A visit to Santa Fe, USA

LF got to spend a little time in Santa Fe, New Mexico in May, and was impressed by the sheer volume of art in a city of only 80,000 people. You could in fact describe SF as an 'Art Town' - it has been a magnet for artists since the turn of the century, and with Georgia O'Keefe's legacy, and many revered artists such as Bruce Nauman and Richard Tuttle living in the 'hood, its' 'hot art' status is perhaps not so surprising. LF was fortunate while there to visit one of the great private American collections (privacy requires that it remains nameless, but there is a picture, left), situated in an extraordinary glass box high in the hills overlooking the Rio Grande valley. The presence (at least part of the time) of many well-heeled collectors, and the dry, clean desert air, is undoubtedly another reason why art thrives there. And it's a hell of a long way from Washington.

As well as some 400 commercial galleries (a lot of them showing tourist crap, admittedly) the city centre boasts the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts (20th century Southwestern American art), and the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum (contemporary Native American fine art). Museum Hill, a few miles southeast of the city, features the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, the truly fascinating Museum of International Folk Art (the world’s largest collection of folk art, no less), The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian (contemporary and traditional Native American art) and The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art. That's quite a haul for a little town.

In addition SITE Santa Fe, a well-regarded non-profit artspace, provides a year-round program of exhibitions, including the annual (sic) biennial, details below.

“Lucky Number Seven"
SITE Santa Fe Biennial
June 22-October 26 2008

Photo: Herbert Lotz, 2005, courtesy Site Santa Fe

David Ebony writes in Art & America:
Organized by independent curator Lance Fung, this year’s SITE Santa Fe Biennial, the seventh installment, promises to be full of surprises. The list of the 27 participating artists from around the world, recently released to the press, has already raised eyebrows in the art world, as it is almost completely devoid of familiar names. In a departure from conventional biennial procedures that routinely tap art stars to move tickets, Fung, operating with an approximately $800,000 budget, decided to focus exclusively on emerging artists. And, as with “The Snow Show,” for which Fung paired artists and architects to create collaborative projects in Finnish Lapland (2004) and at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, the Santa Fe exhibition will be a team effort. Rather than selecting the artists directly, he asked numerous nonprofit, international contemporary art institutions to suggest one or two artists to be included in the show. From these candidates he chose 27 artists nominated by 18 institutions; these institutions will act as co-curatorial partners in the endeavor. Among those on board are Hiroshi Fuji, selected by Japan’s Art Tower Mito; Bharti Kher, chosen by England’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art; Piero Golia, proposed by Turin’s Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; and Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Sibony, submitted by Paris’s Palais de Tokyo. In another unusual move, at a time when many artists have their works fabricated, Fung requires that all the artists create their pieces by hand in Santa Fe. Working in a variety of mediums, and each allotted a $7,500 budget, the artists are obliged to come to New Mexico at least three weeks in advance of the exhibition and produce works either within the SITE Santa Fe building or off-site. For that purpose, Fung has enlisted the architecture team Tod Williams and Billie Tsien to redesign SITE’s interior especially for the biennial.

The model for their distinctive scheme, featuring a series of ramps and zigzagging galleries, was recently unveiled in Santa Fe. In a move to counter the hypercommercialism of today’s art world, Fung requires that no artist accept funding from a commercial gallery for the SITE work. He underscores the specificity of the event by also stipulating that none of the works can be sold after the exhibition, and all are to be destroyed. His unorthodox approach to the biennial has raised some concerns among SITE’s board members. However, Laura Steward Heon, SITE’s director and chief curator, who chose Fung as the organizer, told A.i.A. that part of SITE’s mission is to take risks, and that the biennial, relatively modest in scale, presents the opportunity to innovate. Although the format might seem to invite chaos, much about the work the artists will produce in Santa Fe is known from their proposals. Still, it seems that more than a little positive musing on the laws of chance will be part of the event, and it’s not for nothing that Fung has titled the show “Lucky Number Seven."