Reporting
Browse selected feature stories since 2016 here, and access a full list with links on my CV.
Before I came upon the ocean in Biosphere 2, I saw its reflection in the glass-and-steel triangles of the massive dome enclosing it. The visual was astonishing: a swelling and sparkling matrix, suspended in a lofty kaleidoscope, apparently stretching to infinity. When I eventually reached an elevated walkway with a view of the water, it was more Sea World than sea. The scummy walls of a 100-foot pool enclosed a pale coral reef swamped with seaweed. Beyond the windows of the Earth systems science facility, built in the late 1980s and early ’90s in Oracle, Arizona, an expanse of Southwestern desert clashed with the sad diorama.
The Ants of Biosphere 2
- Southwest Contemporary, September 2024
Editor: Natalie Hegert; Photo courtesy University of Arizona.
In Woven from the Center, Native Baskets Bear Capitalist Marks—but Cradle Sovereign Values
Early in Diane D. Dittemore’s book Woven from the Center: Native Basketry in the Southwest, published this year by the University of Arizona Press, an unnamed young basket weaver makes a seemingly uncontroversial aesthetic decision. “The small ‘olla’ shape with the beads on the rim had been on my mind for a while,” recalls the contemporary practitioner, who is Diné, Tohono O’odham, and Pima. “I consider O’odham baskets to be beautiful in their current state, but I liked how the beads enhanced the beauty of the baskets even more.” Dittemore reports that such a choice, while “widely appreciated” now, would have been “decried as decadent by some basketry purists” around the turn of the last century.
- Southwest Contemporary, August 2024
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Photo: Julian Hayden, courtesy Arizona State Museum.
Faced with Attributions Controversy, Harwood Museum of Art Publicly Edits Santeros Exhibition
“They were not artists, these early Spaniards, at least not in the accepted sense of the word,” wrote Mabel Dodge Luhan for The Arts magazine in 1925, in an essay about New Mexican devotional artists known as santeros. “From them we get these sensitive, suffering Santos: the curious offspring of a most cruelly-inclined race of men.” Following the article’s publication there was a significant uproar in the village of Taos, New Mexico, where the New York-born arts patron had lived for eight years. Under public pressure, Dodge Luhan relinquished her collection of santos to the Harwood Foundation, the nascent predecessor of today’s Harwood Museum of Art.
- Southwest Contemporary, July 2024
Co-reporter: Erin Averill
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Photo courtesy Harwood Museum of Art.
Jeffrey Gibson’s Rainbow-Wrapped Venice Pavilion Has a Gritty Southwestern Origin Story
Early in her role as Jeffrey Gibson’s longest-tenured painting assistant, Kirby Crone recalls hitting a chromatic saturation point. “It would take us two weeks to finish a large piece, and some of the colors were so intensive and would vibrate so much that I started to get a twitch in my eye,” she says. “I’d go home and have solitary time, no vision, to recover from the workday.” Times have changed since Crone’s one-on-one apprenticeship at Gibson’s former studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 2012.
- Southwest Contemporary, July 2024
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Photo: Shayla Blatchford, courtesy SITE Santa Fe.
The allure and tension in defining Nampeyo, an iconic Pueblo potter, as a modernist
Steve Elmore remembers the first time he saw a ceramic vessel by Nampeyo. He was at a Native American trade show sometime in the 1980s when a large golden pot covered with intricate designs caught his eye from across the room. “I said, ‘That looks like Paul Klee, it looks like Miró, it looks like Alexander Calder,’” Elmore recalls. “I went over there and said, ‘Well, who made it?’ They said, ‘Oh, some old Hopi potter.’”
- Southwest Contemporary, March 2024
Editor: Natalie Hegert; Image: Edward S. Curtis, Hopi potter Nampeyo decorating a pot, undated, glass negative. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, NAA. 2010-28, Item 702.
The Celestial Alignments of Nancy Holt
Lucy Lippard and Lisa Le Feuvre discuss the legacy of the famed American artist
When Nancy Holt died from leukemia in 2014, she still owned about 95% of her artworks. Her 50-year oeuvre includes concrete poetry, photography, video works, drawings, installation art, and artists’ books. Promoting it is among the primary projects of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, which also fosters the legacy of Holt’s more famous—and institutionally collected—husband, Robert Smithson. “It’s really a 20-year project,” says Lisa Le Feuvre, the inaugural executive director of the organization, which launched its programming in 2018 and shutters in 2038. Much of Holt’s work is as ephemeral as the foundation that bears her name.
- Hyperallergic, April 2023
Editor: Natalie Haddad; Image courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation
Keeping Tony Price’s Legacy Alive in Santa Fe
In a zigzag constellation across the Atlantic, there’s a Tony Price sculpture show on the seafloor. The Brooklyn-born artist hopped a frigate to Europe in 1963 on a hunt for a hipster scene that culturally bridged the beatniks and the hippies. He discovered a welding rig onboard and made artworks from scrap metal, enlisting the crew to ceremonially jettison each piece to make room for the next one. That ethereal image is echoed at Phil Space, which has housed an exhibition of about 50 works by Price since before the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Hyperallergic, January 2023
Editor: Nancy Zastudil; Image courtesy of the Friends of Tony Price
Meet Zara Kriegstein, the Forgotten Artist Who Spearheaded Santa Fe’s Most Embattled Mural
More than forty years ago and under a blistering summer sun, ten artist-volunteers labored to finish an artwork—which would cause decades of controversy before ultimately meeting its demise—on the side of Santa Fe’s State Records and Archives building. The dedication ceremony for the Multicultural mural was in late September of 1980. Some of the contributors were in attendance, but the project’s official lead artist, Gilberto Guzmán, was notably absent. Instead, a lanky white woman with a thick German accent took the microphone. Her name was Zara Kriegstein, the project director for the Multicultural mural, and she’d spoken extensively to the press about the artwork as it took shape.
- Southwest Contemporary, August 2022
Editor: Steve Jansen; Image courtesy of Gene Aker
Award: Third place for arts, entertainment, and food features or news, Top of the Rockies contest, Society of Professional Journalists Colorado Pro Chapter
Indigenous Fashion Takes the Stage in Santa Fe
On a recent visit to her home region in Western Canada, fashion curator and scholar Amber-Dawn Bear Robe came across her father’s clothes in a museum display. The garment had been his ceremonial dancing dress as a boy, and now it was locked in a glass vitrine. “It’s a feeling of deep sadness that I can’t explain, because it talks to another narrative of why that piece is in the museum,” Bear Robe told Hyperallergic. “It was probably sold for a dollar, but my grandparents needed money.” Bear Robe has been working overtime on a grand reversal of that story.
- Hyperallergic, August 2022
Editor: Nancy Zastudil; Photography: Tira Howard; Artwork: Jamie Okuma
How a Group of Navajo Teens Promoted a Re-Telling of History
In June 1990, a busload of 17 teens from the Navajo Nation rolled up to the Bosque Redondo Memorial at Fort Sumner Historic Site, one of eight historic places maintained by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. Not long after they arrived, chaperone Evelyn Becenti contended with pushback from the students about the visit. She remembers them asking, “What are we doing here?’”
- Hyperallergic, July 2022
Editor: Nancy Zastudil; Image courtesy of the Bosque Redondo Memorial
New Mexico’s university art museums are an important forum for bringing together urban and rural communities that otherwise have little contact. Three university museum curators, vertically spanning the state, are determined to bridge cultural chasms through elaborate and generative work with artists and students. Behind the scenes, they toil amidst complex social and economic forces on campus and beyond. Every aspect of their work, from composing wall text to securing funding, is in flux.
Behind the Scenes With Three New Mexico Curators
- Hyperallergic, May 2022
Editor: Nancy Zastudil; Image courtesy of Mayeur Projects
Stage Worthy: The Santa Fe Opera Properties Department
Where was the dagger? It was the final act of The Letter, a Santa Fe Opera world premiere that opened in 2009, and forty-mile-per-hour winds were howling across the venue’s open-air stage. The murderous Leslie, played by Patricia Racette, was singing her way towards suicide-by-stabbing. Suddenly, the wind whipped a tablecloth and sent Leslie’s fateful knife skittering down the dining table. This was despite the fact that the properties department had reinforced the linen with a stitch called a swing tack and secured it with a wind skirt.
- Southwest Contemporary, June 2019
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Photography: Stefan Wachs
Return to Blackdom
An artist and an architect map a once-and-future freedom colony of New Mexico
Taos artist Nikesha Breeze met her father for the first time when she was ten years old. He was homeless on the streets of Portland, while she was growing up beyond the city’s southern outskirts in the small town of Sherwood. “I was the only black girl in my entire school, kindergarten through high school,” says Breeze. “It was a very white, very redneck town where it was dangerous to be.” She and her ten siblings were brought up by their mother, whose heritage is Assyrian, so Breeze’s transient father was her first direct link to Black identity. She’d see her father intermittently throughout her childhood and early adulthood. One of his tales held a strange clue to her family history.
- Southwest Contemporary, March 2019
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Image courtesy of Nikesha Breeze
If you’ve read Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe—or felt the difference between mud and stucco—you’re likely aware that the all-adobe downtown is but a brown shell concealing a more complicated history. The Santa Fe Plaza once resembled the square of any Western pioneer town, with wood-and-brick storefronts to match the long porticos. As Wilson details in his book, the district’s current visual identity was largely shaped by Anglo transplants who set a snare for tourists by appropriating Indigenous and Hispanic aesthetics. A candy coating of faux-dobe was their architectural patch atop the troubled facade of Manifest Destiny. It’s a different story in Las Vegas, New Mexico, which looks much like it did when it was a railroad boomtown in the late 1800s.
Field Report: Las Vegas, NM
- Southwest Contemporary, August 2018
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Image courtesy of United World College
Christian Mayeur was on a photo scavenger hunt when he took his first trip to Las Vegas, New Mexico, in 2014. The French entrepreneur and art collector had been making visits to the American Southwest for over twenty years, initially drawn to the region for its ties to counter-culture movements and land art. He’d experienced Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field but never wandered through this village of about thirteen thousand on the road to Denver. His son’s interest in American cinema was what finally brought Mayeur to Las Vegas. “Las Vegas is a city between the real and the fiction, which I really loved,” Mayeur says. “A lot of people have seen Las Vegas in movies, but they don’t know it’s Las Vegas.”
Meet Your Makers: Mayeur Projects
- Southwest Contemporary, August 2018
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Image courtesy of Mayeur Projects
Studio Visit: Daisy Quezada
Early in her artistic career, Daisy Quezada came across a real-life scene with all the power of an omen. She and her mother had ventured to their old house in Jalisco, Mexico, which was long abandoned. They leapt across the tall stepping-stones in the enclosed yard outside—formerly a pigpen—and found the interior ransacked. It was common for people to hide money and valuables in the walls or floors of their homes, so strangers had torn the place apart in the time since the family moved back to the United States. In a tiny second-floor room, among scattered family photos and upended furniture, was her mother’s bright pink quinceañera dress piled atop a chest and illuminated by a narrow glass skylight.
- Southwest Contemporary (Cover Story), July 2018
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Image courtesy of Daisy Quezada
Floating Worlds: The Santa Fe Opera Scene Shop
“They’ll say, ‘Why won’t it just float there?’” Scott Schreck says with a little smirk. “Then I go, ‘I’ll tell you what, let me work on that antigravity device for you.’” He’s talking through the joys and difficulties of translating artistic visions to brick and mortar, his principal mission as technical director of the Santa Fe Opera. Moments later, Schreck reveals that he may, in fact, possess gravity-defying powers. In his last job, a five-and-a-half-year stint as technical director of Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., one production called for a full bandstand to hover above the stage.
- Southwest Contemporary, June 2018
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Photography: Stefan Wachs
Collective Unconquered
Israel Francisco Haros Lopez rallies a bold new type of Santa Fe art collective
The first New Mexico home for Israel Francisco Haros Lopez was a tent. In the summer of 2009, he moved here from his native city of Los Angeles and set up camp not far from Santa Fe. "I was coming from East LA—Boyle Heights—which has been going through lots of gentrification battles," Haros Lopez says. "I was getting pushed out. A two-bedroom place was already half a million, so there was no way I could ever afford land in Los Angeles."
- Santa Fe Reporter (Cover Story), May 2018
Editor: Alex De Vore; Illustration by Israel Francisco Haros Lopez
After Ciel Bergman
A Santa Fe artist’s untimely death—and the revolutionary series that launched her career—land two women at a crossroads.
“We are a family of very fast walkers,” says Bridgit Koller. “If you want to keep up, you have to kind of run.” She has a vivid mental image of her mother, Ciel Bergman, blazing through the streets of Pleasanton, California, on a visit to see Koller in early 2016. Shortly after that, Bergman jetted off to Cuba for an action-packed vacation. Then came a lung cancer diagnosis, several surgeries, news that the cancer had metastasized to the brain, and Bergman’s death at seventy-eight on January 15, 2017.
- Southwest Contemporary, April 2018
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Image courtesy of Ciel Bergman’s estate
The Individualists
Albuquerque’s contemporary art scene stands out—and bands together
By all accounts, Elaine de Kooning had a roaring good time in Albuquerque. The abstract expressionist painter was a guest professor at the University of New Mexico for two years in the late 1950s, and longtime faculty members still tell tales of her exuberant ways. She drove her car like a maniac around the city, presided over fantastic dinner parties with martini in hand, and once passed out among the coats at a particularly wild soirée. “It might be said that the sun chased the modern artists indoors,” de Kooning wrote in a catalogue essay for a group show of Albuquerque artists that she curated for a New York gallery in 1960. “Space-rich, they do not need to escape into big canvases as New Yorkers seem to, and their forms are compressed and immediate.”
- Southwest Contemporary, December 2017
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Illustration by Mariah Romero
A Map with No Border
Albuquerque artist Jami Porter Lara’s formative trek through the borderlands
Jami Porter Lara came upon the map with no border line in 2011, during a trip to the Paquime archaeological site in Chihuahua, Mexico. She was a BFA student at the University of New Mexico, traveling with photographer David Taylor and a group of students as part of the Land Arts of the American West field program. “In the museum at Paquime, they had maps on the wall denoting different cultural regions,” Porter Lara says. “We were in a place that was called Gran Chichimeca, and it did not acknowledge the border. There was no national border indicated on it.”
- Southwest Contemporary, September 2017
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Image courtesy of Jami Porter Lara
The Rolling Clock
As SITE Santa Fe renovates and expands its building, curator Irene Hofmann marks a new tempo for the contemporary art institution
SITE Santa Fe’s Future Shock exhibition will be filled with expansive installations but one of its best conversation pieces fits on a small pedestal. BW by Patrick Bernatchez is a black wristwatch that makes one rotation in one thousand years. The clock’s single silver hand started its first turn in 2010 and will finish long after the artist is gone. Bernatchez’s work is a serene eye in the technological storm, steadily but imperceptibly marking real time in a millennium that is only getting farther ahead of itself. It represents the antithesis of the pressure faced by contemporary art museums and biennials (of which SITE is both). In these places, the clock must roll forward with exponential speed, outstripping the motion of its own hands.
- Southwest Contemporary (Cover Story), July 2017
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Photography: Brigitte Henry
Thinking Small
Zane Fischer’s innovative tiny houses are building blocks for the 21st-century cityscape
Zane Fischer is not an architect, nor is he an engineer. He just got his contractor’s license this spring, which makes the small structure outside his Santa Fe workshop all the more remarkable. It’s called the Saltbox Tiny House, and it just might be the prefabricated home of the future. Created with the help of a giant robot called a CNC machine, the Saltbox might look like just another hipster playhouse, but it’s designed to solve a real-world, large-scale problem. Fischer aims to conquer housing shortages in Santa Fe and beyond by transforming empty lots and other not-so-precious urban spaces into vibrant tiny-house communities.
- New Mexico Magazine, July 2017
Editor: Dave Herndon; Photography: Kate Russell
Meet your Makers: Santa Fe Opera Costume Shop
“It’s one thing to draw a picture of a lady in a blue dress,” says Missy West, Costume Director of the Santa Fe Opera. “But what’s the blue dress made of? What period of history are we working in? Is the shape of the singer going to work with the shape of what you’ve drawn?” It’s early May, and West is sitting at a worktable in the relatively quiet costume shop, which is submerged behind the stage of the open air performance venue. This is where she started her career in opera, in 1990. Back then, she didn’t know to ask any of these questions—let alone how to answer them.
- Southwest Contemporary, June 2017
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Photography: Stefan Wachs
Everybody Loves (Hates) Steve
Santa Fe Opera reveals the man behind a 21st-century icon
On a late afternoon in early spring, the Santa Fe Opera’s Crosby Theatre is empty but for a few birds fluttering in the rafters. All 2,128 seats in the iconic, open-air auditorium are draped with light brown covers that protect them from the winter elements. The plywood footprint of a set occupies the stage, but most of the summer’s productions are sprouting like seedlings deep in the foundations of the building. Down a flight of stairs in the costume shop, there’s a black mock turtleneck and a pair of blue jeans waiting on a rack. Another stairwell descends to the cavernous basement, where set pieces that resemble giant smartphones cluster in one corner. In July, the minimal, luminescent universe of Steve Jobs will emerge on the stage above.
- Santa Fe Reporter (Cover Story), April 2017
Editor: Alex De Vore; Illustration courtesy of Santa Fe Opera
Mind Games
Seeing sounds with the synesthetic brain of Reyes Padilla
Imagine for a moment you can see every sound around you. The clink of a coffee cup produces a burst of blue triangles, a passing car is accompanied by rolling yellow polka dots and a barking dog emits bright red rectangles. That's Reyes Padilla's reality and, for part of his life, he thought everyone saw the world that way. "I remember saying, 'Oh, this song is blue,'" Padilla says. "People would be like, 'What?'" One day, he sneaked into his friend's music appreciation class at University of New Mexico and heard a lecture on synesthesia.
- Santa Fe Reporter, March 2017
Editor: Alex De Vore; Image courtesy of Reyes Padilla
Border Patrol
Indigenous arts collective Postcommodity breaches the US-Mexico border fence
Step into the room, and you’re caught in a centrifuge of whirring fence posts. Dark barriers slide across every wall, changing speed from one surface to the next like an ersatz carnival ride that’s about to burst at its bolts. The growl of tires on rocky soil, the hum of the passing barricade and a cacophony of industrial screeches, hisses and roars echo around the room. Between the fence slats, desert landscapes and sun-drenched suburban streets spin past. It’s a dizzying vision of the US-Mexico border, as seen from the American side.
- Santa Fe Reporter (Cover Story), February 2017
Editor: Alex De Vore; Image courtesy of Postcommodity
Circular Breathing
New dance collective Uroboros takes Jill O'Bryan's artwork for a spin
Whitney Jones grew up in the American South, dancing in a Georgia ballet troupe. It was a community so competitive that ballerinas would sneak shards of glass into each others’ pointe shoes. “We would compete to lose weight to fit into a certain costume, because we rented costumes from other dance companies,” Jones says. “If you’re a man you can get in anywhere, but there’s a huge number of women doing dance and ballet. People are cutthroat.”
- Santa Fe Reporter, February 2017
Editor: Alex De Vore; Image courtesy of Center for Contemporary Arts
Same Old Story
Mural on Santa Fe County building inspires conversation on public art
The mural started to take shape in mid-November, swirling across the face of the Santa Fe County Human Resources building on West Alameda Street. It’s a scene depicting Spanish Colonial New Mexico, with figures tilling soil and chopping wood beside a sweeping Southwestern vista. Looming large over the pastoral tableau, a man on horseback points a sword at a seated figure on the ground before him. The character holds a cross in one hand.
- Santa Fe Reporter, December 2016
Editor: Alex De Vore; Photography: Jordan Eddy
Meet your Makers: Roxanne Swentzell
One day, when she was in her twenties, Roxanne Swentzell paced a barren corner of her grandmother’s land at Santa Clara Pueblo. She was a homeless, single mother of two, but this patch of earth with nothing but an unpaved road running through it would be hers. “I literally came out in my pajamas and drew foundation lines in the dirt,” she says. “I started building a house. Every brick.” More than three decades later, she sits at her dining room table, sipping lemon ginger tea. “It’s not a perfect square,” she says, surveying the earthen walls around her. “It’s rough, but it’s a good house.”
- Southwest Contemporary, November 2016
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Image courtesy of Roxanne Swentzell
Tag Team
Cannupa Luger turns viewers into collaborators at Center for Contemporary Arts
Cannupa Hanska Luger arrived at the opening reception of his interactive installation, Everything Anywhere, in disguise. California performance art group La Pocha Nostra was staging one of their “living museums” in Center for Contemporary Arts’ Spector Ripps Project Space, under the watchful eye of a massive figurative sculpture by Luger. As visitors picked bits of corn off a nude man sprawled on the floor, the masked artist quietly joined a group of performers that roamed through the gallery.
- Santa Fe Reporter, September 2016
Editor: Alex De Vore; Photography: Ginger Dunnill
New Myths of Santa Fe
It’s March and Thais Mather sits in her Eldorado living room with a great firmament of inky constellations hanging above her head. She recently completed the artwork for a solo exhibition titled The Anonymous Author, and its centerpiece is a series of densely detailed pointillist drawings of objects from far-flung eras. Together, they present an alternate narrative of human history. The dots that make up these photorealistic images took over a year to apply, and Thais has been weaving together the show’s histories and mythologies for much longer.
- Southwest Contemporary, August 2016
Editor: Lauren Tresp; Photography: Clayton Porter
Twice Burned
Burning Books sets its autobiography ablaze in new exhibition
Michael Sumner and Melody Sumner Carnahan recently put their house on the market and moved into a walkup off Cordova. The glass front door bears a logo for Burning Books, their long-running publishing imprint, and two bikes lean at the bottom of a long staircase. A bright space on the second floor functions as their kitchen, bedroom and dining quarters. This place feels detached from Santa Fe, like a cube of San Francisco floating above the desert Southwest.
- Santa Fe Reporter, August 2016
Editor: Alex De Vore; Photography: Burning Books