Museum of Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
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One of the joys of traveling for art fans is that it provides opportunities to see works you seldom see in your own backyard. The Albuquerque Museum (MoA) is less visited than it should be, perhaps because it’s a hybrid that also tries to spotlight some of the city’s history and its people, but it’s mostly an art museum.
Like many museums that can’t or simply don’t give into the temptation to launch expensive blockbuster shows, the MoA had assembled a small but innovative special exhibit when I visited in April. In this case, it was to a color: indigo. The blue pigment, which ranges from near black to purple, originally came from plants. (Today a lot is synthetic.) The very word is linguistically linked to India, since Europeans often imported it from there. Here are a few items from the show.
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| Sashiko Farmer's Coat (Japan) |
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| Laura Anderson Barbata "Little Jaguar" |
If you’re an Easterner such as I, another striking feature of the MoA is noticing how the aesthetics of art produced in the West differs from those of the East. There is, for instance, art made by Native Americans. Much that one sees at the MoA is of recent vintage, but rooted in older forms. It was my first immersion into the work of the talented Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940), a Native-American woman enrolled in three Western tribes. (Ironically, her BA is from Framingham State in Massachusetts.) She is an activist who works in numerous media and has a cheeky sense of humor and a modernist sensibility. Spend some time looking at “Herding” (1985), as it takes a few moments for its lines and symbols to come into focus. Nor is her “Albuquerque” (1998) the first thing that springs to mind when you hear that word.
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| "Herding" |
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| "Albuquerque" |
Names can be deceptive in the West, given centuries of intermarriage. Fritz Scholder has links to California’s Luiseno peoples, hence his “Man in White Suit” (1983) is not a form of cultural appropriation. The same is true of Alan Hauser, an Apache. His “Mountain Spirit Dancer” (1993) is an eye-catching small sculpture that differs from much of his largescale work one sees in Santa Fe galleries.
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| "Man in White Suit" |
New Mexico was where the atomic bomb was first developed and tested. It played a big role in defeating Japan, but it’s important to remember the effects it had one those living downwind of Los Alamos. Tony Price wasn’t an Indian, but his metallic “Atomic Firebird” (1994) is a subtle reminder of literal fallout. In a more amusing vein, but packed with the suggestion that Natives are often so marginalized they might as well be aliens, is potter Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo), whose “Mayans from Mars” (1995) makes you chuckle and consider.
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| "Atomic Firebird" |
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| "Mayans from Mars" |
The West is just flat out big, thus it’s hardly surprising to see how humans represent the land, the elements, and surviving in their midst. Carl Von Hassler gave us adobe, laundry, and dust in “New Mexico Landscape” (1920) and Carl Redin “Village in Moonlight” (1920s). Peter Hurd offered commentary on the precariousness of humans in that big landscape in his “A Shower in a Dry Year” (1969).
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| Von Hassler |
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| Redin |
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| Hurd |
As you might have surmised, sculpture is well represented at the MoA, both inside and out. Paul Suttman was from Connecticut, but his sculpture at the MoA with the catch-your-breath title “Braque Visited by the Conquering Venus Armed with Apples of Discord” (1991) is either a cool mashup of modernist sensibilities or a parody thereof (your choice). I also quite liked Ron Cooper’s “Labyrinth of Gravity (1990).”
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| Suttman |
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| Cooper |
If, after a while, you get homesick for the East, Andrew Wyeth will cure it. The MoA has a painting from his “Karl” series, this one from 1948.
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| Andrew Wyeth |
Rob Weir
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