Top Talent
From emerging to established and our region’s most influential talent of all time, we give you 150+ standout artists selected by some of our community’s leading art aficionados
Images courtesy of Evo Gallery, William Siegal Gallery, Karan Ruhlen Gallery, and Meyer East Gallery
Images by Gerry Snyder, Colette Hosmer, Janet Lippincott and Suzanne Wiggin
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Given the volume of artists working and showing in our fair city, knowing who stands out as extraordinary is a daunting task. That’s why, for this year’s Art Issue, we surveyed a wide array of opinion-makers (collectors, curators, and gallerists), asking them to name their favorite emerging, established, and most influential artists of all time, with only one caveat: picks should be locally based or at least locally represented. More than 150 individuals were singled out, with the results presented over the next 12 pages.
Tim Rodgers, chief curator, New Mexico Museum of Art
Emerging
Dunham Aurelius: His work has a raw, primitive edge that you don’t find with most New Mexico artists; drawing from African, Greek, and New Guinean art, he creates something distinctly contemporary. Yumi Roth: Her art is the rare combination of seriousness and fun, and it speaks to me like a clever, saucy friend. Mokha Laget: She’s been showing in Europe, keeping her art from the eyes of New Mexicans, which is a shame because her bridging of the long-standing categories of modern art is intellectually engaging and visually exciting.
Established
Gerry Snyder: Anyone who can create paintings that combine Fred Phelps, Italian Renaissance landscapes, and Teletubbies has to be watched! Betty Hahn: I reconnected with her art recently and the pleasure was all mine. Erika Wanenmacher: Her series of I Stole Stealth sculptures is the smartest work I’ve seen in a long time.
Most Influential
Agnes Martin: She offered the possibility of inspirational minimalism. John Marin: He influenced at least two generations of watercolorists here. Georgia O’Keeffe: The O’Keeffe Museum is a shrine that people make pilgrimages to for spiritual renewal. Judy Chicago: Any artist that represents a whole movement is influential. Mabel Dodge Luhan: Her art was her life—and what a life!
Cindy Miscikowski and Doug Ring, collectors
Emerging
Cathy Aten: For her amazing use of materials and colors of New Mexico, imbuing them with a special spiritual quality. Jennifer Joseph: Interesting mediums that add dimension and illusion to light and space.
Established
Peter Sarkisian: Captivating video art that is alluring and hypnotic. Stacey Neff: Sculpture that defies description and transcends its material to be fluidly sensual. Roxanne Swentzell: Representational work that speaks to human frailty and humanity at the same time. Mary Shaffer: She makes glass bend and glow unlike any other artist working in the medium today.
Most Influential
Agnes Martin: Abstraction in its simplest and most beautiful form. Bruce Nauman: A fascinating mixture of medium and commentary on society today. Georgia O’Keeffe: No further comment needed.
Tonya Turner Carroll, Turner Carroll Gallery
Emerging
Jenny Honnert Abell: She creates highly detailed work from old book covers with compulsively stitched and hand-rendered abstract and figurative elements, incorporating the old and neglected detritus of our civilization into highly contemporary works. Wanxin Zhang: A Chinese artist who looks back to the ancient Xian warriors who guarded the tomb of the first Chinese emperor for his inspiration. As an art student in Maoist China, he was amazed at the individualization in each of these 7,000 figures, and was prompted to create his own army, to stand guard over our civilization and to remind us of the past. Sergio Garval: This Mexican artist just won the equivalent of our MacArthur Fellowship, with critics calling him the Mexican Lucian Freud. He uses a rich paint surface to depict women in the role of modern-day curandera, or urban warrior.
Established
Colette Hosmer: She always creates unique and intelligent artwork, with a passion for exploring the world and every aspect of her subject and her materials. Igor Melnikov: I will never forget the first impact his paintings had for me. He knows the voice of true human nature, painting the human spirit via images of children. Peter Sarkisian: He pushes the limits of his mind, the viewer’s mind, and technology. Hung Liu: Both her art and her life are an inspiration. After growing up in Maoist China, she paints works that depict prostitutes, labor camp workers, and others in a manner that elevates them to the quasi-imperial.
Most Influential
Georgia O’Keeffe: She laid the groundwork for Santa Fe to become the contemporary art center it is today. Agnes Martin: She created a new way to see New Mexico’s glorious landscape and light. Tom Joyce: He employs very traditional media in his artwork, but creates pure and refined art from these base materials. Florence Pierce: She showed the world that New Mexico can be a refinement of all the elements. Bruce Nauman: Because of his influence on the history of contemporary art both before and after he moved to New Mexico. Barbara Zusman: She always had a unique aesthetic, and when she began showing her own work, it opened up the very warm and rich side of contemporary art in Santa Fe.
Alex Betts, Windsor Betts Art Brokerage House
Emerging
Carol Hartsock, Henry Payer, Kim Barrick.
Established
Joe Andoe, Susan Hertel, Elias Rivera
Most Influential
Kevin Red Star, Fritz Scholder, T.C. Cannon, Earl Biss, Doug Hyde
Cyndi Conn, Visual Arts Director, Center for Contemporary Arts
Emerging
Ann Gaziano: Working in media ranging from watercolor on paperto realist needlepoint portraits, Ann is a force of nature, an ideal combination of creativity and technical mastery—and she just keeps getting better. Kim Russo: My introduction to her work was a large-scale graphite drawing of a domestic scene gone awry: The foreground was a wedding cake on a park bench being consumed by squirrels; the background was a house on fire. Each piece is increasingly tragic, intricate, ironic, and luscious. Gabriel Romero: Combine Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic, and the Beastie Boys and pour them into a mangy pink bunny costume. Whether he is genuflecting across expanses of desert or reenacting Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, he is remarkable, hysterical, and utterly original.
Established
Eugene Newmann: One of my top five painters in the world. Rebecca Holland: Dental floss, silver leaf, cast candy. She is minimal like Donald Judd or Carl Andre, but the execution is soft, disconcerting, and enchanting. Julie Blackmon: She creates a world of domestic fantasy in her color photography where things never seem quite right, yet everything is perfect, exploring the stress, chaos, and beauty of life in bizarre, hysterical, and captivating scenes.
Most Influential
Georgia O’Keeffe: She turned an international eye to New Mexico at a time when few women were accorded fame. Agnes Martin: She remained accessible and open to the New Mexico community in a way that most “art stars” today are not. I know many artists who called her without an introduction (she was listed in the Taos directory) and were forever changed. She was an incredible talent and created lasting beauty in both her life and her work. Richard Tuttle: We have several local art icons and Richard Tuttle is among the most generous. I often see him at events, volunteering his name and time to promote local arts organizations. Steina and Woody Vasulka: These two are creative entities making art as an exploration, an inquiry, and a life passion. It is easy to forget just how seminal and important they—individually and as a couple—have been in the history of video and media arts. We are honored to have both of them working and playing in our community.
Allison and Ivan Barnett, Patina Gallery
Emerging
Steven Deo: His sculpture has integrity. It’s honest, and he’s working with issues of identity, both cultural and personal. Mary Bennett: She has a strong, conceptual aesthetic, and she’s committed to her work and the community of artists here. Isabella Gonzales: Her work is serene, and also content driven.
Established
Polly Whitcomb: Brilliant design sense with humor, wit, and sophistication in the tradition of Calder. Lonnie Vigil: His clay works are so aesthetically pure—in form, surface, and color; the epitome of less is more. Gail Reike: Sophisticated, thoughtful, intention-filled, sensitive.
Most Influential
Georgia O’Keeffe: Her paintings captured the Southwest in a way never before seen. Gustave Baumann: He also captured the region through his design-driven prints. Will Shuster: He was a true regionalist in the formal tradition of Thomas Hart Benton. Rick Dillingham: He revolutionized contemporary clay-vessel making. Allan Houser: He stylized the human form in a way never seen before by a Native artist and went on to mentor and influence a whole generation of artists.
Lynn Marchand, collector
Emerging
Clayton Porter: His art (drawings, light-box constructions, installations, and paintings) blends humor and social/psychological critique into disturbing, sometimes macabre imagery. With exquisite technical skill, he shows us what lies beneath the surface when desire and fear are laid bare. Keep Adding and The Black Estate: These two collaboratives (Keep Adding: Noah MacDonald and Brian Bixby; The Black Estate: Noah MacDonald and Scott Pagano) are creating visionary work. Noah’s evocative drawings (some are computer generated) form the content of The Black Estate’s animations. Keep Adding’s recent installation Wrekage, at CCA, explores how art—in this case, graffiti-esque art—can breathe new life into a crumbling civilization. Tom Miller: Tom’s work is political, satirical, lyrical, direct, metaphoric—and all in one piece. He plays deftly with symbols and icons, both from ancient sources and popular culture, with a narrative element that is mocking while tender.
Established
Colette Hosmer: Nothing (however squirmy) is beyond Colette’s sphere of interest. Her emphasis on the still life, often employing real animals, vegetables, and minerals, links her art with the past and future. She combs the markets in China for objects that will be transformed in some sculptural way—be it goat heads or pig tongues. Erika Wanenmacher: When I think of Erika’s work, I am reminded of a cabinet of curiosities, of an alchemist’s lab, of Dr. Moreau’s island. There is so much to marvel at—not just the audacity of self-portraits but also the technical precision of her execution. Ray Abeyta: Ray’s paintings reflect his passion for transforming his heritage into contemporary idioms. He grew up in Española and celebrates this culture with great wit and affection.
Most Influential
Richard Diebenkorn, Richard Tuttle, Paul Sarkisian, Florence Pierce, Joel-Peter Witkin: Witkin is a master of legerdemain. His photography takes me down the rabbit hole where Alice encounters an underworld of fantastical yet oddly familiar creatures.
