Past Lectures & Events 2009

November 12, 2009, 6 pm
Rex Ray: Artist's Talk
Presented by Turner Carroll Gallery at SITE Santa Fe.

Turner Carroll Gallery is proud to present artist Rex Ray's artist talk at SITE Santa Fe on Thursday, November 12, from 6 to 7 pm. In conjunction with this event, Turner Carroll Gallery is hosting a solo exhibition of Rex Ray's new works at Turner Carroll Gallery, 725 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 87501. The exhibition will run through December 1.

Rex Ray's innovative collage and resin works have been exhibited at many contemporary art museums and galleries such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. His works are currently on view at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art.

Rex first became known for the innovative album covers he designed for David Bowie, Patti Smith, Bjork, U2 and Radiohead. In the last decade, his retro-esque paintings, collages, and resin works have come to be regarded as some of the freshest and most dynamic in the genre of contemporary abstraction.



Rex Ray
Alectoria mixed media on canvas 75 x 65"

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2009, 6 PM
Artist Talk by Nancy Holt

As part of the LAND/ART series, SITE is pleased to present a talk by Nancy Holt, a pioneer in site-specific public sculpture and a leading figure in the land arts movement. Holt will show MONO LAKE, a 20-minute video she made with Robert Smithson. The original Super 8 film and Instamatic slides were shot by Holt, Smithson, and Michael Heizer in 1968 and were later transferred to video. In 2004, Holt edited the video into its final form and structure. In addition, Holt will show her documentary photographs of early trips with artist friends from 1966 - 9, exploring the urban edges of New York, the Western desert, Florida, and the Yucatan. Holt will also discuss her photographic series of works including: Graveyard Series, 1968 from Lone Pine, CA and Virginia City, NV; Trail Markers, 1969 from Dartmoor, England; Concrete Visions, 1967; and Over the Hill, 1968.



Co-sponsored by William Siegal Gallery

In the summer and fall of 2009, a group of New Mexico arts organizations have collaborated to present LAND/ART, focusing on land and environmental art ( http://www.landartnm.org ). SITE Santa Fe presents a series of cutting-edge lectures that include leading artists and scholars in the land arts movement.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2009, 6 PM
Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco
2010 Biennial Curator Lecture

SITE’s Eighth International Biennial will examine the recent emergence of film and video as an animated platform through which to integrate other media – painting, drawing and sculpture – a development they see as strongly related to the filmic concept of the “dissolve,” in which one shot fades into another. Organized by Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco, The Dissolve will offer insight into this fast-moving development and will also feature new commissionsn from innovators of the medium juxtaposed with key examples of early animations. To address the spatial demands of the constantly shifting nature of video, the curators have commissioned renowned architect David Adjaye to reinterpret the iconic environments through which the moving image is experienced – from the nickelodeon to the arena-like interior of contemporary movie theaters to the internet.

The curators will present their concept and plans for the exhibition in their lecture.

Artists: Paul Chan, Thomas Demand, William Kentridge, Robin Rhode, and Robert Breer.

View the archived Artist Talk Online

Sarah Lewis is a writer, curator, and critic at Yale University School of Art and a doctoral candidate at Yale University in the Department of the History of Art. After receiving degrees from Harvard University and Oxford University, she held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in The Department of Photography and The Department of Painting and Sculpture, and is a guest curator for exhibitions at the Woodruff Arts Center and the Wadsworth Athenaeum. Sarah has published widely, writing for Art in America, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Venice Biennial, The Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Guggenheim Museum. A member of President Obama’s Art Policy Committee, Sarah lives in New York and New Haven.

Daniel Belasco is a curator and art historian specializing in postwar and contemporary art and design. He is the Henry J. Leir Assistant Curator at The Jewish Museum, New York, where his exhibition Reinventing Ritual, opened in September 2009 and will travel to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Daniel has contributed texts to several contemporary art catalogues, including Robert Storr’s Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque for SITE Santa Fe’s Fifth International Biennial. Daniel has published essays and reviews in numerous journals including Art in America and Art News, and is currently completing a book on feminist consciousness in New York School art. He holds a PhD and MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and a BA from Amherst College; he lives in Brooklyn.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2009, 6 PM
Art of the Anthropocene
A Lecture by William L. Fox

In September, SITE will host Willliam L. Fox, a writer, independent scholar, and poet whose work is a sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. Fox is currently the director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art and will present a talk entitled Art of the Anthropocene.

Fox’s talk will draw a line from Alexander von Humboldt (a German naturalist and explorer) and Frederic Church (a 19th-Century American landscape painter in the Hudson River School) through the Mid-Twentieth Century New Topographics and Earthworks. Then, he will discuss the definition of the Anthropocene and the development of what we know as Land Arts. The Anthropocene begins in the 1790s when the burning of fossil fuels began to create a global signature, a strata of residue from greenhouses gases that marks when humans became the most pervasive geomorphological force on the planet. The beginning of the era was also marked by the birth of Earth systems science, and a concurrent evolution in the artistic representation of the planet from landscape art to land art, from making pictures of the land to using land itself and our own effects on the earth to make art.

Co-sponsored by Century Bank

In the summer and fall of 2009, a group of New Mexico arts organizations will collaborate to present LAND/ART, focusing on land and environmental art www.landartnm.org. SITE Santa Fe will present a series of cutting-edge lectures that include leading artists and scholars in the land arts movement.

Other Events:

August 13, 2009, 6 pm
Hung Liu: Artist's Talk
Presented by Turner Carroll Gallery at SITE Santa Fe.

Turner Carroll Gallery is proud to present Hung Liu: "Remote Portraits" Artist Talk at SITE Santa Fe on Thursday, August 13, 2009 from 6 to 7pm. In conjunction with this event Turner Carroll Gallery is hosting Hung Liu’s solo exhibition Remote Portraits. The exhibition runs from August 11, 2009 until September 9, 2009 at the gallery, at 725 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501. The opening reception is Friday, August 14, 2009 from 5-7pm at Turner Carroll Gallery.

Hung Liu is one of the most significant artists working today. She grew up in communist China under Chairman Mao, and came to the United States over two decades ago. Since her arrival in the U.S., some of
the most prominent museums in the country have added her works to their collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, to name a few. Hung’s works have long explored the plight of the Chinese woman or worker in trying historical and social circumstances, often elevating them to a quasi-imperial level. With the exhibition Remote Portraits, Hung reflects on the remoteness of historical time, cultural distance, and the averted consciousness of Chinese female prostitutes and common women from the late-Qing Dynasty as they sit before a camera. Liu’s focus here is on her sitters’ psychological remoteness from the prying and oppressive lens.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 11, 2009, 6 PM
My Life In Art
Jeanne and Michael Klein with Matthew Drutt

Jeanne and Michael Klein’s passionate interest in the visual arts is a consuming endeavor, both from the standpoint of private collecting and museum activities.

The Kleins’ stellar collection includes minimal and conceptual art, innovative and adventurous video work, as well as commissioned interior and exterior site-specific installations by artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Ernesto Neto, and James Turrell. Other of the Kleins' discerning and bold acquisitions include works by Janine Antoni, Teresita Fernandez, Jim Hodges, Roy McMakin, Bruce Nauman, George Ohr, Kiki Smith, and Richard Tuttle.

Recently, the Kleins have embarked on a program at the University of Texas to build a collection of contemporary art for the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art.

Jeanne Klein is currently on the Board of Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. She also serves on the Advisory Council for the School of Education and the Jack Blanton Museum at the University of Texas. Michael Klein is a Board member of SITE Santa Fe and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. He also serves on the Development Board of the University of Texas and the Advisory Council of the University of Texas Press.

Since 2006, Matthew J. W. Drutt has served as Executive Director of Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. Drutt oversees Artpace’s international artist-in-residence program, selects guest curators, and produces exhibitions for Artpace’s Hudson (Show) Room including presentations of David Adjaye and Kehinde Wiley.
Before joining Artpace, Drutt served as Chief Curator at the Menil Collection, Houston, TX, where he organized notable exhibitions of works by Robert Gober, Olafur Eliasson, and Vik Muniz. Prior to the Menil, he was Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Art.

Co-sponsored by Avalon Trust

TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2009, 6 PM
My Life In Art
Peter Plagens with Frances Colpitt

Peter Plagens is a true Renaissance man: a painter whose work has been shown at Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 1974; the staff art critic for Newsweek from 1989 to 2003, where he is now Contributing Editor; and the author of two books of art criticism - Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-70 and Moonlight Blues: An Artist’s Art Criticism - as well as a novel, Time for Robo. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Arts Journalism Program. His paintings were the subject of a current retrospective first shown at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles; it traveled to Columbia College of Art in Chicago, and The Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. Plagens lives in New York City with his wife, the painter Laurie Fendrich.

Frances Colpitt holds the Deedie Potter Rose Chair of Art History at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. A corresponding editor for Art in America, where her articles and reviews appear regularly, she is also on the board of contributers for artUS. She is the author of Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Washington University Press, 1993) and Abstract Art in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and is currently at work on a book about hard-edge abstraction in Southern California from 1920 to the present. Her essay, “Hard-Edge Cool,” appears in Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Mid-Century, published by Prestel and the Orange County Museum of Art in 2007.

She has organized numerous exhibitions of contemporary American art at venues including the University of Texas at San Antonio; Artpace, San Antonio; the University of California, Santa Barbara; Fisher Gallery at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; Blue Star Art Space, San Antonio; and the Phoenix Art Museum. Her 2008 exhibition, Material Culture, was the inaugural program at TCU’s gallery, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts.

Co-sponsored by TAI Gallery

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2009, 6 PM
My Life In Art
Ann Temkin with Laura Steward

Ann Temkin is the The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In addition to the forthcoming exhibition, Gabriel Orozco, which will travel to the Kunstmuseum Basel, Tate Modern, the Musée national d’art moderne, and Centre Pompidou, Paris, she has organized the exhibitions Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today (2008), Projects 83: Monika Sosnowska (2006), Against the Grain: Contemporary Art from the Edward R. Broida Collection (2006), and Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Art Collection (2005). She was the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 1990 through 2003. Her exhibitions and catalogues include Christian Marclay: The Bell and the Glass (2004), Barnett Newman (2002), Alice Neel (2000-2001), Raymond Pettibon (1998), Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp … in resonance (1998), Constantin Brancusi (1995), and Thinking is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys (1993). Ms. Temkin has written for periodicals including Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, and Grand Street, and has contributed essays to numerous books and catalogues, including Roni Horn aka Roni Horn (Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art, forthcoming, 2009), Palermo (Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2007), A Modern Patronage (The Menil Collection, 2007), Eva Hesse (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2002), Robert Gober (Walker Art Center, 1999), and Mortality/Immortality? The Legacy of 20th Century Art (The Getty Conservation Institute, 1999). She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from Yale University and is a trustee of the Association of Art Museum Curators.

Laura Steward is the Phillips Director of SITE Santa Fe.

Co-sponsored by Gebert Contemporary

SATURDAY, JUNE 20, 2009
Auction SITE 2009
Summer Benefit Auction

SITE Santa Fe is pleased to present its third contemporary art auction, AUCTION SITE 2009. This is SITE’s most highly anticipated fundraiser of the year and will support its exhibitions, public programs, and educational outreach. There will be a preview of the works on Friday, June 19, with the main event occurring on Saturday night, June 20, 2009 in SITE’s galleries.

Partnering once again with Sotheby’s, SITE will have live and silent auctions featuring important works by many notable contemporary artists. Our previous art auctions (in 2003 and 2005), raised significant funds to support SITE’s activities and attracted more than 200 bidders from around the nation. We are delighted to honor Marlene Nathan Meyerson for her generosity and tireless work on behalf of SITE. The distinguished Jenny Holzer is our Artist Honoree, and renowned designer Todd Oldham is our Honorary Chairman. We have high expectations for this 2009 event, so stay tuned for more information and updates.

Download the Press Release (PDF)

Visit the AUCTION 2009 website

Photos: Carole Devillers, 2005