RECENT ACQUISITIONS

New Mexico Museum of ArtThe Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States

T he New Mexico Museum of Art

has been selected to receive a gift

of fifty works of art from New York

collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel,

with the help of the National Gallery

of Art, the National Endowment for

the Arts (NEA), and the Institute of

Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

The art is part of a national gifts pro-

gram titled The Dorothy and Herbert

Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty

States. The program will distribute

2,500 works from the Vogel Collection

of contemporary art throughout the

nation, with fifty works going to select-

ed art institutions in each of the fifty

states. Among those whose work will

be at the museum in Santa Fe are Neil

Jenny, Katherine Porter, Lucio Pozzi,

and Richard Tuttle.

The best-known aspects of the Vogel

Collection are minimal and conceptual

art, but these donations also explore

numerous directions of the post-minimalist period, including works of a figurative and expressionist nature. Primarily a collection

of drawings, the 2,500 works the Vogels are donating also gather paintings, sculptures, photographs, and prints by more than 170

contemporary artists working mainly in the United States. Gifts to the first ten institutions were announced in the spring of 2008.

The IMLS is providing funds for the disbursal of the art to the fifty institutions and for the development of a Web site to serve

as an information center and exhibition area for this project. A book titled The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for

Fifty States, published with funds from the NEA, was released in November 2008.

Works from the Vogels’ collection have appeared in numerous exhibitions around the world, including two major exhibitions

organized by the National Gallery that were selected solely from the couple’s collection. In 1994, From Minimal to Conceptual

Art: Works from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection was on view at the National Gallery of Art in 1994 and at the Archer M.

Huntington Art Gallery in Austin and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon in 1997. In 1998, the exhibition traveled abroad to

the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, and the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku, Finland. Following its 2002 presentation in

Washington, Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the Vogel Collection was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

The New Mexico Museum of Art plans its exhibition in 2010. ■

Katherine Porter, American, 1941–, Untitled, 1974, graphite, colored pencil, and glue, with incised and scraped lines,

on paperboard, 12 x 18 in. New Mexico Museum of Art (MNM/DCA), The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty

Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National

Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library

Services. Photograph by Lyle Peterzell.

66 E l P a l a c i o

Earth Now Exhibition Debuts OnlineBY STEVE CANTRELL

ONEXHIBIT

sublime and beautiful images to be used to sup-

port a nascent environmental movement in this

country. Today’s artists are sounding the twenty-

first-century alarm, and some of their images are

shocking.

Responding to this urgent, compelling photo-

graphic summons, exhibition curator Katherine

Ware and the team involved in planning Earth

Now utilized current internet technologies

collectively known as social media. These tech-

nologies can capture the passions surrounding

debates about the environment, enabling and

encouraging an ongoing dialogue involving the

curator, artists, environmentalists, and those visit-

ing the exhibition site. This interaction extends to

sharing information between visitors and upload-

Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment

breaks new ground for the New Mexico Museum of

Art. The exhibition opens in the museum on April 8,

2011, but unlike any other exhibition in the museum’s

history, Earth Now debuted on the Internet, going live in

November, 2010. It can be visited now at earthnow.nmart-

museum.org.

Earth Now offers both a historical survey and a contem-

porary view of how artists working in photography have

addressed our relationship to the environment. Using

beauty, humor, and horror to engage attention, these

photographers provoke questions about the legacies of

industry, construction, consumption, and waste disposal,

while pointing in new directions such as local farming, new

energy source technologies, green roofs, and a renewed

connection with the landscapes we inhabit.

The photographs in this exhibition are a call to action—

some to a greater degree than others. Ansel Adams’s inspir-

ing mountain majesties are in sharp contrast to the harsh

environmental realities portrayed by photographers work-

ing today, such as Subhankar Banerjee, Daniel Handal,

and Brad Temkin. Adams and another classic landscape

photographer in the exhibition, Eliot Porter, allowed their

ABOVE: Eliot Porter, Green Reflections in Stream, Moqui Creek, Glen Canyon, Utah,

September 2, 1962. Dye transfer print, 10 ½ x 8 ¼ in. Collection of the New Mexico

Museum of Art, Gift of the Eliot Porter Estate, 1993. ©1990 Amon Carter Museum of

American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.

BELOW: Bill Owens, Monument Valley, Utah/Arizona, 2004. Pigment print, 16 x 20 in.

Courtesy of the artist. ©Bill Owens.

E l P a l a c i o 67

ing onto the site videos and podcasts. The site

includes artist statements and interviews, and links

to important online sources of environmental infor-

mation. With all of these elements, Earth Now online

can be more than a static exhibition; it becomes

a forum. This vibrant site allows a community to

develop around Earth Now, and over the life of the

museum exhibition and beyond, the online exhibi-

tion will expand in directions dictated by the public’s

interest and interaction with the site. The Earth Now

online exhibition is its own living and breathing

environment—albeit virtual.

New Mexico Museum of Art director Mary

Kershaw says, “Using these Internet technologies

allows us to engage a global audience in ways we

cannot do inside four walls in Santa Fe. Using the

power of the Internet, this online exhibition is an important

source of information about the current state of the environ-

ment; it provides resources for addressing pressing issues and

reminds us that the concerns in one community are in fact

shared globally. At the same time the exhibition features work

by some of photography’s greatest practitioners and those just

now making their mark.”

ONEXHIBIT

Earth Now online, a social media experiment funded by

Annenberg Foundation vice president and director Charles

Annenberg Weingarten, is a dynamic exhibition, anticipating

and augmenting the museum run of Earth Now. ■ Steve Cantrell is the public relations manager for the Center for Museum

Resources. Weekends often find him in Abiquiu, where he is part owner of the gift

shop Girasol and the Frosty Cow ice cream stand.

ABOVE: Earth Now web site home page concept. BELOW RIGHT: Greg Mac Gregor, Fuel Tanks,

2006. Pigment print, 17 x 22 in. Courtesy of the artist. ©Greg Mac Gregor.

The site includes interviews with curator Kate Ware, environmental

activist Jack Loeffler, and Earth Now photographers.

Kate Ware Jack Loeffler

Subhankar Banerjee Sharon Stewart

Bremner Benedict Carlan Tapp

22 E l P a l a c i o

El Palacio celebrates the state’s centennial by putting the first

ten years of the magazine online, offering a window onto the

state’s first decade.

A vision of most magazine publishers, including that of

El Palacio’s, is to see their publications live on in our digital

age. The New Mexico State Library’s State Document Program

shared this goal for El Palacio because of its historical content,

focus on New Mexico, and compatibility with the library’s

mission of increasing access to state publications. The New

Mexico Museum of Art had scanned many volumes and was

able to fill in gaps in the State Library’s collection. And thus a

partnership was born.

Putting nearly a century’s worth of a publication online

presented many challenges. The editorial side of the magazine

had to consider culturally sensitive content, knowing that

increased access via the Internet enhances the possibility of

causing offense or misuse. Regular contributor and consultant

Susanne Caro wrote recently about the difficulties of navigat-

ing our responsibilities to cultural sensibilities, cultural trea-

sures, and the law (“Going Digital: A Newish Look for Old El

Palacios,” El Palacio 115 [4], winter 2010). While El Palacio

currently does not publish photographs of excavated burials

or sacred artifacts out of respect for Native culture and beliefs,

such information does appear in the digital version because

the magazine is both a record of this state’s patrimony and an

official state document that under New Mexico’s Inspection of

Public Records Act (NMSA 1978, 14-2) cannot be altered.

On the other hand, we are required to redact from the digital

version detailed information on archaeological site locations

in New Mexico in accordance with the New Mexico Cultural

Properties Act (NMSA 1978, 18-6-1).

El Palacio began as a broadsheet in November 1913 and

evolved over the decades into a magazine. In its early years, El

Palacio printed articles on architecture by Carlos Vierra, find-

ings from archaeological excavations by A. V. Kidder, poetry by

Alice Corbin Henderson, memorials to New Mexico soldiers

lost in WWI, art criticism by Marsden Hartley, and early pho-

tographs of Poh-We-Ka (Little Blue Corn Flower), later known

as the famous potter Maria Martinez. Over the first decade

(and beyond), El Palacio occasionally reflected on archaeology

El Palacio OnlineExplore the first ten years of El Palacio, from 1913-1923, on the Web at:

archives.elpalacio.org. The entire 100-year archive will go online in 2013.

Excerpts from recent issues and web-only content is online at elpalacio.org.

Look for El Palacio on Facebook and find exclusive content, news updates,

behind-the-scenes reports, and snippets from print articles that wound up on

the editing-room floor.

El Palacio’s First Decade Goes OnlineBY STEVE CANTRELL AND CYNTHIA BAUGHMAN

FROM THE ARCHIVES

worldwide, though it concentrated then as now on “the art,

history and culture of the Southwest.” A representative issue is

Volume 8, Numbers 7–8, that was published in July 1920 and

contained “The Crooked Fir,” a story by Mary Austin; a finan-

cial statement showing how the School of American Research

and Museum of New Mexico spent $43,078.40 to complete a

museum building, pay salaries, cover maintenance, and more;

and a lengthy report from Director Edgar Lee Hewett covering

the previous year’s successes and plans for the coming year.

The old El Palacios are in themselves their own archaeo-

logical site. Digging through the volumes online will unearth

idiosyncratic social mores, dated cultural norms, and quaint

customs. Significant art criticism nestles alongside social news

and gossip, as in this news bit first reported in the Santa Fe

New Mexican: “Gustave Baumann of the art colony had another

runaway with his new Chevrolet. Just after the DeVargas pro-

cession had returned to the Cathedral from Rosario Cemetery,

he turned down San Francisco Street and lost control of the

car at the southeast corner of the Plaza. The Chevrolet jumped

the curb and dashed into a tree scattering in flight quite a

number of people who were sitting or standing in that part of

the Plaza. Fortunately no one was injured” (El Palacio 8 [7-8],

July 1920). That volume also included a letter from Dr. E. B.

Bernard of the University of Denver, spending his vacation

in upstate New York. El Palacio, he reported, “proved to be a

delightful vacation reading in the shade of an eastern orchard

although it made me long for the great Southwest which I

have loved since I first saw it.”

The balance of El Palacio’s hundred-year archive will

become available online in our centennial year, 2013. In the

meantime, we invite you to explore those early issues that Dr.

Bernard admired, whether in your favorite reading chair or

with a leafy orchard shading your screen. ■

Steve Cantrell is Public Relations Manager for the Department of Cultural Affairs

and El Palacio Web Editor. Cynthia Baughman is El Palacio Managing Editor.