NMMOA | July 2024

Line by Line

Richard Hogan, Bosque #5 (detail), 1982, pastel on paper, 26 1/4 x 19 1/8 in. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Gifford and Joann Phillips, 1991 (1991.45.1). © Richard Hogan. Photo by Kevin Beltran.

Line by Line surveys a century of innovative, energetic, and intriguing approaches to one of art’s most ancient and foundational elements: line. The exhibition, opening in two sections, explores the language of line in work by more than seventy artists working from the 1920s to now.

Spanning a range of mediums – including painting, weaving, prints, photography, and sculpture – the art is organized into evocative categories, such as “A Line Alone,” “Land Lines,” and “Unaligned.” Visitors can immerse themselves in the extraordinary variety of linework, from pieces featuring a single line to those with grids, scrawls, stripes, and swirls.

The first section of the exhibition opens on July 6, 2024, with the second section opening on October 5, both on view through March 9, 2025.

https://www.nmartmuseum.org/exhitions/line-by-line/

Saints & Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain

Cristóbal de Villalpando, The Mystic Marriage of St. Rose of Lima, ca. 1700, oil on canvas, 93 ¾ x 63 3/8 inches (238.125 x 160.9725 cm). Gift of Robert K. and Gene O. Woolf, Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California Santa Barbara, 1986.411.

Saints & Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain speaks to the importance of saints in New Spain, a viceroyalty that was part of the Spanish Empire from 1521-1821 and included modern-day Mexico, Central America, and the US Southwest. In the late sixteenth century, Rome’s attempts to manage sanctity as an official process had a profound impact throughout Spain and the Spanish viceroyalties. Saintly devotions traveled to Mexico, and circulated within the vast territory, transforming in the process.

This show examines those devotions and transformations, and explores the region’s attempts to propagate its own holy figures. Drawing on public and private collections from Mexico and the United States, the exhibition attends to the role of images in the construction of the holy: not only were paintings, sculptures, and engravings routinely used to propagate, celebrate, resuscitate, and venerate saintly figures, they were often employed in official beatification and canonization proceedings. The relationship between sanctity and the pictorial is a long and revered tradition that continues in the work of New Mexico’s santero artists today. A lavishly illustrated catalogue and a scholarly symposium will accompany the exhibition in Santa Fe.

https://www.nmartmuseum.org/events/saints-santos-community-day/
https://www.nmartmuseum.org/exhitions/saints-santos-picturing-the-holy-in-new-spain/