Spencer Beckwith On The Arts

An interview recorded in 2016 with Antoine Predock.

In the early years, rock 'n' roll posters were pretty basic -- large legible print, studio photos of the performers and one or two primary colors as accent. In the 1960s, responding to changes in music and society, there was an explosion of new ideas about what a rock poster could be. An outstanding collection of these posters, Dreams Unreal, is on display through April 12 at the Albuquerque Museu...

Over 500 people crowded into Albuquerque's Harwood Art Center last year for the opening of Recycled Heart, an exhibit of artwork made from cast-off objects. The proceeds from that night's sales, over $3,000, went directly to the artists, many of whom lived on the streets. That annual exhibit is back this month, presented by ArtStreet, the community art studio of Albuquerque Health Care for the Hom...

Covering Super Bowl XLIX in Phoenix a few years ago, New York Times journalist Michael Powell, disheartened by the commercialism of the big game, drove north into Navajo country to spend time with a community known for its love of basketball. He ultimately spent six months with the Chinle High School Wildcats as they pursued a state championship. The result is his book, Canyon Dreams: A Basketball...

Towns in 18th Century New Mexico were built as enclosures. Outside adobe walls were windowless and doorless, facing inward were homes and a place of worship, and at the center was a plaza. New Mexico's last such remaining structure is the timeworn but largely intact Plaza Del Cerro in Chimayo. In 2017, hoping to save this historic place, the Chimayo Cultural Preservation Association teamed up the...

When her husband Alfred Stieglitz died in 1946, Georgia O'Keeffe left New Mexico to settle Stieglitz's complicated finances in New York. She wound up having to stay in the city for three years. One of her few paintings from that disruptive period is a memory of her New Mexico home. Spring from 1948 remained in O'Keeffe's private collection until her death. The painting is now in the collection of...

The Grawemeyer Award is the world's top honor for musical composition. Recipients include John Adams, Pierre Boulez, Esa-Pekka Salonen and John Corigliano. This year the Grawemeyer went to Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang for his orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams. On February 3, Lei Liang will travel to Albuquerque to premiere a new chamber work as part of the 2020 J...

Through December, and after sunset, the public can visit five locations in downtown Albuquerque where local artists have created light-based artworks. These temporary installations are sponsored by the City of Albuquerque's City Bright program. One of them, entitled The Game of Life and located at 114 Gold SW, was designed and built by the University of New Mexico's Social Media Workshop. This tea...

Printmaking, said Gustave Baumann, "requires soul, imagination, deftness . . . and unlimited patience." A beautiful and deeply-detailed new book on Baumann reveals the painstaking process behind his sublime and seemingly evanescent views of the New Mexico landscape. In A Modern Rendering: The Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann is a complete record of Baumann's printed works. Author Gala Chamberlain...

Nick Otero teaches art at Bosque Farms Elementary School south of Albuquerque. In his spare time he makes saints -- New Mexico's traditional santos. Nick's retablos, bultos and altar screens are made using centuries-old methods of preparing pigment and carving wood panels by hand. He's been doing it since he was 16, and he's pretty good at it. This fall, at age 38, Nicolas Otero was one of six ind...

When her husband Alfred Stieglitz died in 1946, Georgia O'Keeffe left New Mexico to settle Stieglitz's complicated finances in New York. She wound up having to stay in the city for three years. One of her few paintings from that disruptive period is a memory of her New Mexico home. Spring from 1948 remained in O'Keeffe's private collection until her death. Last month, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum i...

Since its founding 90 years ago, the University of New Mexico Press has been telling stories of the American Southwest through fiction, history, poetry and scholarship. Many of those stories, of course, have dealt with Native and Indigenous cultures. UNM Press will soon start to tell those stories in a new and contemporary way, through graphic novels and non-fiction by and about Native Americans....

They called themselves The Chasers. Twelve young men, eleven Mexican-American, one Jewish. Tucson High School, Class of 1959. "More club than gang," they were inseparable -- also cool, smart, and slightly dangerous. At a high school reunion 50 years later, the remaining Chasers spoke about what their adult lives owed to that youthful solidarity. And one of them, Renato Rosaldo, has created a poeti...

In each photograph, Joan Myers shows us the West both as we want it to be and as we fear it's become: a plywood buffalo stands before a piñon-dotted mesa, a neon saguaro glows against a starry night, a mountain worthy of photographer Ansel Adams rises over tourists and their lime-green cooler. In her striking new book, Where The Buffalo Roamed: Images of the New West, the Santa Fe-based photograph...

Along with Antarctica and the Sahara, one of the best places on earth to find meteorites is the dry lakebeds of New Mexico. So it's not surprising that among the first institutions established to study these extraterrestrial visitors is UNM's Institute of Meteoritics. The Institute celebrates its 75th anniversary with a Symposium on October 24 and 25 that includes an open house at the Institute's...

As an Army private in 1958, Jack Loeffler witnessed the first atomic tests in the Nevada desert. He spent years afterward as a radical environmental activist. But those years also included gigging as a jazz trumpeter, watching for fires in an Arizona forest, tripping on peyote with Carlos Castaneda and, ultimately, having a successful career as a self-taught aural historian. Jack tells his story i...

In a unique display of artistic collaboration, three Santa Fe theater companies are sharing production duties this fall on a prize-winning three-part drama. At the center is Iraq War veteran Elliot Ortiz, who shares with the trilogy's playwright, Quiara Alegría Hudes, family roots in Latin America and a hometown of West Philadelphia. Staged in repertory by Teatro Paraguas, Santa Fe Playhouse, and...

The central character is a charismatic young priest with a radical approach to Catholicism and possible powers to heal. The rise and fall of Father Gabriel Romero is told by the people around him -- believers and skeptics. American Saint has just been published by the Amazon imprint 47North, and author Sean Gandert has set the novel in his hometown, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

There's a unique class available in UNM's 2019 catalog. Introduction to Pueblo Pottery (Studio Arts 389) focuses on "gathering raw materials, pigments and clays, from sites accessible to the public, and then processing the materials to understand their possibilities and outcomes." UNM assistant professor Clarence Cruz, a noted potter from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, has been teaching these traditional p...

Fiesta de Santa Fe has been a defining tradition of the city's cultural life for over 300 years. This year, the annual celebrations will not include La Entrada, a pageant about the reclaiming of Santa Fe by Spanish forces after their expulsion by the Pueblo Indians in 1680. That decision was controversial and divisive. Hoping to reconcile disagreements in the community is an exhibition at Santa Fe...