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY.

The Fenimore, housed in a 1932 Georgian mansion, underwent an exciting expansion in 1995 when Eugene and Clare Thaw of Santa Fe made a gift of a remarkable assembly of Native arts to this wonderful small museum. Frankly, I had never heard of the museum, despite my long-standing love for James Fenimore Cooper‘s books, set in colonial America. The Thaws’ gift led to an 18,000 square foot addition to the museum, which now houses their fine collection, acquired over the years when Mr. Thaw was a dealer in Old Master paintings and drawings. The Thaws’ expertise and patient attention to building this comprehensive collection continues today, as they still contribute new pieces to the Fenimore Museum. And with this exhibition, on its first stop of a national tour, there were many stunning pieces there for me and other museum-goers to enjoy right here in Ohio!

Yup'ik Nepcetat Mask c.1840-1860 The Thaw Collection

The exhibit is well-curated and very easy to enjoy over the course of several hours. The works are grouped by region, moving from the Northwest to the Southwest and spanning several centuries, with the majority of pieces being from the 1800′s, as the U.S. expanded westward. Interestingly, the timeline laid out for the show begins at 1600, when Spain began to colonize New Mexico, and what we might call the age of the collector began! Not until the 1960′s do the tribes and pueblos begin to receive Constitutional protections with the passing of the American Indian Civil Rights Act, followed by the Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978 and the Graves Protection Act in 1990. One can be grateful for the opportunity to enjoy these objects, but also be aware that the trail to seeing these works is strewn with blood and tears.

The broad overview provided by this exhibit not only demonstrates the skill and beauty of the works themselves, but also informs the viewer on how the artists prized the invisible qualities of the objects, qualities such as the correct method of gathering materials, their sound and usefulness, and the powers that may have derived from a vision or how often the planned object may be used in a ritual or ceremony. The exhibition is very tastefully mounted with just enough work to demonstrate symmetries in design and function, yet avoiding the exhaustion that can occur when there is just too much to see.

Tsimshian Frontlet c. 1840-1870 Thaw Collection

Tsimshian Frontlet c. 1840-1870 The Thaw Collection

In the first room were works from Northwest Coastal Native artisans, with the entrance to the exhibit flanked by two massive upright Tlingit log posts, each depicting Raven bringing the gift of daylight to man, and each carved by a different artist. Many of the NW works dealt with shamanism, with rattles, masks and ritual objects displaying exaggerated eyes, emaciated forms and mouths that are calling or singing to the spirits. An octopus shaman’s mask suggests that the shaman can squeeze himself into hidden caverns and obscure himself from view. A Nootka piece shows an extended tongue representing the transfer of knowledge and power. There is one beautiful 1830 carved statue of a woman, likely a Haida tourist piece and consequently in excellent condition. A Nootka war helmet seemed similar to a Samurai war helmet, with its crest denoting status in the community. It’s fascinating to see materials so different from those of our New Mexico Pueblos, with the north-westerners using things such as sheep horns steamed, shaped and then carved, or snail opercula – the little flap that closes the hole in the shell after the snail is inside – used for decoration. A giant greasy bowl used in a potlatch is shaped like an upside down whale, providing wealth for the feast from the belly of the beast, both literally and figuratively. Many cultures have a representation of an old witch, be it Dzoonakwa who keeps the Kwakiutl children in line or La Llorona who keeps New Mexico kids hiding in their beds.

The second room featured works by Arctic and Sub-Arctic peoples such as the Yup’ik, the Gwi’chin, the Inupiat and the Aleut. The walrus ivory carving used as a harpoon counterweight showed how the whale comes full circle in its own demise. Yup’ik dancers apparently never dance with bare hands, and the two beautiful dance fans on display are two-sided with a smiling male half and a frowning female half; it would be interesting to know why the distaff side doesn’t smile. Does the fact that woman’s work is never done make it harder to celebrate? As with all indigenous hunting cultures, every part of the hunted is used in its entirety, as demonstrated by a parka made of seal guts. Carved wooden goggles are a testimony to blinding snow, but Raven as depicted by the Yup’ik is not as angular a carving, seeming to be a smoother fellow and less dangerous than his Haida cousin.

Nancy Youngblood: Swirled Melon Pot

Entering the third room was like coming home to the Southwest, with a Pueblo head-dress of rain clouds reminding me that although I was enjoying sunny days, we in the high mountain desert welcome and treasure our precipitation. In addition to several Mimbres pots, there was a blackware pot by Maria Martinez and an equally gorgeous polychrome vessel that she made with her husband Julian. A contemporary flavor was imparted by a beautiful highly polished vessel created by Nancy Youngblood of Santa Clara Pueblo, that was specifically commissioned by the Cleveland Museum for their collection. Zuni water vessels, Navajo (Dine) weavings, an Apache basket – we Santa Fesinos are lucky to be able to see examples of these arts whenever we ant at our excellent Museum of Indian Arts and Culture or the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian (also with free admission!).

The next section of the exhibit highlighted California and the Great Basin. Basketry was totally the star, with a Karuk woman’s woven basket hat similar in shape to a Muslim prayer cap or a yarmulke, both of which are frequently in evidence in Cleveland, a very multicultural city. A Hupa jump basket of hazel and spruce from the 1800′s was probably every bit a fashionable and desirable in its time as a Chanel bag is today. Two large 1900 Maidu gambling trays, beautifully woven, were food for thought about how gambling has evolved into tribal self-sufficiency today. Glass-beaded Wappo baskets with noticeably misplaced beads showed the same purposeful error seen in fine Navajo rugs. The accompanying text tells how “a basket is a song made visible,” noting that a variety of songs are required for all stages of crafting these beautiful and useful objects.

Osage Blanket,1890 The Thaw Collection

The Great Plains are on dispaly in the fifth room, with a haunting Lakota message that “something sacred wears me,” a reminder that putting on special garments is putting on all that they represent. There is an Osage woman’s robe appliqued with hands, beaded and made of wool, used for a friendhip blanket to tell someone you care for that it goes from hands that love you to your hands. A Lakota war hide depicts a battle, although the warriors are shown in ceremonial garments rather than the tough and dirty outfits necessary to wage a battle. A Nez Perce horse mask proves that even the horses got gussied up in pre-war ceremonies conducted to ensure a victory. A carved Lakota pipe from the 1880′s depicts three important totems: elk – denoting love – turtle – denoting steadfastness – and buffalo – the provider. An incredibly elaborate Ojibwa kinfe sheath from 1830 was made more beautiful by its evident use than the 1998 beaded medicine bag also on display.

Examples of Seminole patchwork

The exhibition ends in the east, ranging down the coast from the northern woodlands to Florida, where the Seminole fled to escape relocation. The north-eastern MicMac cutwork evokes the larger cutwork of the Seminole, although the MicMac use the tiniest of seed beads for decoration. A Huron sash wove the seed beads right into the work rather than sewing them on afterwards. A Noskapi/Innu summer hunter’s coat shows the influence of European fashion in its flared and gusseted design. Thunderbird is depicted here in the east, as well as the west, denoting both rain and success in war in a 1790 bag. A Fox medicine bag shows Underwater Panther (a new spirit to me), who makes the waters turbulent and treacherous, but who also brings all the attendant virtues of life-giving water. One of the items of traditional dress still most used today, the sash, was represented by a lovely Choctaw example from 1800. Two of the oldest pieces in the exhibit are in this section, with a 1300-1500 clay head effigy from the Parkin site in Arkansas and a neck ornament to mark someone’s rank from Oklahoma, circa 1200, making this revealing and engrossing exhibit seem to end back near the beginning.

Jim Hart, a Haida artist, says it best: “When you stand there and hang on (to the object), you’re hanging on to all your history.” And that is what is so wonderful about this show – it’s not just art, it’s history too, one of the things that is special about any museum visit. You go in to learn, and you come out with more questions and a desire to return for answers. And one of the things that’s so special about the Cleveland Museum of Art is that you can go in and out with your questions as often as you want. Why? Because it’s always free!!

Tags: American Indian Art, Art Museums, Native American Art, Thaw Collection
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Moving in Place Moves into Santa Fe

Thursday, March 18th, 2010 by Santa Fe Red

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum once again honors a renowned painter in the third installation of its “Living Artists of Distinction” series with a large show of works by Susan Rothenberg. This continuing artistic exploration has as its goal the exposition of artists whose work shows an extension of modernist principles as exemplified by Georgia O’Keeffe and the members of her circle in the first decades of the 20th century. Although Rothenberg has been a New Mexico resident since 1990, this is the first full-scale exhibition of her work that has been mounted here in the City Different.

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe

The choice of Ms. Rothenberg as a model of the artistic voyager is an apt one since she had to contend with the same glass ceiling that certainly existed for O’Keeffe. While that ceiling may have more cracks today, it is still intact in many ways, so a retrospective such as this one is a welcome demonstration of the Museum’s commitment to women artists. Although the careers of these two artists are separated by many decades, the work of each was a uniquely personal response to her era. And in addition, both of these artists reached a point relatively early in their careers when they abandoned the artworld magnet of New York for the pull of New Mexico.

Chix 2003

Born in 1945 in Buffalo, NY, Susan Rothenberg is a Cornell graduate who began her rise to artistic prominence in 1975 in the SoHo galleries of New York. Known for large-scale paintings that primarily featured horse images, over the course of her career, her subject matter has expanded to include a variety of other animal forms, as well as figurative paintings, landscape works and a variety of more abstracted forms.

Rothenberg’s first solo exhibition in New York was heralded for introducing imagery into minimalist abstraction, while bringing new sensitivity to figurative works. When she embarked on her artistic career, awareness of O’Keeffe and her work had undergone a resurgence as a result of a 1970 exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, this at a time when O’Keeffe had already reached the age of 83; and in fact, the Whitney Museum’s interest in O’Keeffe has continued, as their recently closed show of her abstract works demonstrated (you can still see it at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC). In addition, the feminist movement of the 1970′s adopted O’Keeffe as an avatar at a time when the artistic community was beginning to develop an awareness of the reasons for and the depth of exclusion that women were experiencing in the art world. A new clarity proved that whether O’Keeffe’s work was to one’s taste or not, she had earned a real and significant presence in an establishment that was traditionally a bastion of male hegemony. In view of these developments, one can view Rothenberg as a natural heiress to O’Keeffe’s legacy, although their work truly differs, something Ms. Rothenberg certainly believes.

O'Keeffe: Series I From the Plains 1919

Rothenber: Black Head 1980-81

Seeing the work of these two artists highlights the different artistic paths created by their individual inspiration. O’Keeffe’s work is generally more representational and eschews the broad gestural qualities of Rothenberg’s. Much of O’Keeffe’s work is small, intimate and highly focused, where Rothenberg’s is large, abstracted and active, if not downright agitating. The qualities of both artists’ output seem to be an accurate reflection of the times in which their work was created, O’Keeffe’s in a world that moved more slowly, Rothenberg’s in a time when pressures and stress make it hard to relax. O’Keeffe had no trouble taking everyday objects and examining them in minute detail, where Rothenberg has said “sometimes it seems like there’s nothing to paint, so you make up a game.” O’Keeffe painted at a time when the medium of painting was still king, and Rothenberg began working at a time when painting was declared to be moribund.

Ghost Rug 1994

Overall, I found Rothenberg’s work rather disturbing and challenging, although occasionally work that describes ” quiet unproductive days” or “the slowness of yellow” offers a place for one’s eyes to rest. Her painting Ghost Rug (1994), referring to the last days of her mother’s life, was particularly moving. A large white space described the place to which her mother was going, and the red spaces referred to the space where her mother actually was at the time. She speaks in her artist’s notes of her mother’s eyes roving everywhere, a melancholy description of someone perhaps taking a last look at all the things surrounding her. This work resonated, and generated feelings that lingered even after leaving the museum.

Susan Rothenberg: Red 2008

Based on my own experience of this exhibit, I would suggest that one head directly into the Rothenberg show, by breezing past the O’Keeffes in the first part of the museum and saving them for viewing on the way out. The strength and power of Rothenberg’s work cannot be denied, but since that power cannot be described as comfortable by this viewer, one can relax on the way out with the more peaceful images that O’Keeffe presents. No matter how you view this show, however, do take time to see it, particularly since Rothenberg, like O’Keeffe, is a bona fide New Mexicana now. The O’Keeffe Museum continues to provide us with food for artistic thought while promoting the careers of women artists at a time when women throughout the working world are finally achieving the workplace respect and financial parity with men.

Photo of Georgia O’Keeffe Museum courtesy of Eric Swanson Photography

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The Snow Forest

Monday, March 15th, 2010 by The Santa Fe Naturalist

Hiking in the snow forest

Ok, ok, so we’re all a little tired of snow now. Like that eight inches of wet fluff that fell just last night. But while we are very much looking forward to springtime here in Santa Fe, far above us, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, some 2000 to 3000 feet higher up, the thick stands of Engelmann spruce which darken the peaks right to the timberline, are reveling in the snow.

Engelmann spruce and a similar tree, the subalpine fir, make up what Audrey DeLelly Benedict aptly calls, in her recent book, “The Naturalist’s Guide to the Southern Rockies”, the Snow Forest. These trees form nearly pure stands above 9000 feet elevation up to timberline in the Southern Rocky Mountains, and they are happily adapted to their short, cool, rainy summers, and the two to five feet of snow that falls each long winter. In the mountains above Santa Fe I’ve only found the Englemann spruce in this zone, mixed with stands of aspen where fire has had its way; our neighbors in Colorado enjoy a mix of spruce and true fir.

Englemann spruce poking through winter aspen, and darkening the ridge

Engelmann spruce poking through winter aspen, and darkening the ridge

Dense, dark, and a little mysterious on a summer hike – I always associate the mutter of thunder with a walk through these trees – the spruce forest takes on an entirely different quality in winter. Thick layers of white hide the tangle of downed trees on the forest floor and reflect light up into the somber thicket. Festoons of snow trapped in the branches brighten the entire woods:

Looking up

Since winter shows no signs of letting go this year, a friend and I broke out the snowshoes yet again and made the half hour drive up to the parking lot at Ski Santa Fe (filled to the bursting point by happy spring-breakers) where we could have a walk down the Rio En Medio Trail, which meets the parking area on the western side of the lot. The elevation here is 10,300 feet, right in the middle of the subalpine zone, and the spruce trees crowd right up to the asphalt.

It’s amazing how deep the snow is this year. Here’s a picture of the little Rio En Medio, barely visible through a rift melted in the snowpack:

The buried Rio En Medio

We couldn’t even see the picnic tables that usually guide us to the trail. And the tangle of downed aspen just below the parking lot, through which the trail winds? Completely submerged. Snowshoes were de rigueur today. The forest was in its element, literally:

A patriarch in the forest, snug in blanketing snow

This is a tree made for snow.

I can’t help but offer this long quotation from that delightful book “A Natural History of Western Trees”. Mr Peattie captures the enchantment of the snow forest in evocative words:

“The most dramatic tree of your first trip in the Rockies will almost certainly be the Engelmann Spruce. Your memories of it will be linked with the towering Grand Tetons, the long, forested valleys of the Yellowstone, the breath-taking beauty of Lake Louise, the park-like spaciousness, the exciting dry air, of Rocky Mountain National Park. And the meeting with a bear, glimpses of bounding deer, the insolence of crested jays, the racket of nutcrackers, the chill of high mountain lakes, the plop of a diving beaver, the delicious taste of camp food cooked in appetite-sauce, and mountain meadows glorious with larkspur, columbine, and lupine – all these are part of your composite recollections of the realms where this fine Spruce grows. But you would not recall it as distinct from other trees had it not an inherent personality of its own. Fifty and 100 feet and more tall, it is, in dense forests, slender as a church spire, and its numbers are legion. So it comes crowding down to the edge of the meadow where your tent is pitched, to the rocks surrounding the little lake that mirrors its lance-like forms upside down. And when the late mountain light begins to leave the summer sky, there is something spirit-like about the enveloping hosts of the Engelmanns. Always a dark tree, the Spruce’s outlines are now inky, and its night silence makes the sounds of an owl, or of an old moose plashing somewhere across the lake, mysterious and magnified in portent.”

And so it is. Come see us and find out for yourself.

Posted in Beautiful Day Hikes, New Mexico Day Hikes, Santa Fe Day Hikes | Comments Off

One on One in Santa Fe

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 by Santa Fe Red

SITE Santa Fe continues to open the minds and the eyes of the City Different with its new exhibition, “One on One,” which runs through May 9 of this year. A suite of works by five artists, this expansive show utilizes a diversity of applications, with 21st century media such as installation, video, and photography, as well as the more ancient arts of drawing and painting. Each of these works endeavor to draw the viewer into a profound examination of the relationships between artist, subject and viewer.

Terry Allen: The Momo Chronicles II: Angels

Artist Terry Allen is familiar to Santa Feans, having breezed in and out of our city over his forty-year career. His broad reach as a visual artist is enriched by his parallel adventures as a musician and playwright. In this exhibition, he is represented by his work, Ghost Ship Rodez, a multi-media assemblage inspired by an episode in the life of French writer and artist, Antonin Artaud. Allen’s exploration of this visionary personality is based on his belief that Artaud embodied three characteristics Allen considers to be evident in all artists: innocence, rule-breaking and insanity. What a triad! Over the course of his life, Artaud suffered repeated psychological crises resulting in institutionalization, furthering the deterioration of his mental health. At one point, he was chained to a cot in the hold of the ship Washington on a journey back to Rodez, the French mental institution, hence the title of Allen’s work. A macabre and unsettling vision of mental precariousness, this massive multi-media installation invites the viewer to explore the desperation that accompanies the flash of creativity in the production of meaningful art. In addition, Allen presents a suite of works on paper entitled The Momo Chronicles, which is a reverie on Artaud, who referred to himself as Le Momo (the Fool) and his 1936 journey to Mexico to partake in a Tarahumara Indian ceremony. Allen’s work reveals his interest in the way that narrative can be constructed from fragments of memory and artistic vision. He puts it into words by saying of Artaud that no other artist has “ever taken the terrible desperation of their life and created a body of work as profoundly productive from that turmoil.” This work inspires one to head straight for the library or the internet to further study this fascinating character and his work. From desperation and turmoil to artistic productivity – isn’t that a wonderful goal for any artist? Certainly better than just desperate turmoil alone, and particularly if Allen’s thesis about the three characteristics of all artists is true!

Hasan Elahi: Altitude v2.O C-print

Hasan Elahi is represented by a work generated by a 2002 incident in which he was detained at an airport in Detroit and subsequently became the subject of an FBI investigation after a false accusation of involvement in the 9/11 acts of terrorism. As an artist with an international career, Elahi’s life was naturally marked by extensive travel to a variety of locales around the globe. This ordeal provoked the work on display, Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project. Elahi has used technology to track his physical presence in even the most mundane of situations, resulting in an integrative installation utilizing video and still photography to demonstrate his interest in surveillance, borders and geopolitical conditions. Both real-time and historical moments in his life are on display, representing an accumulation of details that compel the viewer to examine how one’s own life might be displayed by means of the same methodology. Additional works investigate similar issues, such as Flow Wet Feet (Dry Feet), a 1999-2006 multichannel video installation screening footage of an incident involving the U.S. Coast Guard and a group of Cubans attempting to cross over.

The husband and wife creative team of McCallum and Tarry have involved themselves with issues of social justice since 1998, frequently using themselves as the subjects of their work. With a focus on the individual, they aim to create work that highlights the personal in the midst of the universal, with respect to important issues such as civil disobedience, war and homelessness. In this exhibition, SITE is showing three intimate poetic video works from 2006 and 2007. Their piece, Topsy-Turvy, originally created in 2006, is a multi-media presentation that explores the “topsy-turvy” dolls of early 19^th and 20^th century America. These dual-headed dolls frequently featured both a black and a white girl joined at the waist, with a skirt that alternately concealed one of the two identities. In addition to sculptural and historical items, the video component of the work features McCallum and Tarry engaged in the act of the flipping. The work in its entirety explores the complex legacy of race relations in the U.S., of particular interest to these artists as an interracial couple. Their work Cut (2006) is a video piece that accompanies photographs of the two artists and was influenced by photos of Nazi collaborators in post-WW2 France. Based on the emblem of shorn hair as an undeniably public signal, this work encompasses notions of guilt, submission, compliance and control.

McCallum & Tarry: Exchange Video Still

In the third piece, Exchange (2007), dressed in matching outfits, the pair performs a mutual blood transfusion, possibly an examination of the intimate bond existing between couples. All the work of this creative duo queries the nature of relationships between people juxtaposed with their relationships to the world, a question always worth asking.

Los Angeles-based artist Kaari Upson has been at work for a number of years on The Larry Project, a multi-disciplinary investigation based on a person from her neighborhood whom she had never met. When a fire destroyed the house in which this stranger, Larry, once lived, Upson received access to some of his personal effects. Having heard stories of this enigmatic figure from family members and friends, she embarked on a quest to discover more about his history. The work explores the ways in which we get to know someone, from something as straight-forward as reading a person’s diary to the more decidedly new age method of commissioning an astrology chart.

Kaari Upson: The Larry Project

Portions of the project on display include Chapter One, the get-to-know-him phase of Upson’s intial involvement with Larry, full of drawings and meditations. In addition to the works on paper, Upson also created a life-size “Larry” doll and then had the doll figure prominently in a series of videos in which her performing persona explores the development of this unusual relationship. Chapter Two is a video and sculpture installation called The Grotto, invoking Playboy kingpin Hugh Hefner’s grotto, which came to the fore when Upson discovered that Larry had spent time at the Hefner mansion. With eerie sotto-voce vocalizations and mirror placements, the work travels through the unconscious of the artist and her subject. The final visitation, Chapter Three, examines the fire that brought Upson into Larry’s life and then allows her to leave him behind after an exhaustive exploration. This installation really makes one wonder what a stranger would make of one’s own life! Scary…but intriguing!

Taken as a whole, this show brings into sharp focus ideas of the world both close and far, the nature of relationships both personal and universal. Once again, SITE Santa Fe offers the Santa Fe gallery visitor the opportunity to be challenged by questions of self and other, with works that could only be displayed and enjoyed in this valued and valuable institution.

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Going to Maars in New Mexico

Friday, March 5th, 2010 by The Santa Fe Naturalist

The cliff face above the Upper Falls, Bandelier National Monument

No, that is not a typo. A maar is a type of volcano. New Mexico is infested with them, statistically speaking. By now you may have noticed that I seem to talk about volcanoes and volcanic features rather often. It’s impossible not to do so – New Mexico should have been called the Volcano State rather than the Land of Enchantment. You can hardly look out your window anywhere in New Mexico without seeing something volcanic. Here’s a link you have to check out: Volcanoes of New Mexico. As the article says, New Mexico has “one of the largest numbers, the largest diversity of type, the largest range of preservation, and some of the best type examples” of volcanoes in the North American continent. We even have a bun in the oven, so to speak, smack dab in the middle of the state: the Socorro Magma Body. This is a mid-crustal sill of magma that is slowly, but actively, inflating beneath the city of Socorro, New Mexico and surrounding areas, one of only three such features in the United States – and the only one that hasn’t expressed itself at the surface. Yet.

A maar is shallow, flat-floored volcanic crater formed by violent steam explosions, caused when ascending magma meets water at or near the Earth’s surface. The eruption at the surface is confined to these explosions, which toss out great quantities of loose, water-sodden sediment mixed with shattered fragments of chilled magma and the occasional bit of exotic rock torn from the deeper crust. No great cone of lava is built, and in fact the low crater, usually only a mile to two across, typically fills with water to form a shallow, circular lake. Such relatively modest features don’t last long here at the surface, where weathering and erosion work relentlessly, so if you find a maar it’s probably pretty young. Geologically restless New Mexico has a world-class collection of maars, in all stages of preservation, and just west of Santa Fe, the Rio Grande River and its short tributaries have cut canyons right through an entire pock-marked field of these things, preserved by burial under the lavas of the Caja del Rio Volcanoes.

One of these short tributaries is the beautiful canyon of the Rito de Frijoles, which forms the centerpiece of Bandelier National Monument west of Santa Fe.

A walk among the Ponderosa on the Falls Trail in Bandelier

This lovely canyon, which is mostly cut in the orange and pink deposits of the Bandelier Tuff, is accessible from end to end, nearly, by trails which start at the Visitor’s Center. The most popular trail heads up canyon to the Ceremonial Cave, with its 140 feet of ladders pinned to the cliffs and the restored kiva in its alcove far above. But if you head down canyon, you will be treated to a number of wonderful sights along the so-called Falls Trail: meadows full of towering Ponderosa pine, the chortling music of the Rito de Frijoles, two waterfalls, a remarkable transition from woodlands to arid canyon vegetation, and some beautiful color in the autumn. You can follow this trail all the way down to the Rio Grande if you like, although the last bit is in a sloggy delta covered in dead junipers (once flooded by the lake behind Cochiti Dam) that I prefer to avoid.

For years I hiked down this trail and wondered at the tall cliffs of contorted lava above the waterfalls, which protect a softer wall of obviously stratified material, orange, buff, white, and grey, that could not contrast more strikingly with the somber rocks above. And this stratified stuff didn’t fall into any easy categories of sedimentary rocks I’d seen before: no water-cut channels, no dune or bar-like features, a weird regularity of bedding and the oddest mix of volcanic particles with regular sand, and – strangest of all – rough boulders of basalt sitting right in the middle of the beds, with the layers below bent down and contorted, as if someone had just thrown them there.

Finally I learned that I was actually walking inside of a volcano. Frijoles Canyon has cut a perfect cross section into the flanks of a maar, and the stratified beds are the remains of the wet sediment and shattered lava flung out by explosion after explosion of steam caused by an injection of magma into the floodplain of an ancestral Rio Grande. The gently sloping layers are punctuated by volcanic bombs ejected by explosions beneath the riverbed and hurled down onto the flanks of the growing tuff ring, as it is sometime called. That explained my mysterious boulders.

But it gets even better. Look at this photograph:

The curving crater of the maar, filled with a lava lake

Just below the Upper Falls, you can actually see the curving interior of the crater of the maar, which has been filled with layers of lava, interbedded with scoria. The shallow crater filled with small lakes of lava! And if you turn around you will see this:

Upper Falls of the Rito de Frijoles

It’s very likely that the Upper Falls is cascading down the lava-choked throat of the vent that fed the maar in the first place. Amazing!

All of these features are preserved by thick flows of contorted andesite that form the cliffs above:

Cliffs towering above the Upper and Lower Falls

Andesite is a lava rather closely related to basalt, but with a higher silica content. Don’t quote me on this, but I think of andesite as ‘contaminated’ basalt – basalt that has incorporated lighter material from the crustal rocks through which it has leaked upwards. You can see in the picture that these lavas have a ‘sticky’ component, by the way they are thickened and contorted, rather than showing the flattened ‘runny’ layers characteristic of basalt lavas. But I always found these particular rocks puzzling, since they are nearly as dark as basalt and full of tiny crystals of olivine – that component of the Earth’s mantle whose presence nearly always shouts ‘basalt’! Oh well, no one said igneous petrology was straightforward.

In any case, what an opportunity it is, to be able to see a volcano from the inside out, as you can do here on a lovely trail not far from Santa Fe. It’s just one more reason to visit Bandelier National Monument when you come out to see us, here in maar-velous New Mexico.

Posted in Beautiful Day Hikes, New Mexico Day Hikes | No Comments »

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