Santa Fe’s Center for Contemporary Art debuted in 1979 as an exciting, risk-taking arts facility, but its momentum began to wane in the 1990s. By last year, the alternative space faced the possibility of eviction and even bankruptcy.
Steve Buck stepped into the middle of this crisis in September when he took over as executive director. He has managed to get the center back on firm financial footing and negotiate a stability-inducing, long-term lease from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
Another newcomer, visual-arts director Cyndi Conn, who formerly administered a commercial art gallery in Santa Fe, has injected new vitality into the center’s exhibitions. She has quickly made the space an essential stop once again for anyone interested in progressive contemporary art.
A good example of Conn’s new focus is the center’s offering through Aug. 13 in its high-ceilinged, main gallery – “Light Phenomena,” a beautiful solo show devoted to Erika Blumenfeld, one of Santa Fe’s most promising young artists.
Blumenfeld stood out during a three-person exhibition two years ago at the Rule Gallery in Denver, and has taken important strides since then.
Using not cameras but various kinds of sometimes-crude photographic devices, she captures the aureole effects of the sun and moon, creating extraordinarily nuanced, photographic abstractions.
If her work were only about achieving such visual effects, it would be compelling enough. But Blumenfeld goes much further, infusing nearly all of her pieces with a conceptual dimension that deals with the elements of time and space.
A key piece in this show is “Light Graph: Twilight” (2001), a group of 609 4-by-5-inch Polaroid photographs taken at three-second intervals over 10 hours, documenting the transition of twilight into night. They are assembled in an imposing, nearly 12-foot-tall grid.
Probably even more exciting is “Moving Light: Lunation 1011” (2004), a spellbinding video projection and an exciting new direction in her work. In this piece, she animates her still photography to delicately document a complete lunar cycle.
Blumenfeld’s exhibition is hardly the only worthwhile show on view in Santa Fe. As one of this country’s largest and most active art centers, the city offers a constant myriad of diverse, overlapping exhibitions. This summer is no exception.
One of the best-known artists showcased in Santa Fe is Milton Avery (1885-1965), whose simplified, sometimes quirky paintings earned him a lasting place in the history of 20th-century American art.
The Riva Yares Gallery, which has long represented the artist’s estate, regularly features surveys of his work. But this latest one, “Connections Over Time,” is one of the best in recent memory, with 52 selections, including some impressively high-quality pieces.
The gallery has cleverly paired paintings of similar subject matter from the early and better-known late periods in Avery’s career, creating some insightful juxtapositions.
Prime examples include “Laguna Beach” (1941) hung next to “Blue Bay & Dunes” (1961), a startling, almost radical seascape with black used to evoke the whitecaps, and “Vermont Autumn” (ca. 1936) coupled with “Dark Mountain” (1958), a classic late work with its soft colors and contours.
James Kelly Contemporary, long one of Santa Fe’s top galleries, is offering a superb exhibition of 10 small works by one of this country’s senior and most respected sculptors: Ken Price, a star of the 2001 biennial at SITE Santa Fe.
Price’s beautiful abstractions combine blobby yet surprisingly graceful, gourdlike forms with stunningly subtle surfaces that he creates by painstakingly sanding down layers of acrylic paint to create a refined, incredibly intricate speckled effect.
These range from “The Other,” a 5-by-7-inch, lime-green piece dotted with dark green and orange; to “Slouch,” a phallic piece with a light-blue field; to “Dee Dee,” a small, knobby piece with an indentation in its side.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
“Light Phenomena”
Through Aug. 13|Photographs by Erika Blumenfeld|Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe|Free|10 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and during movie screenings (505-982-1338 or ccasan tafe.org)
“Connections Over Time”
Through Aug. 15|Survey of Milton Avery paintings and drawings|Riva Yares Gallery, 123 Grant Ave., Santa Fe|Free|10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays (505-984-0330 or rivayaresgallery.com)
“Ken Price: Small Scale Sculpture”
Through Sept. 10|Clay sculpture exhibition|James Kelly Contemporary, 616 1/2 Canyon Road, Santa Fe|Free|10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays (505-989-1601 or jameskelly.com)
