Kim Russo

This week’s column is the last in a four-part series that highlights art collections in unexpected settings in and around Santa Fe.

The weather is warming up — it will be time for picnics soon — and there is a place near Santa Fe where you can picnic on the grass between big, bronze sculptures: Shidoni. The eight acres of sculpture gardens at Shidoni are not public spaces, but they are open to the public any day of the year during daylight hours, making Shidoni an “art option” on the days when galleries and museums are closed, or on holidays when everything is closed.

Shidoni, the bronze foundry, art galleries and sculpture gardens in Tesuque, must be evaluated...

This week’s column is the second in a four part series that highlights art collections in unexpected settings in and around Santa Fe.

You likely don’t think of going to a casino resort to see art, but Buffalo Thunder houses one of the most impressive collections of pueblo art in the state. It is rare to find a collection like this — a selection of works in which tradition and innovation are presented side by side, where older and younger voices speak multiple truths about Native American experience in contemporary America.

The excellence of this collection is due to the sharp and savvy eye of George Rivera, the governor of Pojoaque Pueblo. Rivera is an artist himself (...

This week’s column is the first in a four-part series that highlights art collections in unexpected settings in and around Santa Fe. When the Santa Fe Arts Commission determined that they would use the revenues from the 1 percent Art in Public Places Program for the Santa Fe Community Convention Center’s public art collection, it made sense to highlight Santa Fe artists. But coming up with a firm definition of a “Santa Fe artist” was an overwhelming task.

So the arts commission asked the artists themselves to describe their personal and professional connections to Santa Fe. Some of the applicant artists hailed from families that have lived in or near Santa Fe for many gener...

If you visit James Kelly Contemporary to see Helmut Dorner’s new paintings, ask the staff to turn off the lights so you can view the paintings as the artist intends, in natural light. Dorner’s small oil paintings on canvas will cease to reflect light and instead will completely absorb it, causing the colors to deepen and the layers of paint to separate visually. Everything, including the space of the gallery, softens.

Dorner is interested in paint itself: what it can be physically and perceptually, how he can manipulate and change it, how the support on which it sits can alter what the paint does. Viewed from the side, his works on canvas reveal layers of paint a good quarter-i...

During the kind of heavy snowfall we saw just before Christmas, the landscape is abstracted. A huge expanse of white land dissected by a road appears flat, like a sheet of paper playing host to a brown, inky line. The sky bleeds aqua blue through warmer white clouds, and the whole composition of sky and land becomes a series of watery marks blurring into each other. We name things less, and experience more, when the landscape is covered in snow.

Abstract artists seek the same, direct, unnameable experiences when they compose their works. Like the snow, abstract artists erase details, and like the snow, they isolate visual relationships we are otherwise too distracted to see. By d...