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The current exhibit at Chiaroscuro features three contemporary women artists who are kin by more than blood. But for starters, Nora Naranjo-Morse is the mother of Eliza Naranjo-Morse and great-aunt of Rose B. Simpson. The latter also is the daughter of artists: Her mother is renowned sculptor Roxanne Swentzell, whose whimsical figurative clay sculptures have become iconic to contemporary American Indian art; and her father is Patrick Simpson, a contemporary wood and metal artist. Nora, Eliza and Rose all have familial connections at Santa Clara Pueblo, where the Naranjo name has been...

Friday, June 20, 2008
by Hollis Walker • Journal Santa Fe

Dan Namingha has been working with the same subject matter for most of his career as an artist. He explores the beauty of the Hopi Reservation, where he grew up, and the iconography and beliefs of the Hopi people in several media. In the current exhibition are acrylic-on-canvas paintings and bronze sculptures, though over the course of his career he has worked in many other mediums.

In this particular exhibition, Namingha demonstrates a wide interpretive range, from semirepresentational to completely nonobjective. I was drawn immediately to the simplest images in this exhibit — five...

Friday, June 6, 2008
by Hollis Walker • Journal Santa Fe

Many years ago, when I lived in Dallas, a friend’s mother came to visit from out of town, and we took her shopping at Neiman-Marcus. At the jewelry counter, a perky Southern Methodist University coed guided the petite Mrs. Z toward tasteful and feminine rings, the kind with rows of small gems in delicate filigreed gold and ladylike solitaire stones in platinum princess settings. I could feel Mrs. Z — a woman whose attitude could be as brassy as her hair color — getting more and more irritated as she shook her head at every ring the girl proffered. Finally, she stabbed a finger toward the...

Friday, May 30, 2008
by Hollis Walker • Journal Santa Fe

Idon’t often like flowers in artwork with the exception of botanical illustrations, and the older, the better. Little else has risen to the challenge of saying something about flowers that flowers don’t say better themselves. Paintings of flowers — even realist paintings — are more often about painting than the flowers.

But Vera Sprunt’s exhibition, “Tideline,” intrigues me. The 12 images in this show are mixedmedia works that combine layers of black-andwhite photographs printed on clear film and sheets of Mylar painted with acrylic gouache. It’s an unusual technique that Sprunt uses to...

Friday, May 9, 2008
by Hollis Walker • Journal Santa Fe

If aliens are watching CNN, they can sum up our world in one (English) word: Disaster. Ours is a world of plane crashes, hurricanes, boys with machine guns, one wretched tragedy after another. Viewers watch endless replays of the coverage, vicariously suffering along with those directly affected. But what if there was something to see in those pictures besides the attendant human suffering — a moment of beauty, a bit of irony, a spiritual memo from a higher power? And what about the turning point these disasters represent — the moment at which everything changes, after which nothing will...

Friday, April 25, 2008
by Hollis Walker • Journal Santa Fe

Revelation — and self-revelation, in some cases — is the underlying theme of Tim Tate’s electronic reliquaries on display at Jane Sauer Gallery. The 11 pieces in this exhibit — none more than 16 inches tall — are clear blownglass jars with finials of colored cast glass, set upside down (much like bell jars) on glass pediments. Inside each orb is a miniature video screen and in some cases audio components and a camera with a lens about the diameter of a pencil eraser. All the technical accoutrements — computer board, wires, plugs, etc. — are revealed.

But the important revelations here are...

Friday, April 18, 2008 at 4:00 PM
by Hollis Walker • Journal Santa Fe

I think I saw Garo Antreasian’s work for the first time in 1997, at a Cline LewAllen Gallery show, but it might have been a decade earlier, at another gallery or museum show. It could have been anywhere in the United States, actually. Antreasian, 86 and still making art, is quite the elder statesman of printmaking and has exhibited widely, and his works are in many museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was the first technical director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which opened in Los Angeles in 1960, and when it moved to the...

Friday, April 4, 2008
by Hollis Walker • Journal Santa Fe

Each week when I sit down to write this column, I inevitably find myself instead lost online, as if stuck in a never-ending Chinese nesting box. Each link that I open in search of some basic tidbit of information leads me to another I can’t resist opening, and so on, until hours have gone by and my partner comes into my office to see if I have perhaps expired. (I also can get lost in my art bookshelves, but that’s another therapy session.)

I ended up lost in the links of Chinese boxes last week because that’s what came to mind when I was looking at the paintings of guest artist Joe...

Friday, March 28, 2008
by Hollis Walker • Journal Santa Fe

If you read this column frequently, you may have read some of my “confessions,” like having a penchant for fun art and good titles — things no art critic worth her salt should probably admit. But I got into a conversation with an artist last week about titles and recommended she go over to see Sharon Booma’s show at LewAllen Contemporary if she wanted to get my drift.

Abstract art is difficult for many people — including me, sometimes — to get into. A title that at least hints at what the artist was thinking about before, during or after making a work can help the viewer take the plunge....

Friday, March 21, 2008 at 10:09 AM
by Hollis Walker • Journal Santa Fe