SITE Santa Fe is a private not-for-profit, non-collecting contemporary arts organization committed to enriching the cultural life of Santa Fe and beyond. It meets this commitment by providing an ongoing venue for exhibitions of artists who merit international recognition, as well as offering education and multidisciplinary public programs. Its International Biennial is a crucial part of this mission.

SITE Santa Fe belongs at the forefront of contemporary art presentation. It must be flexible, foresighted, and risk-taking in its exhibitions and programs. Since the first Biennial in 1995, it has earned a stellar reputation among an international group of non-collecting exhibition spaces (Kunsthallen) around the globe. SITE must strive to further that reputation while offering a welcoming experience for all who come here.

Photo: Herbert Lotz, 2005

SITE Santa Fe was launched in 1995 to organize the only international biennial of contemporary art in the U.S. Conceived to bring the global contemporary art dialogue to the art-rich Southwest, and as a major event on par with such renowned exhibitions as the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale, it has become an integral event for contemporary art aficionados, attracting tens of thousands of visitors from around the world. To date, SITE Santa Fe has successfully held six biennials, each of which has drawn worldwide attention and brought important contemporary art from all over the world to Santa Fe. Past biennial curators have either arrived as or have subsequently become superstars in the world of contemporary art. Following their SITE Santa Fe Biennial guest curatorships, Francesco Bonami (1997), Rosa Martínez (1999) and Robert Storr (2004) were chosen to organize the Venice Biennales in 2003, 2005 and 2007, respectively. Dave Hickey received the coveted MacArthur “Genius Award” after curating SITE’s Biennial in 2001. In 2006, Klaus Ottmann, a New York-based independent curator organized SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial, Still Points of the Turning World that ran from July 9, 2006 to January 7, 2007.

Following the success of the first Biennial in 1995, SITE Santa Fe expanded its operations to include 3-4 exhibitions per year; the Art & Culture series of public programming events; an extensive education and outreach program serving the communities of Santa Fe and New Mexico; and catalogue publications. During non-biennial seasons, the museum brings noted artists to Santa Fe for solo and group exhibitions. Artists who have exhibited here include Janine Antoni, Cai Guo-Qiang, Gregory Crewdson, Andy Goldsworthy, Roni Horn, Juan Muñoz, Ernesto Neto, and Dana Schutz, among more than 400 other important artists. The Art & Culture series reaches out to a diverse arts audience by providing multidisciplinary programming that includes lectures and discussions with artists, curators, and museum directors as well as poetry readings, film, chamber music, and dance performances.

In October 2003, SITE finalized the purchase of its building located in Santa Fe’s historic Railyard District, which is currently undergoing major redevelopment, and entered into a long-term lease on the land, bolstering SITE’s stability and growth potential. In 2006, SITE broke ground on the construction of a new addition to its current building—a 4,000 sq. ft. fabrication workshop. This expansion, which will be completed in summer 2007, allows SITE to integrate more commission-based works into their exhibition programming.

Laura Steward Heon joined the staff as director/curator in April 2005 after serving as Founding Curator for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) for nine years. She brings to the job a substantial and impressive record of exhibitions, publications, and awards and has quickly earned the respect of SITE’s Board and staff, and significantly, the Santa Fe community.

The primary mission of the SITE Santa Fe Biennial is to give independent curators the freedom to present unique international exhibitions within the context of our museum that incorporate site-specific projects that may otherwise be difficult to execute in larger institutions.

Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby

SITE Santa Fe’s First International Biennial
July 14 – October 8, 1995
Curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, former Executive Director and Curator, SITE Santa Fe, and current Director of Exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario

Longing and Belonging was the inaugural exhibition at SITE Santa Fe. It included 31 international artists who all explore identities in global culture. This exhibition mirrored SITE’s mission of bringing the “faraway nearby” by bringing objects and images from the international community to Santa Fe. It also addressed culturally-based ideas of permanency, displacement, exile, and heritage, among others.

Artists: Marina Abramovic, Chema Alvargonzález, Francis Alÿs, Robert Ashley, Rebecca Belmore, Barbara Bloom, Imre Bukta, Carlos Capelán, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Braco Dimitrijevic, Felix Gonzáles-Torres, Ann Hamilton, Gary Hill, Jenny Holzer, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Catherine Lord, Chie Matsui, Jakob Battner, Gerald McMaster, Bruce Nauman, Marta María Pérez Bravo, Alison Rossiter, Meridel Rubenstein, Andres Serrano, Lorna Simpson, Valeska Soares, Pierrick Sorin, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Tseng Kwong Chi, Millie Wilson

Truce: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions

SITE Santa Fe’s Second International Biennial
July 18 – October 12, 1997
Curated by Francesco Bonami, former independent curator, and current Chief Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

SITE’s second Biennial, TRUCE: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions, benefited from the concurrent opening of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum as well as the second ART Santa Fe Contemporary Art Fair, producing a triple header that attracted the art world’s attention. Aptly named, this Biennial signaled a truce with the community by engaging in dialogues with local voices. Curator Francesco Bonami assembled 27 artists from 20 countries whose work connected isolated individuals to communal forces and contested our culture’s language of violence as “the only transmitter of meaning.” Among this Biennial’s successes count Sam Taylor-Wood’s simultaneous videos of five isolated people narrating their lives, Esko Männikkö’s bleak photographs of West Texas Hispanic communities, subREAL’s documenting of Ceaucescu’s fall, and, in his first U.S. showing, William Kentridge’s animations of post-apartheid South Africa.

Artists: Massimo Bartolini, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Olafur Eliasson, Giuseppe Gabellone, Kevin Hanley, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Gary Hume, Lukás Jasansky & Martin Polák, KCHO, William Kentridge, Suchan Kinoshita, Udomsak Krisanamis, Sharon Lockhart, Esko Männikkö, Tracey Moffatt, Chris Moore, Elizabeth Peyton, Huang Yong Ping, Tobias Rehberger, Miguel Rio Branco, Rudolf Stingel, SubREAL, Sam Taylor-Wood, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Jaan Toomik, Eulalia Valldosera

Looking for a Place

SITE Santa Fe’s Third International Biennial
July 10 – December 31, 1999
Curated by Rosa Martínez, art critic and independent curator, currently Chief Curator at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art

In 1999, Rosa Martínez extended the earlier biennials’ meditations on place by bringing 29 artists from 23 countries together in Looking for a Place. Understanding her role as editor/agitator, Martínez wanted a “fluid alternative to the inviolable solidity of museums,” where white cubes display beautiful objects. Her artists both punctured SITE’s walls and reached beyond them into public, commercial, and sacred spaces like the old dancehall at Galisteo, the Los Alamos airport, and a municipal parking garage. Nobody objected to Diller + Scofidio’s multimedia installation in Room 120 of the Budget Inn, but even after permissions were granted, two installations—the cemetery for a Hispanic Catholic parish church and a lake on a nearby Indian Pueblo—were dismantled in the opening days, speeding up the Biennial’s ephemeral quality.

Artists: Helena Almeida, Ghada Amer, Janine Antoni, Monica Bonvicini, Louise Bourgeois, Tania Bruguera, Cai Guo-Qiang, Lygia Clark, Diller + Scofidio, Dr. Galentin Gatev, Greenpeace, Yolanda Gutiérrez, Mona Hatoum, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Carsten Höller, Simone Aaberg Kærn, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Nikos Navridis, Shirin Neshat, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Pipilotti Rist, Francisco Ruiz de Infante, Bülent Sangar, Arsen Savadov & Georgy Senchenko, Charlene Teters, Sergio Vega, Miwa Yanagi

Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism

SITE Santa Fe’s Fourth International Biennial
July 14, 2001 – January 6, 2002
Curated by Dave Hickey, art critic and recipient of the 2001 MacArthur “Genius” award.

In selecting Dave Hickey to curate its fourth biennial, SITE made a bold and canny choice because Hickey had vociferously criticized both the concept and execution of biennials as “trade shows for curators in search of internationally certified installations to fill out their exhibition schedules.” While the earlier curators all scoured the globe in search of artists to weave installations around a loose theme, Hickey opted for the pragmatic, the democratic, and the historical in Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism. Instead of trying to make an ideological point, he organized “an exhibition that I want to see,” whose fundamental criterion was simply “Does the space look better and more interesting with or without it?” Hickey selected 27 international artists, including Jo Baer, Ed Ruscha, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Jessica Stockholder, who wove diverse cultural milieux into a “beau monde.”

Artists: Kenneth Anger, Jo Baer, Jeff Burton, James Lee Byars, Pia Fries, Gajin Fujita, Graft Design, Frederick Hammersley, Marine Hugonnier, Jim Isermann, Ellsworth Kelly, Josiah McElheny, Darryl Montana, Sarah Morris, Takashi Murakami, Nic Nicosia, Kermit Oliver, Jorge Pardo, Ken Price, Stephen Prina, Bridget Riley, Ed Ruscha, Alexis Smith, Rafael Soto, Jennifer Steinkamp and Jimmy Johnson, Jessica Stockholder, Jane and Louise Wilson

Installation View: Foreground (reflected in mirror): Jessica Stockholder, Darryl Montana
Background (through doorway): Pia Fries, James Lee Byars, Bridget Riley

Façade View
L to R: Graft Design, Jim Isermann

Beau Monde advances one big argument—for itself as a model of what an omnibus exhibition should be like—as well as several lesser arguments for the art it displays. The main point succeeds completely. The others invite spirited debate. The importance of pleasure in aesthetic experience is so simple and self-evident. How did we reach a point where a forthright assertion of that idea by an art show can seem like a stroke of genius? - Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, August 13, 2001

Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque

SITE Santa Fe’s Fifth International Biennial
July 18, 2004 – January 9, 2005
Curated by Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale School of Art, Consulting Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and curator of the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Storr’s Biennial focused on the theme of the grotesque in some of today’s most cutting-edge art. The grotesque tradition in art extends back to ancient times and can be traced through the Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic periods. In the modern era, it can be found in the expressionist and surrealist movements, among others. Disparities and Deformations: Our Grotesque examined expressions of the grotesque tradition in contemporary art. The exhibition brought together a diverse group of works that responded and gave new substance to the sense of emotional and logical uncertainty inherent in the grotesque. This Biennial tracked the incongruous combination of disparate forms and ideas in the work of internationally renowned artists of different generations, coming from various cultural contexts, and working with different processes and ideas. The exhibition revealed the many elements of paradox inherent in the artists’ work while showing that the grotesque has many sources of inspiration and a nearly infinite number of guises.

Artists: Ricci Albenda, Louise Bourgeois, Charles Burns, Francesco Clemente, Bruce Conner, R. Crumb, John Currin, Carroll Dunham, James Esber, Inka Essenhigh, Tom Friedman, Ellen Gallagher, Robert Gober, Douglas Gordon, Mark Greenwold, Lyle Ashton Harris, Jörg Immendorff, Jasper Johns, Kim Jones, Mike Kelley, Maria Lassnig, Sherrie Levine, Christian Marclay, Paul McCarthy, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Hermann Nitsch, Jim Nutt, Tony Oursler, Gary Panter, Lamar Peterson, Raymond Pettibon, Lari Pittman, Sigmar Polke, Neo Rauch, Alexander Ross, Susan Rothenberg, Peter Saul, Jenny Saville, Thomas Schütte, Jim Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Fred Tomaselli, Adriana Varejão, Davor Vrankic, Kara Walker, Jeff Wall, John Waters, John Wesley, Franz West, Lisa Yuskavage

Installation View (L to R):
Maria Lassnig, Thomas Schütte, Jörg Immendorff, Thomas Schütte, Neo Rauch, Sigmar Polke

With a swift sleight of hand, Storr stakes out a position between the art of the Louvre and the finer fruits of contemporary mass-media culture. He’s an intellectual populist. Unlike so many lumbering theme shows without actual themes, Storr delivers his thesis clearly and persistently rather than merely wheat-pasting some catchy, faux-smart slogan over a predictable selection of overly familiar, trendy artists who make the international exhibition rounds from Venice to São Paulo to Pittsburgh to Seoul. – David Riminelli, Artforum

Still Points of the Turning World

SITE Santa Fe Sixth International Biennial
July 9, 2006 – January 7, 2007
Curated by Klaus Ottmann, independent curator and scholar, author of numerous articles, essays, and books on art and philosophy

Intensity, experimentation, and visceral presence were the hallmarks of 13 significant one-person installations – some of them newly commissioned, all of them never-before seen in the U.S. – that constituted SITE Santa Fe’s Sixth International Biennial. Ottmann’s exhibition both concentrated and amplified these singular works, empowering them to speak for themselves without the common filter of a prescriptive curatorial theme. As Ottmann explained, “I want this Biennial to be about the artists, not about the curator.” Ottmann envisioned a bold concept for this timely, groundbreaking Biennial. Eager to steer away from the now ubiquitous mega-biennials, he dramatically reduced the quantity of artists to 13 and the exhibition to approximately 40 works. Each artist had separate rooms, designed to encourage as well as seduce their audiences with a purer, unmediated experience. The exhibition covered the full spectrum of contemporary art media and comprised photography, installation, painting, performance art, soundscapes, sculpture, and video. All the work was new, and four artists were commissioned to create works expressly for the Biennial.

Artists: Miroslaw Balka, Jennifer Bartlett, Patty Chang, Stephen Dean, Peter Doig, Robert Grosvenor, Cristina Iglesias, Wolfgang Laib, Jonathan Meese, Wangechi Mutu, Carsten Nicolai, Catherine Opie, Thorns Ltd.

Ottmann's show was easy on the senses, and on the feet, and . . . it did more justice to the art on view than almost any other biennial.Since its founding SITE has pushed itself toward the front of the crowded field of global biennials.
-Blake Gopnik, The Washington Post