Ways of Seeing: Four Photographic Collections

 Via The New Mexico Museum of Art

January 18, 2024

Art collectors are often said to have “a good eye” for pictures, but what does that really mean? This selection of photographs from three collections recently donated to the museum and one promised gift illustrates a variety of approaches to choosing works of art and assembling a collection. United by a passion for photography, each collector brings a distinctive sensibility to the undertaking. Artist Jamie Brunson and her former husband Mark Levy gravitated to large color photographs of the 1990s that reflect their interest in social justice and meditation. Photographer and photo dealer Don Moritz amassed a large collection of that included a group of prints by David Michael Kennedy. New Yorker W.M. Hunt was attracted to images of people whose eyes are not readily visible and searched internationally for decades to build a unique holding on that theme. Santa Fe collectors Caroline Burnett and her late husband William chose images that moved them deeply, ultimately creating a collection largely of modernist photographs from the mid-twentieth century. On view will be suites of work from each collector, including photographs by Ruth Bernhard, Edward Burtynsky, Harry Callahan, Adam Fuss, David Michael Kennedy, Minor White, and more.

Opening Saturday, January 20

At the 1917 Plaza Building 

New Mexico Museum of Art

(505) 476-5072
Plaza: 107 West Palace

Santa Fe, NM

 nmartmuseum.org

Related article in the Santa Fe New Mexican Pasatiempo: Photography in NMMoA's new exhibit reflects the eye of the beholder

Screening of the film Remembering Edward Weston

 

October 18, 2014

2:00 pm
Via The New Mexico Museum of Art

Celebrating its rich collection of photographs and the key role the medium has played in shaping New Mexico history, culture, and tourism, the museum presents a series of exhibitions in the year-long series Focus on Photography (March 7, 2014 – April 19, 2015). In conjunction with these exhibitions, the museum will host gallery talks by photographers as well as a photography film series:

October 18: Remembering Edward Weston is filled with stories and memories of this much-loved and influential photographer. The film includes interviews with two of Weston’s sons, his former wife Charis Wilson, historian Beaumont Newhall, and many others. Curator of Photography Katherine Ware will introduce the film with a short slide presentation about Edward Weston in New Mexico.

 

107 West Palace
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505.476.5072
www.nmartmuseum.org

The New Mexico Museum of Art hosts a year-long cycle of photography exhibitions

Via New Mexico Museum of Art



The New Mexico Museum of Art hosts a year-long cycle of photography exhibitions
 March 7, 2014 - March 15, 2015


Celebrating its rich collection of photographs and the key role the medium has played in shaping New Mexico history, culture, and tourism, the museum presents a series of photography exhibitions in the coming year:


Solo shows will feature surveys of work by contemporary masters of the medium.


Theme shows bring together a selection of contemporary work from both national and regional artists who are exploring a particular subject.


The Photo Lab is an evolving space in which to learn more about photography. We invite you to spend time finding out more about photographic processes, reading about artists in the solo exhibitions, browsing articles, using the magnet board to exchange ideas, watching a video on how wet-process photographs are developed, and initiating conversation with others!

Beneath our Feet: Photographs by Joan Myers
March 7, 2014 - August 17, 2014
more »

Grounded
March 7, 2014 - August 17, 2014
more »

Photo Lab
March 7, 2014 - March 15, 2015
more »

To Do Saturday: Public Lecture: Photography from A to Z + Tea

 

 

"A" is for Atget, "B" is for Baltz and "C" is for come join Katherine Ware, our New Mexico Museum of Art curator of photography, for the official launch of FOCA + P (the Friends of Contemporary Art Plus Photography). Ware will take us on a journey through the museum's photography holdings and talk about collecting strategies, future exhibitions, and special projects. Come learn about photography and have a chance to join this exciting friends group.

2:00 to 4:00 p.m.
St. Francis Auditorium, inside the Museum of Art.

Free.
Light refreshments served.

image: Eugène Atget, Shop, avenue des Gobelins, 1925 (printed by Berenice Abbott c 1930). Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Palace of the Governors Photo Archives Wins Award for Excellence

Palace of the Governors Photo Archives Wins the Edgar L. Hewett Award for Excellence

 New MexicoAssociation of Museums to present the honor on Nov. 4

Santa Fe—Citing its many resources and online accessibility, the New Mexico Association of Museums will bestow its Edgar L. Hewett Award for Excellence on the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at its annual business meeting in Farmington on Friday, Nov. 4.

“The staff of the Photo Archives has worked diligently to make the state’s visual record readily available to people in any part of the state and even the world,” said Dr. Frances Levine, director of the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors. “These resources will prove especially valuable as we prepare to enter our Centennial year as a state. We’re honored by this award.”

The History Museum as a whole received the Hewett Award in 2009, the year it opened on a campus that includes the Palace of the Governors, Photo Archives, Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, Palace Press, and Native American Artisans Program. The award is named for the first director of the Museum of New Mexico, Edgar Lee Hewett, who led the agency from 1909 until his death in 1946. He also taught anthropology at the University of New Mexico and was instrumental in encouraging the development of small museums throughout the state.

“The Palace of the Governors Photo Archives is a rich and tenured resource in our state that promotes preservation and scholarship through a unique collection of historic photographs, films, glass plate negatives, photo postcards, and other visual imagery,” said Laurie Rufe, president of NMAM and director of the Roswell Museum and Art Center. “Recipients of this award illustrate exemplary leadership in the field, and the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, with its multitude of resources and online presence, serves a community of scholars, authors, researchers, and the general public on an international level.”

The archives hold an estimated 800,000 items dating from 1843 to 2011. Included among them are historic photographic prints, cased photographs, glass plate negatives, film negatives, stereographs, photo postcards, panoramas, color transparencies, lantern slides, and more than 1,500 books on photography. More than 16,000 images have been digitized and can be keyword-searched by clicking here. Other images can be searched in person. Nearly all are available as high-quality digital scans and prints, for editorial reproduction, and use in advertising, publishing, media projects, and TV news media stories at nominal cost.

Research into what the archives already hold is ongoing. Just last year, Archivist Daniel Kosharek discovered a rare, ca. 1870s photograph of famed Navajo war chief Manuelito. The image, now on display in the History Museum, was among photographs, glass-plate negatives and other photographic ephemera in the archives’ Henry T. Hiester/Melander Brothers Collection. Most recently, staff and volunteers have been processing and digitizing 5,000 early 20th-century images of Santa Fe and northern New Mexico taken by Jesse Nusbaum.

Some of the most important 19th- and 20th-century photographers of the West are represented in the Photo Archives’ collections, and the subject matter spans the history and people of New Mexico, anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology of Hispanic and Native American cultures. Smaller collections document Europe, Latin America, the Far East, Oceana, and the Middle East.

The archives are widely used by researchers, authors, publications and the public. More than 1,000 people visit the archives each year to conduct research, and several thousand more submit direct research queries, photograph orders, and permission requests each year from the website.

The collection continues to expand, and long-range preservation and conservation projects are underway. To inquire about donating historical or contemporary photographs, contact Daniel Kosharek, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, 120 Washington Ave., Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 476.5092; or Daniel.kosharek@state.nm.us.

Image above: "Hispanic family, New Mexico," 1949, by Anacleto (Tito) G. Apodaca. From the Tito Apodaca "Mi Gente" Collection, Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, #142320.


Media contact: Kate Nelson, Public Relations and Marketing
 New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors
 (505) 476-1141; (505) 554-5722 (cell)
 kate.nelson@state.nm.us

http://media.museumofnewmexico.org/

The New Mexico History Museum is the newest addition to a campus that includes the Palace of the Governors, the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States; Fray Angélico Chávez History Library; Palace of the Governors Photo Archives; the Press at the Palace of the Governors; and the Native American Artisans Program. Located at 113 Lincoln Ave., in Santa Fe, NM, it is a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs.

Exhibition Reframes Works From Depression-Era WPA

By Kathaleen Roberts

Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer

The public art created with federal support during the Depression anchored the New Mexico Museum of Art's permanent collection in an innovation that would become iconic.

Opening Friday, "Conserving Public Art: The New Deal Artwork of Gene Kloss and B.J.O. Nordfeldt" presents the prints of two of the state's renowned artists, many newly re-matted and framed for protection. The conservation work was funded by the WPA Federal Art Project.

Although technically still owned by the federal government, the prints fall under the museum's responsibility for their care and conservation.

"A lot of them had never been matted," curator Joe Traugott said. "When the artist (brought) in the material, a lot of them ... came between two pieces of corrugated board."

Others had been sandwiched between high-acid materials. The acid in the wood pulp fibers can scorch the artwork.

The exhibit includes an image of the chapel at Rancho de Chimayó that is instantly recognizable as one of Kloss' signature prints.

"It's probably her best work," Traugott said. "It's just an incredibly powerful work in black and white that's so iconic of work in New Mexico that it just draws people in."

Kloss first visited New Mexico in the 1920s with her husband, Phillip. They summered here regularly until moving to Taos permanently in 1929.

Kloss became a drypoint printmaker of uniquely New Mexican compositions, particularly of religious scenes. Her prints offer dramatic contrasts of light and dark passages and rising diagonal lines, often referencing winter rituals from northern New Mexico. These prints were first displayed in post offices, libraries and schools.

The Nordfeldt prints depict vignettes of classic local New Mexico village scenes from the 1930s.

Nordfeldt "has an incredible reputation built on pieces he did here in New Mexico in the late teens through the early '20s," Traugott said. "They were heavily influenced by Paul Cezanne's work in France."

Nordfeldt's New Mexico works form some of the most pivotal woodcuts made during the 20th century, Traugott added.

"Kloss' reputation is of course more local than national," he continued. But the artist's work has risen astronomically in price.

Like Gustave Baumann and Raymond Jonson, Nordfeldt came here from Chicago during the late teens. His classic painting "Antelope Dance," from 1929, is on display in "How the West Is One" exhibition on the museum's first floor. Nordfeldt's lithographs from the 1930s are less known, reflecting the world-weariness of the Depression, when jobs were as scarce as tourists.

Conserving Public Art:The New Deal Artwork of Gene Kloss and B.J.O. Nordfeldt



Public art produced with federal support during the Great Depression represents an important component of the museum’s collection. The federal government still owns these works, but the museum is responsible for their care and conservation. Unfortunately, many were not matted, or had been improperly matted in the 1930s. Recently a grant from the NM Chapter of the National New Deal Preservation Association enabled these works by Gene Kloss and B.J.O. Nordfeldt to be matted properly for protection and preservation. These works demonstrate the museum’s commitment to conservation and best museum practices.

For more information, check the website:  http://www.nmartmuseum.org/site/explore/current/conserving-public-art.html

Twin opening with Cloudscapes: Photographs from the Collection Friday, Feb 4, with a reception hosted by the Women’s Board of the Museum of New Mexico from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.