While the New York art world enters its summer slumber in August, the Southwest heats up (in more ways than one!). In Santa Fe, especially, the local art scene makes a point of keeping it interesting, with a whole crop of exciting shows springing up like cactus flowers in the desert. Herewith, a sampling of the city’s art attractions.
* "Explorations in Bronze: Degas and New Mexico Sculptors," June 10-Oct. 2, 2005, at the Museum of Fine Arts, features a dozen bronzes by Edgar Degas along with works made at New Mexico bronze foundries by contemporary artists, including Dunham Aurelius, Harmony Hammond, Dean Howell, Susan Rothenberg, Kiki Smith and Daisy Youngblood.
*Georgia O’Keeffe and Andy Warhol: "Flowers of Distinction," May 13, 2005-Jan. 6, 2006, at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, brings together ca. 40 works by the two iconic Americans -- both of whom, curiously enough, made their mark with images of flowers.
* Paul Sarkisian, May 28-Aug. 28, 2005, at SITE Santa Fe, features -- in its last week -- more than 20 large-scale paintings by the Santa Fe-based Photorealist.
* "Theater of Art VI," Aug 19-Oct. 31, 2005, at Riva Yares Gallery, features major works by Color Field and Abstract Expressionist painters, including Milton Avery, Morris Louis, Hans Hofmann, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski. Also on view is "Convergence," an exhibition of paintings by the New Mexico super-realist Paul Pletka, whose 7 x 12 foot triptych depicting a local religious celebration was acquired by the Phoenix Art Museum.
* Tom Joyce, Aug. 11-Sept. 10, 2005, at EVO Gallery, gathers together the artist’s cast sculptures, provocatively made from the detritus of American industry, along with works on paper, mixed media work and photographs. His sandy, rust-colored, biomorphic sculptures, set directly on the floor, are defiantly evocative and, in their quiet way, potent symbols of local culture.
* Subhankar Banerjee, "The Last Wilderness," July 15-Aug. 27, 2005, at Gerald Peters Gallery, features the scenic photographs of the Arctic National Wildlide Refuge which in 2003 became the center of a congressional debate over oil drilling there.
* Michael Eastman, "Grandeur Lost," Aug. 12-Sept. 5, 2005, at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, focuses on color photographs of the fading, weathered and mostly deserted interiors of once beautiful buildings along Havana’s ambassadors row, taken during the photographer’s visits to the crumbling communist utopia between 1999 and 2002. Eastman’s gift for summing up social relationships in a single image is well represented in a work like Fidel’s Stairway, which shows the elegant curve of a disheveled spiral stairway watched over by a headless sculpture of an angel, an image that packs all the pathos of revolution betrayed.
* Harold Joe Waldrum, "A Life Examined," Aug. 6-Sept. 13, 2005, at Zaplin-Lampert Gallery, features the incredible, often semi-abstract aquatints of the late artist Harold Joe Waldrum (1934-2003), who is acclaimed for stripped-down works based on the architecture of New Mexico, with its dramatic contrasts of color and spectacular lines of shadow.
* Frank Buffalo Hyde, Aug. 15-Sept. 1, 2005, at Cline Fine Art, presents paintings by the young artist Frank Hyde (b. 1974), who juxtaposes gritty and fantastic images -- teepees painted on a computer screen, say, or a herd of buffalo grazing in a public park -- in a deconstruction of the typical stereotype of the "serene Native American."
* Maria Martinez, Aug. 19-Sept. 16, 2005, at Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, is the gallery’s seventh annual show and sale of finely crafted art pottery by the legendary Native American potter Maria Martinez (1887-1980), who reinvented the traditional medium during her long career.
* John Moyers & Terri Kelly Moyers, Aug. 12-Sept. 16, 2005, also at Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, features paintings by the husband-and-wife team on quintessential cowboy artist themes, including horsemen, Native Americans and the grandeur of the open range.
* Doug Hyde, Douglas Johnson & Michael Naranjo, Aug. 13–Sept. 5, 2005, at Nedra Matteucci Galleries brings together three artists, each with his own take on New Mexico culture. Both Hyde and Naranjo are Native American artists who work in sculpture -- Hyde crafts small, expressive talismans of alabaster, while Naranjo makes detailed figurines in bronze. Johnson, a painter, mixes historical and contemporary imagery in his colorful canvases.
