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For Immediate Release: June 25, 2016
Vida Loca Gallery
-where art is crazy fun
A division of Andrew Smith Gallery, Inc.
New Friends, Old Friends and Family
Andrew Smith Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Vida Loca Gallery at
203 W. San Francisco Street, Santa Fe, N.M. 87501 where la buena vida, the good
life, lies at the heart of contemporary Nuevo Mexicano art and culture. Vida Loca
Gallery celebrates regional fine art, folk art and vernacular art made in local
barrios, villages, suburbs, and neighborhoods. It specializes in Car Culture art,
Low Rider art, fine art photography, Native American contemporary jewelry, and
works by diverse artists who share an eye toward the beautiful, humorous, ironic,
witty, sexual, and modern.
Special Events in July:
Friday, July 15, 2016 - 5-7 p.m. Open House, Meet many of the artists.
Friday, July 22, 2016 – 5-7 p.m.. "Natural Elements" by Flor Garduño. The artist
will be in attendance.
The new gallery is the brainstorm of long-time photography dealer Andrew Smith
and his daughter Holly Smith. Both were raised in Santa Fe, attended its public
schools and grew up embracing the notion that New Mexico’s homegrown arts
merit regional, national and international attention.
Vida Loca Gallery welcomes a younger generation of emerging local artists into
the mix with an older generation of renowned artists who have achieved distinction
for their folk art, photography, car culture art, airbrush painting, jewelry, and other
forms of expression.
A main gallery emphasis is on Low Rider and Car Culture art, a 75-year tradition
in our region. Car clubs in New Mexico, like the artist societies in Taos and Santa
Fe of the 20th century, have long nurtured the creation and exhibition of
spectacularly decorated and restored automobiles. It’s a tradition that has been
passed down between family members and friends since World War II. Part of the
fun includes taking to the streets on Friday and Saturday night in “Night Cruise
Lines” intended to show off new, modified and traditional car creations to fans and
the public: a grass roots parallel to Friday and Saturday night gallery and museum
openings.
As leaders and innovators of Car
Culture art, New Mexico’s artists
from Espanola, Chimayo, Santa
Fe, Albuquerque, Las Vegas,
Farmington, Las Cruces and
beyond, have come up with
original embellishment styles
such as flecking, striping, and
mural painting. The gallery offers
a vibrant sampling of automobile mural painting, long an integral part of Northern
New Mexico’s vernacular and folk art traditions.
Santa Fe airbrush artist Grant Kosh and fabricator William Rowell of Sure Shot
Custom are showing outrageous collaborations and individual pieces. The primary
object is the “Basilica of Santa Fe 1956 Mercury Car Couch,” [copyright 2016
Sure Shot Custom] that combines the worn out bullet-ridden trunk of a vintage
Mercury with a mural of the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, Santa Fe.
Las Vegas native and multi-media
artist John P. Gonzales has an
immense talent for painting,
welding, fabricating, tinkering,
and working with found objects.
His work ranges from Modernist
engine block tables to car
couches, classically restored
trucks and coupes, and chopped and recombined hybrid cars. [photo: “Chevy 409
with Triple Deuces, Engine Block Table,” copyright 2010 John P. Gonzales]
Vida Loca
Gallery
represents
legendary
Chimayo car
muralist, Arthur
“LowLow”
Medina, showing his paintings made between 1988 and 2014 of custom cars set
against the backdrop of Chimayo. Like many of his peers, LowLow works with
precise, first-hand knowledge of a small number of cars that are family
heirlooms. His subjects are derived from his Catholic faith interwoven with the car
club culture of Northern New Mexico, an expression that is at once macho, sexy,
and religious. [Painting, “Barrio De Santuario, 2011, copyright Arthur “Lowlow”
Medina.]
Outrageously witty cartoon paintings by Ricardo Cate' from Kewa [Santo Domingo
Pueblo] are on display. Well known for his comic strip “Without Reservations” in
the newspaper Santa Fe New Mexican, Cate' paints clever, insightful works that
reveal the absurdity of life from
a Native perspective. Cate' is
the only Native cartoonist
featured in a daily mainstream
newspaper read by some
60,000 readers. The artist will
be periodically in-residence at
the gallery drawing new
cartoons and painting his
classic favorites. [copyright
2010 Ricardo Cate' “It’s cool
that your grandpa is…”]
PHOTOGRAPHY AT LA VIDA LOCA GALLERY
MIGUEL GANDERT- Andrew Smith Gallery first exhibited Espanola native
Miguel Gandert’s work in 1984. His photographs of tough young kids from
Albuquerque’s south valley fused street photography with high art and barrio
culture. Gandert was born in Española in 1956, a descendant of Spanish settlers of
Mora, New Mexico and Antonito, Colorado. Since 1980 he has documented the
lifestyles and traditions of rural and urban Hispanics living along the Rio Grande
valley from Mexico to southern Colorado, with an emphasis on barrio culture of
Albuquerque and Northern New Mexico villages. His many exhibitions over the
years include a one-man show at the National Museum of American History at the
Smithsonian in 1990. He is currently a professor of journalism and
communications at UNM.
Gandert’s primary interest
is in New Mexican Indo-
Hispanic culture and rituals
that remain a vital part of
life along the Camino Real
to Mexico City and beyond.
His vast subject matter
extends to documents of
New Mexican artists,
farmers, land grant activists, Santa Fe Plaza Rats, local boxing, carnivals, and
barrio culture. [photo “Couple In '51 Chevy, Albuquerque, New Mexico,” 1986,
copyright Miguel Gandert]
DELILAH MONTOYA – Born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1955, Delilah Montoya
describes herself as a Chicana artist who lives within the perpetual tensions of a
minority woman in the United States. Since the 1980s she has explored her roots
through powerful art works that delve deep into spiritual, political and emotional
visions. Montoya is a master of various photographic, printmaking and mixed-
media processes who creates two and three-dimensional works in a variety of sizes.
Drawn to the spiritual icons of the southwest (her grandfather was a penitente from
Las Vegas, New Mexico, she has lived in Albuquerque for over 30 years when she
is not teaching at the University of Houston), Montoya incorporates powerful
mythic symbols in her work, like the Madonna, La Malinche, La Sagrado Corazón,
and La Llorona. To show how such sacred images are deeply imbedded in the
collective consciousness of the culture, she produced a series of photographs of the
Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed on the bodies of Hispanic and Latino men and
women who cherish that image. [photo: “La Llorona In Lillith's Garden,” 2004,
copyright Delilah Montoya)
Montoya found examples of feminine power in ordinary life when she
infiltrated the world of women boxers, primarily in Albuquerque a sport
that attracts girls as young as fifteen who are anxious to emulate media
superheros like Xena Warrior Princess, the Powerpuff Girls and Cat
Woman. Her most famous subject is Holly Holmes, the local champion.
FLOR GARDUNO - Flor Garduño is one of
Mexico’s legendary contemporary
photographers. In the 1980s she made
numerous trips to remote parts of Latin
America to photograph the lives and rituals
of indigenous people, capturing the
mysterious threshold between the
sacred/temporal worlds. Her next project
dealt with the mythic feminine and lyrical
still lifes. This was followed with a major
body of work called Trilogy which drew
from three ongoing themes: Bestiarium
(enchanted animals representing dreams and passions), Fantastic Woman
(celebrating the mystery and sensuality of the female body) and Silent Natures (the
realm of the wilderness). Garduño prints her photographs and portfolio prints
using silver, platinum, palladium and digital processes. [photo: “Basket of Light,
Sumpango, Guatemala,”1989, copyright Flor Garduño)
ZIG JACKSON - Zig Jackson was raised on a reservation in North Dakota and is
a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes. He has been a guest a long
time professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and is best known for
his series of photographs titled Entering Zig's Indian Reservation. Each
photograph was taken at a
well-known site around San
Francisco "occupied" by
Jackson wearing a full Indian
headdress and sunglasses and
standing next to an official
looking sign stating:
"Entering Zig's Indian
Reservation." Underlying the
genuine humor, Jackson's
photographs raise complex issues about Native American identity, land rights,
indigenous sovereignty, and cultural ambiguity. [photo: “Kennecott Copper Mine,
Tooele, Utah,” Zig Jackson copyright 2004]
PATRICK NAGATANI - Patrick Nagatani's protean creativity is matched by a
superb intellectual grasp about such serious issues as the nuclear waste industry,
anachronistic archeology, prisoner of war camps, and apocalyptic disasters of all
kinds. The theatrical dimension of his works reflects his experiences in the
Hollywood film industry in the 1970s. Using magical realism, Nagatani explores
such diverse subjects as Buddhism, gender and ethnic paradoxes, the creation and
history of nuclear modernity, his own Japanese-American heritage, bodybuilding,
color, light, healing, cancer, cars and airplanes. Each print is coded with multiple
visual layers of clues and information. The intensity of his subject matter is
softened by sheer beauty and humor.
One of Nagatani’s most
entertaining series was
“Excavations,” (2001), a
series of thirty photographs
in which a Japanese
archeologist named Ryoichi
(invented by Nagatani)
excavates historic and
contemporary sites around
the world noted for their cultural significance. To Ryoichi’s amazement (and ours)
he uncovered evidence of a site-specific automobile culture that had existed all
over the world in the past. For example, at Chichen Itza the car he uncovered from
the ground was a Jaguar; at Stonehenge a Bentley, at Herculaneum a Ferrari, and
so on. Nagatani’s meticulously crafted photographic “documents” play with
society’s universal fascination with the cult of the car, while at the same time
exploring the thin line between reality and illusion as photography creates,
recreates, or supports a particular history. Nagatani ir retired from decades of
teaching at the University of New Mexico. [photo: BMW, Chetro Ketl Kiva, Chaco
Canyon, New Mexico, 1997,” copyright Patrick Nagatani]
DON USNER – Photographer and
author Don Usner was born in Embudo,
New Mexico in 1957 and grew up in
Los Alamos and Chimayo. After
earning degrees in Biology,
Environmental Studies and Geography
in California and New Mexico, Usner
moved to Santa Fe to teach, write and
photograph. His extensive photography
projects include the landscape and
architecture of Chimayo, the Valles
Caldera near Los Alamos, and portraits
of ordinary and distinguished
individuals from New Mexico and
elsewhere. Usner has published eight books, many of which include his own
photographs. He teaches photography at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design
and Santa Fe Preparatory School. [photo: “Cinco De Mayo Car Show, Espanola,
NM, 2, May 2015,” copyright Don Usner]
[photo: copyright 2009 Vic Macias Photography]
VIC MACIAS – Santa Fe Resident Vic Macias has been photographing Car
Culture for decades, notably for Low Rider Magazine. His dynamic images depict
cars, bikes, bikers, car makers and fans of lowriders and Custom Culture from his
native California to New Mexico and beyond.
From 1994 to 2008 the exhibition space at 203 W. San Francisco St. was home to
the distinguished Andrew Smith Gallery, legendary for contemporary and classic
photographs.
Vida Loca looks forward to celebrating New Mexico’s extraordinary homegrown
art that reflects our uniquely amalgamated culture of Indo-Hispanic-post-atomic-
rural-car-based-Americanized digital-world aesthetics!
Gallery hours for VIDA LOCA are 10 to 5 Monday through Sunday. For more
information please call VIDA LOCA at (505) 988-7410 or Andrew Smith Gallery
at 505-984-1234. Visit us online at www.andrewsmithgallery.com to view
photographs and ongoing exhibits. Our email:
or
