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EVOKE Contemporary

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EVOKE Contemporary

PROVOCATIVE + COMPELLING CONTEMPORARY ART The focus of EVOKE is to showcase provocative, contemporary and compelling art of international acclaim.
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EVOKE Contemporary invites you to experience the creative spirit of the contemporary Santa Fe art scene in the Railyard Arts District with a riveting line up of events, gallery openings and exhibitions. All events open on the Last Friday of each month along with the celebrated Last Friday Art Walks in the Railyard Arts District. EVOKE Contemporary and the Railyard Arts District present one of the

most prestigious art destinations for contemporary art collectors worldwide. EVOKE Contemporary
550 S. Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501

877.995.9902 | 505.995.9902

email | [email protected]

09/13/2024

Announcing at the Harwood Museum in Taos in just 7 days! “Nicholas Herrera: El Rito Santero” September 21, 2024 –June 1, 2025

“Nicholas Herrera: El Rito Santero” is a glimpse into the life and works of master Santero Nicholas Herrera. Herrera born and raised in El Rito, New Mexico, is a folk artist whose family was among the earliest settlers in the region. Claiming Spanish, Native American, and Mexican ancestry, Herrera identifies as mestizo and descends from farmers and outlaws, landowners and soldiers, craftsmen and artists. He grew up around the Spanish traditions of Northern New Mexico and came of age with a fast-paced lifestyle that resulted in a serious car accident at the age of 26. After awakening in the hospital and recovering from a coma, Herrera felt called to become a saint maker.

Harwood Museum of Art presents Nicholas Herrera’s first solo museum exhibition. Please join us in celebrating Herrera’s exceptional work at the opening events in Taos.

OPENING CELEBRATION
Friday, September 20
5:00 pm–6:30 pm Members + Director’s Circle Preview
6:30 pm –8:00 pm Public Opening Reception

Images:

Nicholas Herrera in Taos. Courtesy of Beth J. Wald.

Nicholas Herrera, ‘La Batalla’, 2020, hand carved wood with natural pigments, 24 x 21.5. Courtesy of Tia Collection, Santa Fe, NM. ❤️

Nicholas Herrera, ‘El Rito Santero,’ acrylic on hand carved wood, 12 x 20 x 13.25. Courtesy of the Travis Family Collection

08/30/2024

TONIGHT TONIGHT TONIGHT! Join us for the big opening of Honey in the Desert 5-7pm unveiling the latest work of Irene Hardwicke Olivieri 🥂🌵

08/29/2024

IRENE HARDWICKE OLIVIERI
Honey in the Desert
Opening Friday, August 30th, 5 - 7 through September 21st. In addition to paintings, Irene will be showing three dimensional animals and people created from cholla cactus skeletons, ponderosa pine and juniper. While hiking in the wilderness of New Mexico Irene gathers tree cholla cactus skeletons. After making some creatures out of the local cholla (Cylindropuntia imbricata) she decided to look for larger cactus skeletons and last winter went to the Sonoran Desert in Arizona to collect teddy bear cholla skeletons. (Cylindropuntia bigeloveii) She searches for the dead cholla in the desert, brings them home, carefully cleans and sands the thorns off and uses them to create people and animals. My cousin is a kinkajou features a wild desert girl with a pet coati in one hand and in the other hand a special satchel filled with all she will need to explore the desert, fresh fruit, plant press, collecting jars, books, sketchpads, pencils, paints and brushes. Her shoulders are strong in their teddy bear cholla shapes, her cholla legs are powerful as are her painted ponderosa pine boots. desertexhibition ❤️

08/29/2024

(This story continued from previous 3 posts) Looking and seeing should be fun. The fun of looking at Gugger’s art is discovering what it’s made of and contemplating what it could mean. -John O’Hern

08/29/2024

Gugger no longer makes personalized portraits, concentrating now on enigmatic figurative compositions of people and animals. She describes them as embodying a “tension between opposites.” She controls the tension between positive and negative space, dark colors and light colors, detail and empty space, even energizing the space between male and female figures. Describing the latter, she says, “It’s not just a daily scene in a daily material. There’s much more behind it.”

“I find the informative aspect of newspaper quite important, “she says. “Since each piece I create holds all the world/local news of that particular time frame, it becomes an historic piece within itself. All artists date their oeuvre with great importance—reflecting their moment in time. My works not only hold a date, they also represent an historic documentation of our lives. This information may not be of importance to the viewer, but for me each piece becomes a diary.”

In Dog with 3 People and Child, a dog in the foreground occupies a negative space with no detail, contemplating an unknown object in front of him. Little bits of shadow ground the dog and the figures in the nebulous space. Gugger says, “The shoes and legs are arranged on the vertical and the background is totally chaos.”

“My works are usually monumental,” she explains. Dog with 3 People and Child is 62 by 45 inches. “You can see the totality of the work form a distance. Close up it transforms in a wonderful way into an abstraction. It can be viewed both ways. There is always ambiguity in my work. The story needs to be informed by the viewer. The subjects are anonymous. I need freedom when I work and I set the subjects free. Here we don’t know what kind of dog it is. It wears a collar so it belongs to someone but maybe not the people nearby.”

Dog with 3 People and Child invites us to wander visually around its surface, looking for details in the colored areas, enjoying the patterns in areas with no detail, and making up stories about the people and the dog, adding psychological tensions to the visual tensions, and having fun in the process. (This story continued in next post . . . last one!)

08/29/2024

(This story continued from previous post). The Danish Museum of National History and Portrait Gallery in Frederiksborg Castle, asked Gugger for the loan of the Obama portrait. She suggested to the museum that it would be nice to have another portrait to go with it, telling them she would like to produce one of Crown Princess Mary. In 2012, Mary unveiled the portrait at the museum.

I lived briefly in northern Denmark when I studied at a photography school that promptly went bankrupt. Gugger asked if I can still speak Danish. I told her there is no “still” about it since I lived out in the country where the people have a heavy accent (which she acknowledged). I would practice what I needed to say when I went to get milk and eggs and gas for the hot water heater, but was then dead in the water. The Danish people were warm, welcoming and supportive, however, and often wanted to practice their English—especially the kids. It’s no surprise to me that these open-minded people would welcome a portrait made of newspaper of their soon-to-be queen into a national museum and that she would unveil it herself.

Given the complexity of her raw material and its assembly, I’m amazed by the subtleties she realizes in her portraits, especially this one of Queen Mary. She decided to face her subject toward the left, gazing into the future, using Danish newspapers on the left and newspapers from Mary’s native Australia on the right. She looked everywhere for Australian newspapers and eventually had to call the Danish embassy there to send her some—which they did, after a lot of convincing.

“As a child I loved going to museums,” Gugger says, “and this was my favorite museum. I always dreamed about living there--and today I do (a little bit) with my Mary work in permanent collection.” (This story continued in next post . . .)

08/29/2024

Looking & Seeing | One long look at one work of art featuring “Dog with 3 People and a Child” by Gugger Petter. John O'Hern is an arts writer, curator and retired museum director who is providing a weekly contemplation of a single work of art from our gallery. In our fast-paced lives overflowing with information, we find it necessary and satisfying to slow down and take time to look. We hope you enjoy this perspective from John.

When Gugger moved to California 1986 she was intrigued by the way the sun yellowed newspapers and began to think about how she could use newspapers as a medium in her art. Its limited color palette and fragility posed a problem but she found if she rolled the paper into a tube and actually limited her palette to the colors available she had the building materials for making 3-D wall and floor sculptures.

She had learned basic tapestry weaving in Mexico and adapted it to her own unique way of weaving the newspaper roles on a metal frame and varnishing it to make nearly indestructible compositions. They are so indestructible, in fact, that several survived the total destruction of the Hard Rock Hotel in Biloxi, MS, in Hurricane Katrina. When she saw video of the aftermath, on top of one of the piles of rubble was one of her 4 panels of rock stars that had been installed days before the grand opening that would never take place. When the hotel was rebuilt, Hard Rock dedicated a private space in the attic for relics of the disaster, including two of Gugger’s panels. The other two had floated out to sea.

Lady Luck smiled on her after that, however, when, in 2007, her brother-in-law asked her to do a portrait of Barack Obama for his presidential campaign headquarters in Chicago. The ambassador of her native Denmark had seen the monumental portrait and asked later if he could borrow it for his official residence in Washington, DC. He kept asking for an extension of the loan and to thank her, invited her to lunch with Crown Princess Mary and Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark. (The couple are now king and queen.) This story continued in next post . . .

08/26/2024

Preview live now for IRENE HARDWICKE OLIVIERI | Honey in the Desert! *LINK IN BIO*. Join us for the exhibition opening reception 5-7pm this Friday, September 30th. There will be an additional Artist Talk with Irene at 1pm Saturday, August 31. We hope to see you at both of these exciting events! 💕 ❤️

08/23/2024

KRISTINE POOLE | Artist Demonstration at 1PM! Join us for this exclusive demonstration in which Kristine will show techniques for designing and sculpting the elaborate hairstyles that are a hallmark of her fired clay sculptures. As the hair design often relates to the words in her work, she’ll also demonstrate how she chooses and inscribes patterns and text on her figures.

08/21/2024

When she was working on the figure, she came upon a recently deceased porcupine. “There was no blood and it was clean,” she explains. As she went through the arduous task of removing its quills, she did her research. She discovered “They have 30,000 quills with long soft quills on their underbelly. They have different shaped quills and different coloring. The quills are a pale creamy color and then they’re dark brown at the tip so you have these beautiful variations. It’s just so exciting. I thought, ‘I can make shadows with these. I can put them in with the bone pieces and I can make things so the dead porcupine can live on in my art.’”

The bones and quills are adhered to the copper tray with a special glue called PaleoBOND. “I love it,” she says. “It’s what paleontologists use on fossils.”

The early reception of her bone pieces (which are only part of her output that includes complex paintings and assemblages) wasn’t always positive. “You know, most people don’t want to think about an owl coughing up something. Or, sometimes, they think it’s droppings. It’s not, but it turns people off. I feel people miss out on learning about something that’s really interesting and amazing.”

Exploring her house and gardens rising up in levels past a greenhouse to a guest casita at the top of a rise, everything is “interesting and amazing”. Sitting on the porch of the casita—which she is now using as her studio—I gazed into the tops of dried agave spikes. The sometimes 30-foot spikes with yellow blossoms are stunning in gardens and in the desert. These, however, were the beautiful, brown, expired spikes which she had seen in other people’s gardens, asked the owners to save them, and then strapped them on the top of her Jeep to take home.

Looking and seeing has the added element of conserving for Irene. Dead things come alive in her work. “I never have a lack of ideas,” she says. “I have a whole lot of things I want to do. I can’t wait to get to my studio. Some days I get so excited I feel like I’m just going to take off and fly. Literally. It’s a good feeling.”

08/21/2024

When she was living in Orgeon, looking and seeing as she hiked, Irene found several owl pellets, the coughed up, undigested bones, teeth and fur of the owl’s last meal. She relates, “One day we were at this incredible place called Fort Rock. There are giant cliffs and at the bottom of one there were all these owl pellets, hundreds of them. I was so excited. I couldn't believe it. I didn't know what I was going to do with them, but I had a backpack and I started to fill it. My husband said, ‘What are you going to do with them?’ I said, ‘I don't know, but I we need them for something.’”

She explains, “It's all out there just waiting for us. It's like this incredible world of everything and anything that you want to learn about, be it a plant or an animal like a gila monster that you see for the first time. I like to read about it as much as I can and it just opens up a whole world of interest for me.”

Back home, after collecting the owl pellets, she tried soaking them in water—which made a mess. In her research, she learned that she should sterilize the pellets by baking them in the oven at 300 degrees. After that, and airing out the house from the smell, she began dissecting them, sorting out the ribs, jaws and other bones with tweezers.

The bones have found their way into complex yet subtle compositions that appear from afar to be like sgraffito or the scratchboards we all made as kids.

One of those pieces, Encantada (Spanish for enchanted) will be shown at Evoke in her exhibition, Honey in the Desert, that opens August 30. Irene explains, “I thought I really want to make alluring figures out of the bones. So, from a distance you would think ‘Ah, there’s a very alluring woman.’ But she’s really made out of bones.”

Encantada is composed on a round copper tray. “I’ve had that tray for years,” she explains. “I think I got it at some antique store or junk store. I collect all kinds of stuff. I like round things and I wanted the piece to be very graceful and beautiful. I also thought I needed something that would be protective around the edges.”

08/21/2024

John O'Hern is an arts writer, curator and retired museum director who is providing a weekly contemplation of a single work of art from our gallery. In our fast-paced lives overflowing with information, we find it necessary and satisfying to slow down and take time to look. We hope you enjoy this perspective from John. Irene Hardwicke Olivieri grew up in south Texas at the mouth of the Rio Grande. After a peripatetic lifetime of living everywhere from Central America to an off-grid home in Oregon to a lighthouse keeper’s cottage in Maine, she has settled in Santa Fe, in the Rio Grande Rift between the volcanic Jemez Mountains and the tectonic Sangre de Cristos. The valley and the mountains are full of the flora and fauna that have fascinated her since she was a child.

“Other than New York,” she says, “This is the first time I’ve lived in a town. We’d been living way out and I miss seeing wild animals in the back yard like bobcats and bears. She and her husband have favorite mountain trails and collect rocks, bones and plants on their hikes. They have even set up a trail cam with a motion sensor in a remote canyon in the mountains to observe the animals that visit its tiny spring. “You get to see who’s wandering unseen,” she observes. “The little spring of water is only the size of a plate but it’s a magnate for everything. They love it and so do we.”

When I first moved to Santa Fe 17 years ago, I went on hikes in both mountain ranges with Roshi Joan Halifax and folks from Upaya Zen Center. Naturalists in the group would point out things I, for one, didn’t see, including deer and coyote s**t—their droppings along the trail. The only interest I had had in such things in the past had been avoiding cow flaps when we ran barefoot through the pastures on the New Hampshire farm where we vacationed each July. Identifying the s**t on the trails and its age, is a helpful guide to who is sharing the environment with you.
Part one of a two-part post.

08/15/2024

(Continued from previous post) Jeremy Miranda likens the painting to 1,000 years of art history in which artists have worked to render light on metal (an ubiquitous still life subject), v***r (steam, clouds, mist), “all the senses and the textures of the materials.”
He captured the feeling of that moment in his powerless house and ignites our own memories of the beauty of a mundane gas stove. We, as viewers, bring our own experiences and preconceptions to looking at a painting. One viewer asked Jeremy how he had a gas flame when the k***s of the stove are obviously turned off. The two k***s actually control the oven and broiler. In another painting in the Cooking exploration, he includes a gauge next to the k***s; in others, there are no k***s at all.
As Jeremy slows down, pauses in the moment and simplifies his paintings, he continues his education in the elemental.
Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote, “There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.”
—John O’Hern ’hern &seeing

08/15/2024

John O'Hern is an arts writer, curator and retired museum director who is providing a weekly contemplation of a single work of art from our gallery. In our fast-paced lives overflowing with information, we find it necessary and satisfying to slow down and take time to look. We hope you enjoy this perspective from John.

Jeremy Miranda, Cooking (version 3), acrylic on panel, 24" x 20".
Camille Pissarro wrote “Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.” A few years earlier, Thoreau commented, “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
When he was boiling water on his gas stove during a recent power outage at his home in Maine, Jeremy Miranda looked and thought “That blue flame is so beautiful.” Cooking (version 3) is his third rendering of the phenomenon of the blue gas flame heating a metal pot with steam rising from the boiling water. This continuing series of paintings is, he says, “an attempt to capture brief run-ins with the sublime that are buried in the everyday."
They’re also a sign to him that he is slowing down, a process he has been working on for many years. “The work is, in a way, an attempt to slow the world down and experience it with all the senses on a level that sort of feels otherworldly.” The ethereal blue flame is a gaseous mixture of mostly carbon dioxide and water v***r which we’re not usually aware of in our brightly-lit kitchens. Jeremy was “steeped in the moment of the power outage” when the flame burned brightly in the dark. Slowing down and living in the moment is a focused experience which, he says, “in my brain is a space like a shelter with a confined set of sensory information.” “We don’t associate flame with textures,” he says. But, to interpret the insubstantial flame in this rendition of the subject, he used almost pure cobalt blue in parts of the flame and its reflection. In the process, he gave the flame a chunky presence on the panel. As the gas is transformed to flame and the water is transformed to steam, the acrylic pigment is transformed into a recognizable image on the panel. (This article continued in next post)

08/03/2024

Join us TODAY at 1pm to meet Thomas Vigil as he demonstrates his art! Space is limited. Don’t miss this premiere event.

08/02/2024

“After a Storm” by Jeremy Miranda feels like 3pm today in Santa Fe. Thunder, lightning, hard rain, harder hail and gushing rivers through the streets, but clear and sunny by 5pm. View more by Jeremy Miranda and our other artists in the Summer Salon link in bio.

07/29/2024

Spanish Market weekend in Santa Fe is over, but it goes on for a few more weeks at Evoke! Come by and view works by Nicholas Herrera, Javier Marín, Patrick McGrath Muñiz, and Thomas Vigil. In addition, Thomas Vigil will demonstrate his process this Saturday at 1 PM at Evoke. Join us for this exciting event!

07/29/2024

Our Summer Salon, Part II is off to a smashing start! Thank you to everyone who attended our opening on Friday evening 💕 We have many special events paralleling this exhibit so subscribe on our website to receive updates! This Saturday at 1 PM we will hold an Artist Demonstration with street art santero, Thomas Vigil - more on that coming soon!

07/23/2024

Mark your calendar for our Summer Salon Part II exhibition opening Friday 5-7pm at EVOKE: Summer Salon, Part II. Join us Friday during the Santa Fe Rail yard Artwalk for the festivities! hiocchio

07/12/2024

Subscribe to be included in a special early preview of new paintings by Jeremy Miranda at 1pm this Sunday, July 14th. Link in Bio or go to evokecontemporary.com

07/06/2024

ARTIST TALK | Irene Hardwicke Olivieri
The Mysterious Workshop of Nature and Imagination
1pm Saturday, July 6 at EVOKE

Irene will be giving a talk on her creative process; what sparks ideas and the life experiences that feed her imagination. She grew up in the borderlands of south Texas and Tamaulipas Mexico; her childhood years were spent along the Rio Grande River. These early experiences in the natural world surrounded by rich diversity of cultures lit the way for the rest of her life.
An ongoing theme in Irene's work is rewilding the heart, exploring connections to wild animals, wild lands. Many of her paintings are also about love, relationships and obsessions, parts of life which are often subterranean. She will describe how surprising conversations with neighbors inspired one of her largest new paintings, Secrets of the Neighborhood. Other pieces portray emotional autopsies, and lively explorations of mortality.
Irene spends much of her time in the wilderness and is excited to use natural materials in her work. She grows yucca, cholla and agave from seeds she collects in the desert. In her talk she will show images of how she makes figures out of cholla cactus skeletons, combined with ponderosa pine and other new work that will be in her upcoming show Honey in the Desert (August 30- September 21).

07/06/2024

Today at 1pm you are invited to preview a selection of new work by Irene Hardwicke Olivieri and hear her speak about her inspiration and process in her upcoming exhibiton "Honey in the Desert" opening on August 30th. This event is part of our Summer Salon series including artwork by 12 artists, artist talks, demonstrations and studio visits. ❤️

06/29/2024

Please join us today at 1pm for an ARTIST TALK | ALICE LEORA BRIGGS. Alice Leora Briggs is known for works that comprise provocative amalgams of classical and contemporary imagery that illuminate the narcotic trade-driven violence of Ciudad Juárez. In addition to her traditional subject matter, this new exhibition includes images that “are an examination of my own history and that, hopefully, manifest some larger meaning.”

Briggs now cares for her elderly mother, who is living with dementia. “I’m in strange territory now,” the artist says. “Instead of Mexico, I’m in ‘Dementia’. But my work has always been about mortality. That’s the overarching theme.”

Despite history, a continuum stretches from art’s ancient past to its present. Memento mori—reminders of mortality—are reflected by our own mirrored faces so that our actions might be meaningful, even worthwhile; as we also remember the impermanence of our lives.

“What an amazing gift this is,” marvels Briggs—“to be able to breathe, make work about this[existence], and make some attempt to communicate [this gift] to other people.”.

06/28/2024

Double header exhibitions opening tonight at EVOKE: Summer Salon, Part I and The Fate of Poetry featuring Alice Leora Briggs. Join us tonight during the Santa Fe Railyard Artwalk for the festivities!

06/25/2024

Join us this Friday 5-7 pm, June 28th for the opening reception of "The Fate of Poetry", an exhibition of new artwork by ALICE LEORA BRIGGS

06/21/2024

McGrath Muñiz will be presenting a lecture titled “Archetypes and Algorithms, Narrative Painting in the Age of A.I. Generated Art.” at the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum (formerly The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art), Friday, June 21 at 11:00 a.m. At 2:00 p.m. later that same day, the artist will give a guided tour of his current works at EVOKE Contemporary. McGrathMuñiz

06/21/2024

Patrick McGrath Muñiz will be presenting a lecture titled “Archetypes and Algorithms, Narrative Painting in the Age of A.I. Generated Art.” at the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum (formerly The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art), Friday, June 21 at 11:00 a.m. At 2:00 p.m. later that same day, the artist will give a guided tour of his current works at EVOKE Contemporary.

Address

550 S Guadalupe Street
Santa Fe, NM
87501

Opening Hours

Monday	10am - 5pm
Tuesday	10am - 5pm
Wednesday	10am - 5pm
Thursday	10am - 5pm
Friday	10am - 5pm
Saturday	10am - 5pm

Telephone

+15059959902

Website

http://EvokeContemporary.com/

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Our Story

EVOKE Contemporary invites you to experience the creative spirit of the contemporary Santa Fe art scene in the Railyard Arts District with year-round line up of events, gallery openings and exhibitions. The focus of EVOKE is to showcase provocative and compelling art of international acclaim. All events open on the Last Friday of each month along with the celebrated Last Friday Art Walks in the Railyard Arts District. EVOKE Contemporary and the Railyard Arts District present one of the most prestigious art destinations for contemporary art collectors worldwide. EVOKE Contemporary 550 S. Guadalupe Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 505.995.9902 email | [email protected]