About Love: Gay Block lecture at NM Museum of Art
James Drake Video
During the installation of Salon of a Thousand Souls, James Drake created an original work of art in the museum gallery. This video documents the process.
James Drake Time Lapse Video
During the installation of Salon of a Thousand Souls, James Drake created an original work of art in the museum gallery. This time lapse video documents the process.
New Mexico Sunrise – 5/19/2011
Michelle Gallagher Roberts – Chief Registrar
In early 2011, the New Mexico Museum of Art acquired New Mexico Sunrise, the official New Mexico state guitar made by the Pimentel and Sons Guitar Makers, of Albuquerque. A beautiful example of New Mexico craftsmanship and artistry, New Mexico Sunrise was a welcome addition to the over 20,000 works currently in the Museum’s collection. However, it creates a unique challenge in regards to its long term care. We cannot treat it the same as a painting. A musical instrument is a functional object designed and crafted to be at its best when played regularly. This is at odds with most of the other objects in the collection which need to have as little direct interaction as possible in order to last.
So in light of this object’s unique needs the Museum created a policy to allow invited musicians to play the guitar at public performances. The first such event occurred on May 16, when New Mexico received the "America’s Best License Plate Award" from the Automobile License Place Collectors Association. At a ceremony hosted at the New Mexico History Museum, State Folklorist, Claude Stephenson played New Mexico Sunrise to a dignitary-packed audience that included Governor Susana Martinez and Cultural Affairs Department Secretary Veronica Gonzales.
Stay tuned for news regarding future performances of New Mexico Sunrise!
New Mexico Sunrise isn’t the only unique artwork in the collection. Check out more on SAM-Searchable Art Museum »
Forecast Cloudy - 1/12/2011
We are pleased to report some unusual weather here in Santa Fe – inside the museum. As part of our new year’s resolution to showcase the permanent collection, we’ve assembled the exhibition Cloudscapes. Another impetus for the show was discussing what features of New Mexico are so irresistible to artists (as well as to the rest of us).
As Photography Curator, I can certainly attest to enduring appeal of this state’s landscape to photographers. What do you think of when you imagine New Mexico? One of the images foremost in my mind is open stretches of sky punctuated by a dizzying variety of cloud formations. That motivated me to look at the museum’s collection to see how clouds and the sky have been portrayed by photographers over the years. The result of my findings will go on view in mid-January, with the formal opening and public reception on the evening of February 4.
Many of the pictures are of storm clouds, because of their heightened visual drama, but artists also gravitated toward a solo cirrus cloud in an empty sky or the big spun-sugar variety. Come see us, rain or shine – and check out the January issue of New Mexico magazine, their annual photo contest issue, which features a group of luscious skyscapes by grand prize winner Leah Robertson of Albuquerque.
For more information on Cloudscapes>
(above image)
Paul Caponigro (b. 1932)
Near Dixon, New Mexico, 1977
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Gil and Eileen Hitchcock; © Paul Caponigro.
Francis Frith - 10/29/2010
Looking at the Collection: Francis Frith’s Self-Portrait
In addition to its rich holdings of work by photographers working in New Mexico, the museum collection also includes prints that represent the history of photography and its international scope. This self-portrait was made in photography’s second decade by the British photographer Francis Frith, well known for his early photographs of Palestine and Egypt. Since Frith is playing dress-up in this photograph, it seemed an appropriate selection for Halloween!
Spurred by religious feelings, Frith traveled to the Near East in 1856 with the idea of making a series of images of biblical sites. Positive critical reception to the work resulted in two additional, extended trips in 1858 and 1859. This self-portrait was published by Frith in 1859 as a frontispiece to his two-volume Egypt and Palestine, a collection of seventy-six photographs from his travels, where it appeared as Portrait: Turkish Summer Costume, 1857. In writing about this image, the photography historian Gordon Baldwin suggests that Frith’s pointed dating of the image was probably intended to establish his credentials as one of the earliest photographers working in the region. Citing the importance placed on the veracity of the photographic image at the time, Baldwin speculates that the inclusion of the self-portrait in the publication was meant as hard evidence that Frith had, indeed, visited the lands he photographed.
Frith is known to have made three self-portraits in this costume -- each with a different backdrop and props – and Baldwin notes that he most likely made the series in England in 1857, after his first expedition. Though the photographer carefully identifies the clothing as “Turkish Summer Costume,” Baldwin’s research indicates that Frith never visited Turkey and, thus, the attribution most likely resulted from imprecise distinctions between the cultures inhabiting the Ottoman Empire.
For more information, see Roger Fenton: Pasha and Bayadère, by Gordon Baldwin (Getty Museum Studies on Art, 1996), especially the chapter “Eastern Photographs and Artistic Applications,” pp. 53-57.
(above) Francis Frith (British, 1822-1898)
Self-Portrait in Turkish Summer Costume, 1857
albumen photograph
Jane Reese Williams Collection, Gift of Jane Reese Williams, 1996
[1996.68.59]
Show Us Your Boots! - 5/25/10
Sole Mates: Cowboy
Boots and Art has been one kick of a
show! At the opening, on May 15, we asked visitors to “Show Us Your Boots!”
Little did we know that 112 boot wearers would show us their stuff. We are
processing all the photos taken by Ellen Zieselman, Education Curator, and
putting them up on our website. With this blog entry, we begin. Over the next
few days, I will continue to post the boots and their wearers’ boot stories. Check out them out on the Show Us page>
We want you to join us for the fun and Sole Mates fresh look at art in New Mexico. We will have a series of great events over the summer, in conjunction with the Sole Mates show, so check back with our website for details. You can also sign up for our e-newsletter for announcements of events.
And yes, we will host more “Show Us Your Boots” events, and at that point, we plan to move the pictures to Flickr, so we can see boots and hear stories from around the world.
(above) The boots of Joseph Traugott, Curator of Sole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art
Sole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art has been one kick of a show! At the opening, on May 15, we asked visitors to “Show Us Your Boots.” Little did we know that 112 boot wearers would show us their stuff. We are processing all the photos taken by Ellen Zieselman, Education Curator, and putting them up on our website. With this blog entry, we begin. Over the next few days, I will continue to post the boots and their wearers’ boot stories.
We want you to join us for the fun and Sole Mates <link to webpage> fresh look at art in New Mexico. We will have a series of great events over the summer, in conjunction with the Sole Mates show, so check back with our website for details. You can also sign up for our e-newsletter for announcements of events.
And yes, we will host more “Show Us Your Boots” events, and at that point, we plan to move the pictures to Flickr, so we can see boots and hear stories from around the world.
Anne Noggle - 5/5/10
Katherine Ware, Curator of Photography
Pilot, photographer, professor, poet: Anne Noggle (1922-2005) was a woman of many talents. Noggle didn’t begin her career as a photographer until she was forty-three, but quickly gained recognition with her witty and honest work. By 1982, she had received a Guggenheim Fellowship and she later received three National Endowment for the Arts awards and an honorary doctorate from the University of New Mexico. She was the first curator of photography here at the New Mexico Museum of Art, serving from 1970-1976, while also working as an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico.
One of Noggle’s most significant contributions to the field of photo history was the show she organized with San Francisco Bay Area photographer Margery Mann, Women of Photography: An Historical Survey. The exhibition -- which premiered in San Francisco in 1975, before traveling to this museum and then to Milwaukee and Wellesley, Mass. -- was a groundbreaking survey of women’s contributions to the medium from its inception up to the 1970s. The accompanying book became an important reference and an inspiration for young artists.
Noggle, who had served as a U.S. Airforce captain before turning to photography, also wrote and illustrated For God, Country, and the Thrill of It (1983), a book about women Air Force pilots in World War II. Noggle is known for her portraiture, especially of the elderly, and her self-portraiture, including pictures of herself recovering from a facelift and nudes made when she was in her seventies. A gathering after the death of her uncle stimulated her interest in portraits.
“I looked up at these people and saw their faces, and I loved what I saw. I saw beauty in their expressions and in the people they were,” the artist told reporter Beth Castro of the New Mexico Lobo (Oct. 11, 1989). Asked about her self-portraits, Noggle said, “People tell me that the photographs of me are not in any way flattering. They are not meant to be. They are supposed to be real.” (interview with Anne Wilkes Tucker, Art Journal, 1993).
The museum is pleased to have in its collection a group of seventy of the artist’s photographs. Vertical Stance is included in the 2010 exhibition Sole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art exhibition. For more images of Noggle’s work, see the book Silver Lining: Photographs by Ann Noggle (1983).
(above) Vertical Stance (from the series Earthbound - plate 26), 1979. Anne Noggle. Chromogenic print; 12 7/8 x 9 inches. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Patrick Nagatani, 2008 (2008.46)
Treasures from the Vogel Collection - 2/26/10
Treasures from the Vogel Collection
A Visible Sounds, by Edda Renouf
Becky James, Intern - 2/17/2010
Hello, I’m Becky James, and intern at the New Mexico Museum of Art. Recently I’ve been working on researching a large gift to the museum from the collection of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel. The Vogels have been collecting art since their wedding in 1962, and had amassed a collection of over 4,000 works of modernist and contemporary art, representing more than 170 artists.
In the early 1990s, the Vogels teamed up with the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., to donate 2,500 works from their collection to American museums across the country. Through a program called The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, the Vogels decided to donate fifty pieces from their collection to one institution in each of the fifty states. Fortunately, the New Mexico Museum of Art was selected as the recipient for our state.
Through my research of this collection, I have become especially fond of one of the works: A Visible Sounds, a work on paper by Edda Renouf. In this work, I am drawn to the juxtaposition of the simple process with which the work was made, and the artist’s preoccupation with rendering invisible and intangible forces visible. In Renouf’s artist statement, she states that her work often relates to "the four natural elements; time and memory; and that of sound and music." In A Visible Sounds, Renouf incised the paper then covered a rectangular area with a cloud of blue and gray pastel. The raised edges of the incised lines in the paper are saturated with the pastel, and from this matrix of lines, the color flows and dissipates outward towards a thin graphite border. Through this process, I believe Renouf meditated about air and water, and about the harmony between the lines and pigment as a visible manifestation of aural harmonies.
At the bottom of this work is written, in graphite, “for Herb and Dorothy - best wishes for 1978, love Edda.” This note adds a very personal and sentimental quality to the work, and I am thankful that it has come to stay here in New Mexico.
A Visible Sounds is one of three works by Renouf given to the Museum through this program, and one of over seventy works by the artist in the The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States program.of the fifty states. Fortunately, the New Mexico Museum of Art was selected as the recipient for our state.
(above) A Visible Sounds,1978
Edda Renouf
Incisions and blue and gray pastel chalk on Arches paper with fixative
8¾ x 7¾” (irregular)
To view more of the Vogel’s collection, please visit the website for the Fifty Works for Fifty States program at http://vogel5050.org.
To view more works from the collection that have found a new home at the New Mexico Museum of Art, please visit http://vogel5050.org/#institutions/31.
Happy 100th Birthday, Milton Rogovin!
December marks the one hundredth birthday of an extraordinary ordinary man, the American social documentary photographer Milton Rogovin. Mr. Rogovin began his career as an opthamologist but soon took an interest in photography. In the 1940s, he and his wife Anne became increasingly involved with civil rights and pro-labor movements, as well as raising money to defend accused spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In 1957, Mr. Rogovin was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and was identified with the Communist political party. Publicly ostracized and finding it difficult to survive financially, Mr. Rogovin turned to the camera as his primary vehicle for expression. His commitment was, he says, to represent “the forgotten people of the world.” He is best known for his series of images capturing the struggles, as well as the vitality, of a neighborhood on the lower west side of Buffalo, New York, and returned, over several decades, to photograph some of the same people. The two pictures illustrated here depict the same couple, photographed in 1974 and again in 1984.
In 2008, Wes and Julie Nichols made a generous gift to the museum of twenty-five of Mr. Rogovin’s photographs, the first works by the artist to join the collection. A small selection will be included in the exhibition New Arrivals: Works from the Collection (February 12 – April 4, 2010).
Mr. Rogovin, we salute you in your centenary year, not only for your accomplishments but also for your great empathy toward humankind.
More information about Milton Rogovin is available on his website: http://www.miltonrogovin.com/home.php
(right) Untitled from the series Lower West Side, 1972
Milton Rogovin (American, b. 1909)
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Wes and Julie Nichols, 2008
2008.53.1
(left) Untitled from the series Lower West Side, 1984
Milton Rogovin (American, b. 1909)
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Wes and Julie Nichols, 2008
2008.53.2