“Galleries are scrambling toward nationally relevant contemporary art,” says Willy Bo Richardson, a Santa Fe-born painter whose internationally acclaimed canvases of fluid vertical strokes hang at Canyon Road’s Turner Carroll Gallery. “The quaint notion of going to Santa Fe to buy howling coyote art is thankfully disappearing.”
Luxury and Lifestyle Magazine VIRTUOSO LIFE
Color Outside the Lines
July/August 2016 – Santa Fe Travel
STEP INTO MEOW WOLF, a newly opened art space inside a repurposed bowling alley in southwest Santa Fe, and the facade of a Victorian house that greets you in turn opens into an Alice in Wonderland world. In the warren behind the fridge door and fireplace is a room fashioned from a fake mastodon skeleton, a cave of stalactites that make music when you hug them, and an inverted school bus with a windshield laser light show. It’s unusual and interactive art – an “immersive storytelling experience in a science-fiction novel,” as cofounder Vince Kadlubek puts it. It’s also the flash point for a creative energy infusing New Mexico’s capital.
“People aren’t traveling here to buy high-priced art any more. They are traveling to experience it,” Kadlubek says of the campy, hands-on space, which is partially funded by Game of Thrones author and Santa Fe transplant George R.R. Martin.
A trip to Santa Fe, with its blocky adobe architecture and refined restaurant scene has always been a bit like tumbling down a rabbit hole. A magnet for artists and free spirits since the 1880s, the city radiates from a Mexican- style, cottonwood-shaded central plaza in a tangle of narrow streets and alleyways. Its circuitous, almost European-feeling jumble is part of the charm. Museums and shops huddle in the low cinnamon-colored buildings of downtown and wooded Canyon Road, which houses the highest concentration of the city’s approximately 250 galleries, a short walk away.
Santa Fe’s curious mix of culture and Wild West cavalier – Noam Chomsky, John Wayne, Jackson Pollock, and The Big Lebowski all wrapped up into one out-of-the- way, confounding place – lured me to move here more than a decade ago. Summer is the prime time to experience it, especially with its parade of festivals from Independence Day until the leaves begin to fall. There’s the juried Art Santa Fe and the International Folk Art Market, with crafts, food, and music from nearly 60 countries in early July; the Santa Fe Opera, showing Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette this season; and the Santa Fe Indian Market, which will celebrate its 95th edition of Native American arts in August.
Young artists, chefs, and entrepreneurs, including Kadlubek and his Meow Wolf cadre, have already made their mark. “Galleries are scrambling toward nationally relevant contemporary art,” says Willy Bo Richardson, a Santa Fe-born painter whose internationally acclaimed canvases of fluid vertical strokes hang at Canyon Road’s Turner Carroll Gallery. “The quaint notion of going to Santa Fe to buy howling coyote art is – thankfully – disappearing.”
In 2003 when gernor Bill Richardson announced plans for a commuter rail line to connect Santa Fe and Albuquerque, everyone thought he was mad as a hatter. Yet the the completed line’s terminus has become one of the hottest spots in town. At the heart of the newly appointed Railyard Arts District, the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market draws crowds with food and art vendors, live music, and a carnival atmosphere. And behind a scrum of galleries, the Santa Fe Railyard park is a leafy retreat with rotating public art; recent pieces include sculptor Don Kennell’s two-story Green Coyote (you can’t completely forsake your past).
A few blocks south in a shady lot on Cerrillos Road, Modern General stocks tools, books, kitchen equipment, and staples such as locally grown and milled flours and beans. The bright space, with wooden floors and bouquets of oregano and Russian sage drying in the rafters, is a perfect spot for whiling away the afternoon over mugs of coffee or steaming bone broth and a fruit kolacky made from the owner’s grandmother’s recipe.
A scattering of hot restaurants has popped up around the Railyard. In a cozy adobe with viga ceilings and murals, Joseph’s Culinary Pub serves beautiful yet unfussy items such as grilled lamb from the Jemez Mountains that’s caramelized with fennel and goat milk. Around the corner, Radish & Rye’s fried green tomatoes with pimento cheese is a must, but many locals’ real reason to visit is to sip from New Mexico’s largest selection of bourbon. And just down the street, State Capital Kitchen bills itself as “an artisanal American dim sum” joint, which may sound affected until you pluck a small plate of rabbit pappardelle with wild mushrooms off carts circulating around the room.
But nowhere exemplifies Santa Fe’s verve better than Eloisa, John Rivera Sedlar’s eatery that garnered a James Beard Best New Restaurant nomination this year. (A personal favorite: the two-bite blue corn pastrami tacos.) “Santa Fe is a crazy, incredible, Palace Street’s centuries-old adobe architecture and the fresh look of Santa Fe Collective.
Thank you Willy, are those vertical fluid strokes here to create the mood? The energy of color rainbow-like complement?
I studied Albers and Itten color theories as well as Kandinsky and others… and of course my own personal experience with color in a continuing dialogue with the natural world. Working within boundaries we often find freedom. The colors are in a tug of war of sorts – reaching out for total freedom while being tethered to the earth. It is our human experience, or at least my human experience.
If you have time and want to hear more about my vision, please read my statement (of sorts) called, “Dad, Why Do You Paint Stripes?”
You can also check out a video where I talk about real world limitations and using that friction against total freedom… striving for ideal perfection, yet tethered to the ground:
PBS COLORES!