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Albuquerque sculptor Peter Bilan at work as part of the Artist-in-Residence program of the Roswell Museum and Art Center.


up the most professional working environments. Thompson makes the important point that in Albuquerque, painting activity distinctly "does not whirl around the university."

There's also an emphasis on group support. Artistic competition exists among New Mexico artists, but it doesn't negate anything, according to Sarah Moody. "There's a real sharing of ideas and information," says Thompson. "We do appreciate our little triumphs."

Sam Scott, a Santa Fe painter who helped organize the recent Santa Fe Armory Show, puts it this way: "There's a certain vulnerability in New York or Houston. Everybody wants to see what you got. It's a hustle. Perhaps that's more the way the real world is. But here everyone tries to reinforce each other. Maybe it's a little unreal here."

The Armory Show is a case in point. The idea was conceived "over beers" when the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce did not include any regional artists in its plan for the October Festival of the Arts. With Santa Fe artists taking the lead - Scott, Judy Allison, Gene Cluster, Frank Ettenberg, Don Fabricant, Anne Ferrier, Eli Levin and Dick Thibodeau - an old building that was originally a National Guard Armory, then a blue jeans factory and finally a performance and media auditorium was acquired for a two-week period in October. In six months, $12,000 had been raised by a growing body of volunteer artists numbering nearly a hundred by the time the show opened on October 1. With the funds channeled through a nonprofit art projects group called Rising Sun, the old armory was renovated, with artists contributing carpentry, lighting and graphics work.

The show itself, selected by 20 jurors, included more than 300 works by 111 artists, each given eight feet of exhibition space in the show. More prominent artists also participated, exhibiting side by side with unknown artists. One $300 cash prize was contributed by Scholder.

"It was a real statement of common awareness," says Scott. "It was the process and the sense of community that were most important." [A review of the show begins on page 78.)

A number of artist-founded professional print workshops in New Mexico also bring artists together in a collaborative situation. Both graduates of Tamarind Print Institute, located in Albuquerque since it left Los Angeles in 1971, Robert Arber and Ben Q. Adams are printers who work closely with New Mexico artists, publishing and sometimes distributing lithographs. Ron Adams of Hand Graphics worked with Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles before he set up his workshop in Santa Fe.

Efforts at establishing big artists' studio complexes have been less successful. An artists' building in the Odd Fellows Hall in downtown Albuquerque closed down in 1973. However, other buildings have been workably adapted to studios. Paul Sarkisian works in an old school in Cerrillos, and Bell shares a Taos studio (originally a laundry) with Gus Foster, a photographer-publisher who was formerly a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

One communal activity not developed by artists but underwritten by a New Mexico art patron is the artist-in-residence program of the Roswell Museum and Art Center. Begun in the mid-'60s by Roswell oil operator Donald Anderson, president of Anderson Oil & Exploration Co. and brother of ARCO chairman Robert O. Anderson, the program was picked up by the Roswell Museum in 1967, with operating funds in the vicinity of $50,000 a year coming from Anderson and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The program, modeled on the MacDowell Colony but designed exclusively for the visual arts, consists of an artists' compound of six homes and eight studios in a shady grove of trees on the outskirts of Roswell, the most active art community in southern New Mexico. Five artists and their families can live and work there for six months to a year with all living expenses, materials and most equipment provided. No lecturing or teaching is asked, and all work made during the grant period belongs to the artists. All the program requires is an exhibition at the end of the grant period by the artist at the museum.

So far, some 50 artists have taken advantage of the program, with usually at least one New Mexico artist participating at any one time. Artists in the program for 1977-78 are, from New Mexico, sculptor Peter Bilan, painter Elmer Schooley and his painter wife, Gussie du Jardin, and printer Mary Ahern. New York painter Robert Neffson and Italian sculptor Andrea Grassi are also included.

Mutual support among New Mexico artists extends to stylistic considerations. The abstractionists exist reasonably comfortably with the imagists.

Although there is some hard-edge minimalist abstraction being done in New Mexico, particularly by Federick Hammersly, Charles Mattox, Johannes Lacher, Harry Nadler and Bill Materson as well as Larry Bell, the more common abstract format is closer to the free and brilliantly colored painting of Abstract Expressionism. Terry Conway, Frank Ettenberg, Warren Davis, Janet Lippincott, Eugene Newman, Allan "Skip" Graaham, Jean Promutico and Sam Scott are painters working within this more traditional abstract format with an emphasis on rich color and luxurious paint.

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An interest in Surrealism also exists in New Mexico, with strong references to European styles. Like John Wenger, Richard Hogan used to paint lush, enigmatic works vaguely suggesting Francis Bacon but is now involved with illusionistic realism. Steve Catron's dark markings are reminiscent of André Masson's later work, and Helen Beck's fluid, biomorphic drawings suggest Dali. Mark Spencer's strange drawings are like Victorian mezzotint fantasies.

At the moment, however, the main area of interest lies in either Pop style or pictorially faithful interpretations of New Mexico, its myths and landscapes. From the Taos painters of the 1920s to country-and-western painters, the New Mexico landscape has been such a dominant theme in the art of the area that, for some, it has become the symbol of the Southwest regional artist, a stereotype derided by New Mexico's more sophisticated artists.

According to Thompson, such work doesn't fall into the category of tongue-in-cheek "Texas Funk" art. "It's not done with the same sense of ironic humor," he says. "We're just responding to the imagery that's here. If there's lots of sky and mountains, we'll just get that in, too."

Yet some of the state's most innovative artists work in this vein, combining abstraction with literal narration. Charles Greeley, John Fincher and Ken Saville paint brightly colored patterned canvases that lean slightly in the direction of kitsch. Douglas Johnson and Fritz Scholder take Indian imagery more literally.

The evocative New Mexico landscape and the country's brilliant sun continue to attract artists to the area. Forrest Moses, Woody Gwyn, David Outhwaite and Dick Thibodeau paint fairly straightforward, lushly executed scenes of forests and mesas. Bruce Lowney gives a surrealistic cast to his landscapes, and Andrew Dasburg works within a Cubist view of landscape.

With Paul Sarkisian at the head of the list, the superrealist painters of the area include Nick Abdalla, Clinton Adams, Robert Ellis, James Harrell and James Wood.

Fetish-like work using earth materials was popular for a while among New Mexico artists but is now losing ground. Among those still working in this genre are Joe Atteberry, Rebecca Davis and Megan Lloyd Hill, whose bauble-crowded assemblages are a delight. Artists working in traditional craft materials also abound in New Mexico, notably Gloria Graham, who works in ceramics, and Jay Pearson, who works with leather.

More conceptual art forms, such as video and film, have less of a foothold in New Mexico. Jim Jacobs, working with some advice from Ken Price, is using ceramics in conceptual-based works. Doris Cross and Donald Woodman incorporate photographic processes in their canvases. John Watson-Stockley is one of the few video artists around.

Photography, however, flourishes. A good deal of outstanding documentary photography - influenced by Gilpin, Caponigro, Porter, Clift and occasionally Ansel Adams - is seen in the work of younger photographers. More conceptual photography that manipulates the medium in some way, a strong thrust of the UNM-Albuquerque group, is reflected in the work of younger artists like Meridel Rubenstein, Karen Truax and Joel Witkin.

In spite of the variety of styles flourishing in New Mexico, however, Thompson believes that the state is more conservative artistically than California or even Texas.

"The crazy thing about New Mexico is that its art sensibility is more European or New York. It's a little tougher, dryer and more conservative; the really far-out movements never really caught on here."

Nevertheless, New Mexico artists experiment with avant-garde ideas. Santa Fe is generally considered a have for artists with more traditional bents in painting and photography. Artists and photographers in Albuquerque, the state's largest and most industrial city, tend more toward conceptualism or trendier ideas. Art activity in the southern part of the state is erratic, except around Roswell, where Luis Jiminez lives. In the view of several artists, greater experimentation is hampered by the lack of a supportive, sophisticated audience.

Concurrently, the irony of this haven of artistic freedom and energy is that outlets don't keep pace with productivity. Santa Fe's Museum of New Mexico, which has staged New Mexico and Southwest biennials since 1924, has discontinued the shows for two years while the museum is being renovated. The Roswell Museum stages an annual invitational with work by only five artists. (Sculptor Marcy McKinnon and painters Johannes Lacher, William Masterson, David Outhwaite and Hyde Solomon will show this year.) The University of New Mexico at Albuquerque Museum 


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The coyote as icon and satiric object, in Luis Jiminez's lithograph, Howl.
Jiminez lives in Roswell, in the southern part of the state.


December 1977


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