Museum Foundation

Blending an eclectic mix of Eastern and Western poetry and printing techniques, From a Distant Road features hand-colored Japanese albumen prints and original haiga by Santa Fe poet John Brandi. The exhibit runs Sept. 16-March 4, 2012, in the John Gaw Meem Room.

The exhibit includes: Eighteen of Brandi’s contemporary haiga (haiku poems accompanied by brush art work) that find their source in the poet-painters of 17th-century Japan. The haiga will be displayed on papers marbled by Palace Press Curator Tom Leech in the Japanese technique of suminagashi (black ink floating).  Six hand-tinted albumen photographs from a collection of late 19th-century images of Japan from the Photo Archives at the Palace of the Governors, paired with excerpts from the travel diaries of 17th-century haiku master Matsuo Basho. A new marbled broadside from the Palace Press featuring a prose poem by Brandi.

Considered the Sistine Chapel of the modern era and overseen by the Benedictine monks at Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota, Illuminating the Word: The Saint John's Bible features portions of the first modern-day Bible entirely handwritten and illuminated in 500 years. World-renowned calligrapher Donald Jackson, senior scribe to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Crown Office at the House of Lords, serves as the project’s artistic director from his scriptorium in Wales. Also on exhibit will be a page from an original Gutenberg Bible. A series of lectures, musical performances and calligraphy workshops accompany the exhibit, which serves as a companion to Contemplative Landscape.

One-person exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art

From a Spanish government that never quite knew where to draw its northern colony’s borders to a Mexican government that disagreed with where the lines eventually were drawn to a Texas Republic that wanted to claim the Rio Grande, Santa Fe, and much of eastern New Mexico, the U.S. government eventually managed to carve out the trusty rectangle we now know as New Mexico.

Between the Lines: Culture and Cartography on the Road to Statehood opens Thursday, January 5 and will be on view through May 4, 2012, in the Governor’s Gallery on the fourth floor of the state Capitol. The exhibition, part of the state’s 2012 Centennial celebration, explores explores how cartographers interpreted New Mexico’s land, its physical and political boundaries, and the cultural minglings of Native, Spanish, Mexican, and American people.

The Arts of Survival: Folk Expression in the Face of Natural Disaster explores how folk artists helped their communities recover from four recent natural disasters: the Haitian Earthquake; Hurricane Katrina on the U.S. Gulf Coast; Pakistani floods; and the recent volcanic eruption of Mt. Merapi in Indonesia.

The Arts of Survival opens during International Folk Arts Week and culminates with the 8th Annual International Folk Arts Market running July 8 – 10, 2011. Highlights of the week will be artist demonstrations, artist talks, lectures, and more. A full schedule of events is on on the MOIFA website

They Wove for Horses: Diné Saddle Blankets opens at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture on March 25, 2012 (on long-term view). The exhibition highlights both the textile-weaving proficiency of Diné weavers who produced complex saddle blankets for all occasions and the design skills of Diné silversmiths who created dazzling headstalls of silver and turquoise.

The saddle blankets on exhibit date from 1860 to 2002 and are arranged by weaving methods: tapestry weave; two-faced double weave; and twill weaves of diagonal, diamond, and herringbone patterns. By using a variety of warp and weft yarns—natural wool, cotton, angora mohair, unraveled bayeta, and Germantown—weavers added individuality to the everyday and fanciful tapestries they created for horses.

Horse trappings on exhibit reveal the great pride that Diné horsemen took in their horses and how they adorned them for ceremonial and social events. The Diné first learned how to manufacture saddles and bridles from neighboring cultures and their proficiency quickly surpassed that of their mentors. That devotion resonates still, as the horse remains a viable living force in Diné life today.

Since the Civil War, photographers have aimed to capture the lives of Native peoples in the Southwest, resulting in some of the most beautiful and elegant portraits in the collections of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. From May 20 to November 4, 2012, Native American Portraits, a selection of these images, will be on display in the History Museum’s Mezzanine Gallery. Together, they document the changing perception by photographers of Natives over a span of almost 170 years.

The exhibition showcases exquisite examples by some of the most prominent photographers of their days, from the post-Civil War period to about 1935.

Included are the rigid and formal ethnographic portraits of visiting Native dignitaries to Washington, D.C., following the Civil War by photographers such as Delancy Gill and Zeno Schindler; the overly romanticized and staged photos of Edward S. Curtis and Karl Moon; and the elegant but casual at-home photographs of New Mexico’s Pueblo Indians by T. Harmon Parkhurst and others.

Contemplative Landscape is a photographic exploration of how people have responded to and interacted with New Mexico’s landscape through art, architecture and sacred rituals. Drawing on works from the Photo Archives at the Palace of the Governors and contemporary photographers, the exhibition prominently features the work of Tony O’Brien, whose 1994-95 sojourn at a New Mexico monastery forms the heart of his new book, Light in the Desert: Photographs from the Monastery of Christ in the Desert  (Museum of New Mexico Press), debuting with the exhibition. A companion exhibit to Illuminating the Word: The Saint John's Bible.

It’s About Time: 14,000 Years of Art in New Mexico celebrates the centennial of statehood by presenting a social history of the art in the Southwest. This exhibition opens May 11, 2012 at the New Mexico Museum of Art and runs through January 2014 and is an official New Mexico Centennial project.  High resolution images may be downloaded here from the Museum of New Mexico Media Center.

T.C. Cannon, Gerald Cassidy, Judy Chicago, E. Irving Couse, Robert Henri, Marsden Hartey, Luis Jimenez, Raymond Jonson, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Florence Miller Pierce, Diego Romero, and Luis Tapia are some of the well-known artists in the exhibition.

Woven Identities features baskets woven by artists representing 60 cultural groups in six culture areas of Western North America: The Southwest, Great Basin, Plateau, California, the Northwest Coast, and the Arctic.

Now 400 years old, Santa Fe was once an infant city on the remote frontier.  Santa Fe Found: Fragments of Time, on long-term exhibit in the Palace of the Governors, explores the archaeological evidence and historical documentation of the City Different before the Spanish arrived, as well as at the settling of the first colony in San Gabriel del Yungue, the founding of Santa Fe and its first 100 years as New Mexico’s first capital.

Co-curated by Josef Diaz of the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors and Stephen Post of the DCA/Office of Archaeological Studies, Santa Fe Found collects more than 160 artifacts from four historic sites, along with maps, documents, household goods, weaponry and religious objects. Together, they tell the story of cultural encounters between early colonists and the Native Americans who had long called this place home.

Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now, the main exhibition of the New Mexico History Museum, sweeps across more than 500 years of stories - from early Native inhabitants to today's residents - told through artifacts, films, photographs, computer interactives, oral histories and more. Together, they breath life into the people who made the American West: Native Americans, Spanish colonists, Mexican traders, Santa Fe Trail riders, fur trappers, outlaws, railroad men, scientists, hippies and artists.

"I believe we should preserve this evidence of the past, not as a pattern for sentimental imitation, but as nourishment for the creative spirit of the present."

- Alexander Girard