This lavishly illustrated book explores the aesthetic and cultural impact of New Mexico art from the 1880s to the present, and highlights a refreshing range of works representing European, native, ethnic, tourist, regional and commercial art. For the past 125 years, art in New Mexico has told a complex story of aesthetic interaction and cultural fusion. Southwest art began with 19th-century documentarians confronting a disappearing Native America and an exotic landscape. Artists who arrived in New Mexico beginning in the 1880s wrestled with the commercialisation of the region and the clash of cultural identities. Native peoples and expedition photographers, tourism and the railroad, artist colonies, the arrival of modernism, Trinity and the end of romanticism, a new generation of native artists challenging ethnic identity -- all have played a part in what we now call New Mexican art. "The Art of New Mexico" provides new perspectives on the evolution of art in the state, and highlights the outstanding collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, which is the repository for some of the finest works by renowned artists such as Adam Clark Vroman, Marsden Hartley, Robert Henri, John Sloan, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Luis Elijo Tapia. Curator and author Joseph Traugott discusses how Native American and Hispanic artists of the Southwest not only influenced the non-native artists who came to call New Mexico home, but how in turn their work was influenced by these newcomers. By organising key objects from the museum's collection with an intercultural history of New Mexico art, the book makes cogent connections between specific works, aesthetic movements, and cultural traditions. As a result, this book will engage readers who are well versed in the artistic traditions of New Mexico, as well as those new to its aesthetic heritage. The book is published to coincide with a reinstallation of the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe.

Soul Mates takes a serious and ironic look at popular icons in western American culture--cowboy boots and masterpieces in western art--to explore American cultural values and pervasive themes in twentieth century art. Cowboy boots are examined as markers of western life, as works of art, and subjects of works of art. The author has selected stellar examples of boots made by skilled and famous boot makers, including Lucchese, Tony Lama, and C. C. McGuffin, to offer a counterpoint to the "fine art" more typically considered. He has also selected drawings, paintings, prints, and photographs that reflect the changing attitudes and perceptions of western culture over the past 50 years and raise conceptual issues about western mores and modern life. Featured are works by Barbara Van Cleve, Frederick Hammersley, Bruce Nauman, Hal West, Luis A. Jimenez, Jr., and many others whose art define and redefine aspects of Western mythology and culture. The text examines the contemporary art forms that shape the current representation of the cowboy and the West in modern life and explores the origins of cowboy imagery; the isolation of ranch life; the non-traditional roles of female cobblers; and the depictions of boot wearers (both male and female) as powerful, sexual, and independent. Soul Mates is published to coincide with an exhibition to open at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico in May 2010.

This book considers 250 works of art from across a vast timeline of 14,000 years, expanding the definition of what constitutes art to include aestheticised cultural objects extending back to the earliest worked points of the Paleo-Indian Clovis people. The transition from these early works to modern and contemporary art reflects changing economic, ethnic, ideological, religious, and cultural perspectives, while considering the diversity, aesthetic complexity, and cultural breadth that developed in New Mexico and the greater Southwest. The art in this lavishly illustrated publication includes pre-European Native American pottery, baskets, and weavings; Hispanic santero art highlighting religious bultos and retablos; as well as twentieth-century artists, many of whom helped to shape the canon of modern and contemporary art. Examples are drawn from both fine art and anthropology collections and include works by the luminaries of twentieth-century art, including the Santa Fe and Taos colony artists, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, Richard Diebenkorn, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Fritz Scholder, and many more. This comprehensive book is published to coincide with an exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico to open May 2012.

Through photographs and interviews, this book is an extraordinarily intimate glimpse into the creative spaces and minds of fifty-two New Mexico artists whose work environments are as varied as the artwork produced in them. Among those represented are contemporary painters, sculptors, printmakers, ceramic and textile artists, video and conceptual artists living in the art capitals of Taos and New Mexico and in many remote locales throughout the state. These artist studios defy generalisation, and the interview-based portraits and photographs document a range of creative approaches, both practical and aesthetic, that these artists bring to the task of organising and inhabiting their creative spaces. Influential Santa Fe artist Eliseo Rodriguez was born eighty years ago in a house on Canyon Road, in Santa Fe's historic art district. He and his family 'hand-dug' what became a two-room adobe studio, since expanded to thirteen. He believes he has painted in every one of the rooms. Taos painter Earl Stroh has a cabinet with eighteen narrow drawers holding pastels organised by colour -- a legacy from his tutor and friend Andrew Dasburg. restored Victorian hotel in Belen. Chicago's studio is an old parlour, stripped down and painted white. For Agnes Martin, balance is found in a small Taos studio, her third New Mexico art space. At 91, in three and a half hours of painting a day, she continues to paint the way she sees.

William Lumpkin's residential designs speak volumes about the fusion of styles -- Spanish colonial, Pueblo, Art Deco -- in the Southwest. This book shows his distillation of the pure architectural elements of Pueblo style -- the heart of 'Santa Fe' style -- in 47 modern adobe projects. A skilled manipulation of this truly American architectural form. Also demonstrated is Lumpkin's adept talent for incorporating modern living standards into historic architecture with pleasing functional results.

Jerry West: The Alchemy of Memory is the long-awaited, richly deserved retrospective of one of Santa Fe and New Mexico's most prominent artists. West was born in 1933 before the war that brought New Mexico into the modern century. His father Harold E. ("Hal") West, a WPA artist, anchored his son in the rugged world of ranch life and an abiding respect for American regionalism. Dreams, memory, prairie, the night sky; demons, family, history; remoteness and the grandeur of the vast windmills, coyotes and low-flying ravens; childhood, manhood, a tiny white kite and an advancing storm; vulnerability and masculinity; the strong, saturated colors of an artist who knows what he knows - a figurative artist of the subconscious nestled in peronal history with the New Mexico roots intact. Featuring ninety painting and some prints and murals that cover the period from early 1960s to the present and narrated by the artist.