The twelfth version of the Website Santa Fe Worldwide biennial, titled As soon as Inside a Time and opening on 27 June, will embody over 300 works by greater than 70 historic and modern artists—half of whom have been commissioned to conceive works particularly for the exhibition by the curator Cecilia Alemani. Moreover, she has chosen round 25 figures—each actual and fictional—with roots in New Mexico to function inspirational and thematic nodes all through the sprawling exhibition to be put in in additional than a dozen venues throughout town.
“These individuals will operate as punctuation in a present that may be very a lot about storytelling and makes use of the lived expertise or existential adventures of those characters as a place to begin,” says Alemani. She named the exhibition after an experimental movie from 2022 by the Santa Fe-based artist Godfrey Reggio. His As soon as Inside a Time is a surrealistic fairy story that shall be proven at Website, the central hub and largest venue of the Worldwide, in a piece in regards to the uncanny anchored by a puppet of a witch known as Dona Mala, made round 1940, from the gathering of the New Mexico Museum of Artwork.
At Website, the present will open with a room grounded by the late Santa Fe-based Indigenous author N. Scott Momaday and his poem “Within the Telling” in regards to the round prospects of tales. “I believed it was a robust metaphor for the present,” says Alemani. Right here, clay figures of storytellers with kids scaling their our bodies, by the late Pueblo artist Helen Cordero, shall be grouped with three new ceramic-based works by the New York-based sculptor Simone Leigh and a panoramic site-specific scroll by Dominique Knowles, the youngest artist within the present—she born in 1996 within the Bahamas and relies in Paris.
Ceclia Alemani Courtesy The Excessive Line, Picture by Liz Lignon
Santa Fe’s Nineteenth-century “queen of sin”, a saloon proprietor generally known as Dona Tules, serves because the catalyst in a piece in regards to the erotic. Little-known work of amorous scenes by the author D.H. Lawrence, from a set in Taos, shall be clustered with work of fleshy, distorted figures by the Los Angeles-based artist Louise Bonnet and riffs on Italian Baroque-era anatomical Venues by the Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen.
The theme of power revolves round a number of characters together with Francis Schlatter, a Nineteenth-century Frenchman who moved to New Mexico and drew crowds for his supposed powers to remedy individuals. His magic rod shall be in dialogue with mystical work by Agnes Pelton, the earliest artist within the present (1881-1961) and a pacesetter of the Transcendentalist motion, and panorama work on glass by Rebecca Salsbury James, Georgia O’Keeffe’s greatest pal in New Mexico. New commissions from Maja Ruznic, Diego Medina and Terran Final Gun, all based mostly in New Mexico, have interaction with spiritualism and the area as a land of enchantment.
In the identical room, the concept of power as associated to nuclear historical past in New Mexico shall be oriented round Lilli Hornig, one of many few feminine scientists who labored on the Manhattan Undertaking at Los Alamos. Right here, the Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca will present a brand new piece copper as a cloth utilized in technological industries in addition to in sacred ceremonies. The artist Will Wilson, who relies in Santa Fe, will pair aerial images of uranium mines with photographs of land artwork tasks like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and James Turrell’s Roden Crater.
Website Santa Fe Picture by Shayla Blatchford
For the primary time since its founding in 1995, the Worldwide is partnering with a broad vary of venues. “Our purpose is to broaden in a really dynamic means all through the material of town,” says Alemani. On the little-known New Mexico Army Museum, she is going to current artists together with Karla Knight, John McCracken and Joseph E. Yoakum. The WheelwrightMuseum of the American Indian, housed in a constructing within the form of an octagon, will host works by Raven Halfmoon, Nora Naranjo-Morse, Sky Hopinka, Cristina Flores Pescorán and Emmi Whitehorse. The VIP lounge on the Finest Daze Hashish Store may have a brand new set up by Omari Douglin exploring membership tradition.
Total, roughly a 3rd of the taking part artists come from the Southwest, a 3rd from different locations within the US and in Canada, and a 3rd from the remainder of the world, with round 60% figuring out as girls or gender nonconforming artists.
“I needed the exhibition to come back from the location, to be a present that would solely occur in Santa Fe,” says Alemani. “That is how I began going deep into analysis on each establishments and those that have left their mark on that area.”
Website Santa Fe Worldwide: As soon as Inside a Time, 27 June 2025-13 January 2026, varied websites, Santa Fe, New Mexico
