Art Over the Edge
Collectors Guide
Contemporary art comes of age in New Mexico
Image: © Jennifer Steinkamp & Jimmy Johnson
Image: ©2005 Florence Pierce
Beatrice Mandelman (left) and Agnes Martin (right)
The College of Santa Fe Visual Arts Center
There was a moment one summer in the early to mid-‘90s when you could have dropped into Santa Fe and thought that you were in one of the art capitals of the world- Tribeca/Soho, Basel, Paris, Tokyo, say. For along with the innumerable natural and cultural wonders, from the Sangre de Cristos to Canyon Road to the Santa Fe Opera to the newly opened Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, came the pièce de résistance-post-modern-conceptual-minimalism, or call it what you will, in all its muted glory.
The longest-running art movement in history, you could argue, had arrived in the form of SITE Santa Fe, our own international kunsthalle housed in a former beer distribution warehouse on Paseo de Peralta and the railroad tracks, and the Laura Carpenter Gallery in a renovated Territorial residence on Read St. In one grand stroke the balance of power seemed to have shifted from the north side of town, and the Museum of New Mexico to the south side of Santa Fe. (Even the elegant O’Keeffe Museum, when it opened, seemed a little dull in comparison. It wasn’t; only understated.)
Within minutes, it seemed, art had come off the wall and onto the floor: international biennials with extremely significant sounding, and entirely obscure, titles were being held; people named Dieter and Helmut were hanging about; and the Art Crowd, munching canapés in museums next to cages filled with live insects, were suddenly bussing each other on BOTH cheeks as if they’d just stepped in off Boulevard St. Michel. Instantly, or so it again seemed, artists such as Kiki Smith, Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Kara Walker, were having exhibitions, and rocker-poet Patti Smith was howling under a tent. (At one point it got so thick you couldn’t even find relief in the restroom of the restaurant that helped stir this heady post-cultural concoction without running into a Bruce Nauman video running in a continual loop up in the corner.)
It left one wondering, in the immortal, paraphrased words of David Byrne and the Talking Heads, "How did this get here?!"
The short answer is the same way that culture gets spread around anywhere - via that lovely confluence of dollars and sensibilities. In this case each came from disparate private, corporate and institutional quarters, notably from the Medicis de Santa Fe, aka Anne and John Marian, he a savvy street-wise New Yorker by way of Sotheby’s, she of the Tandy Corporation and Burnett Foundation, Ft. Worth, Texas (and who also generously supported the O’Keeffe Museum, endowed a chair of Photography at the College of Santa Fe as well as a sizeable expansion of the Santa Fe Art Institute featuring the Louis Barragan-inspired architecture of Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta); Joann and Gifford Phillips, famously of the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Charles and Bobbie Foshay Miller.
The other short answer is the art world, way beyond Modernism and several other "isms", was basically here all the time in the persons of a number of visionary artists, and it was only a matter of time before support from galleries, institutions, collectors and most importantly a discerning audience, finally showed up.
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