Artist Tommy Bruce’s many-sided art practice comments on identity construction, often through his real-life renderings of furries.   Albuquerque, NM | tommybruce.net | @tommybruce Something about furry fandom stuck with Tommy Bruce as a teenager. Today, his many-sided...

Furry photog Tommy Bruce regroups post-pandemic “I think I always feel like, for the work I make, it requires a little bit of context up front,” artist and photographer Tommy Bruce tells SFR. “I’m giving some of the history and the culture with straightforward...

Rez Dogs artist Chaz John is back, and he's knee deep in dreams and the American mythos  You know how your dreaming life is a stitched-together assortment of vaguely familiar ideas, shapes and pseudo-realities? Or when you describe to someone how you dreamed about...

Barely 100 yards from La Conquistadora's stronghold in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis, a new statue of Our Lady waits to be burned. This one's made of white wax on the outside, with a wick poking out the top. Her head will someday melt, revealing layers of...

PHOTOGRAPHY PORTFOLIO PORTFOLIO: TOMMY BRUCE DECEMBER 1, 2019 Tommy Bruce, Outside the Castle, 2019. In Outside the Castle (2019), Atmus the deer sits on a lawn outside Disney’s Cinderella Castle. If this were a photo of a standing, front-facing...

n March of 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged the first of two Bed-Ins for Peace, intended as nonviolent protests against the Vietnam War. The first Bed-In lasted a week and took place in the presidential suite of Amsterdam’s Hilton Hotel. It was how the newlywed...

If you wonder what John Lennon and Yoko Ono would be doing 50 years after their radical “Bed In” at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal in 1969… check out “Strange Bedfellows,” an interactive voice-of-the-people exhibit about to launch at Ellsworth Gallery in Santa...

Elise Ansel at Cadogan Contemporary The American painter Elise Ansel takes inspiration from Old Master paintings but translates them into her own, highly contemporary visual language. “I flip the orientation and use abstraction to interrupt a destructive narrative and...

Dressed to Kill Rhonda Sonnenberg/Selvedge Magazine Japanese Samurai warrior armour  Perhaps more than any other, the Japanese culture possesses a seductive, delicate, and yet bellicose sensibility that finds precise expression in the arts. Arising in no small part...

As Frieze week approaches there is plenty to see in London, from Old Masters to cutting edge contemporary art, one exhibition that should definitely be on your radar is yes I said Yes, a solo show by the acclaimed US artist Elise Ansel, opening 1 October at Cadogan...

If there's one thing artist Chaz Johns (Winnebago, Mississippi Band Choctaw and European) proved after his residency at the Institute of American Indian Arts last year, it's that fine art need not be humorless. John's series Rez Dogs merged his training from the...

Chaz John (WINNEBAGO TRIBE OF NEBRASKA, MISSISSIPPI BAND CHOCTAW, EUROPEAN) paints a lot of rez dogs. His works have names like Rez Dog Fights Turkey Vulture to Protect Fry Bread and Rez Dog Mother and Puppies. Lately he's been busy at the easel creating dog-themed...

Owen Marc Laurion’s front window display at Ellsworth Gallery isn’t full of flashy baubles. There’s nothing to entice you, like an expensive piece of jewelry or fashionable cashmere sweater. It’s a simple display with a rustic, clunky-looking ceramic table, a ceramic...

ALI EDELSON & JOHN EGNER, SOTHEBY'S INSTITUTE OF ART, APRIL 17, 2019 Sotheby’s Institute of Art is pleased to present Represented Past, a group exhibition curated by Ali Edelson, Master of Art Business candidate class of 2019, and John Egner, Master of...

If one is hoping to come down from stress of daily existence, two concurrent exhibitions at Artspace111 in Fort Worth could do the trick. The works of both Peter Harrington and Jeffrey Poole are meditative and calming. Harrington’s oil-on-canvas paintings pair...

Healthy dollops of praise should be lavished on Artspace 111 for providing an enjoyable and efficient primer on the virtues of pure abstraction and its more familiar sibling, whimsically rendered realism. Thanks to 18 pieces by Peter Harrington in An Expansive Moment...

Albuquerque photographer Tommy Bruce, furries, and Ellsworth Gallery's 'Censored!' "It certainly helps with marketing and interest, having the large commercial holiday—but I think, for me, this kind of imagery that deals with sex and its different aspects has always...

I enter the gallery and see the word “Anthropocene” in vinyl on the wall, and my first thought is: it’s a tired conversation in an art context, but let’s shake the tree and see if anything good comes out. The Anthropocene is a recently coined term to describe the...

For her title, Elise Ansel snatches a fragment from the first lines of T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” (1936) the first of his Four Quartets: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future. / And time future contained in time past.” This melding...

“I took this work by Titian and I turned it upside down.” Elise Ansel is sitting in her studio in Portland’s West End, the walls covered with her large-scale abstract paintings. Pinned by some are small reproductions of works by the old masters: Titian, Michelangelo,...

EARLY 20TH-CENTURY Modernism swiftly kicked aside the starched Edwardian aesthetic, so it was hardly surprising when the art of the time literally began to move. The photographer and multimedia artist Man Ray created “Obstruction” in 1920, a dangling...

Alivia Magaña, an Albuquerque-based autopsy technician found another use for the spectral glow of luminol: art photography. It isn’t so separate from her career in forensics. In fact, Magaña also makes use of all the protective equipment and stainless-steel tools used...

Peter Harrington’s paintings of symmetric conflations of pagodas and other Buddhist temples and iconography with cacti, vintage cars, cross sections of trees, jet planes, and flowers have a quirky edge but also suggest the transparency of the physical realm of...

Peter Harrington’s drive to find his perfect symbolic expression through combining geometric forms with organic elements in totemic ways motivates this Jemez Springs painter every time he enters his studio. “I began this series of paintings about 25 years ago,”...

An exhibit of approximately 25 paintings and drawings by David Syre opens on Friday, Sept. 14, with a 5:30 p.m. reception. Guest-curated by Argentine curator Ana Palacio, the show includes a selection of works that reflect Syre’s interest in the Tierra del Fuego...

For their joint exhibit at Ellsworth Gallery, Amie LeGette and Courtney M. Leonard have created complementary bodies of work that, each in their own way, reflect artistic engagements with the organic world. In LeGette’s work, the engagement with the organic is tied...

Chaz John’s exhibition and artist residency continues through April 15. John, a Winnebago and Mississippi Band Choctaw artist who resides in Santa Fe, is the gallery’s first artist-in-residence. His Rez Dogs series are portraits of reservation dogs, which are often...

The rez dog may be the supreme symbol of reservation life; the dogs, through no fault of their own, are abandoned, ignored and maligned—but not in the hands of artist Chaz John (Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska/Mississippi Band of Choctaw). The Institute of American Indian...

On the local front is Zachariah Ben, a Diné artist who practices sand painting, a medium in which natural materials such as sandstone, turquoise and semi-precious stone are used to create imagery of universal forces that demonstrate the interconnection of all beings....

Diné singers, or medicine men, have many healing ceremonies, including one known as the Yeii Bichei or Night Chant. Part of the nine-day medicinal ceremony includes the ritual personification of paternal or grandfather gods — with the figure known as Talking God, an...

“Back off, buddy, or I’ll end you.” That’s the message behind pretty much everything that falls under the heading of arms and armor. Some pieces shout it louder than others, but the message is clear, no matter if it was designed to kill a foe cleanly and quickly, or...

lise Ansel’s stunning show goes to the heart of the relationship between artists practicing today and those of the past. Ansel investigates the “dialogues” her paintings establish with the great masters and gives new life to a tradition that extends back to Miró’s...

During my tour of the L.A. Art Show in January, a glimpse of Elise Ansel’s work from a distance reeled me into the Ellsworth booth about as quickly and effectively as anything I spotted in my tour of the entire fair. It was a small study based on a Poussin painting,...

THE SAMURAI ARTS EXHIBITION AT ELLSWORTH GALLERY FEATURED pristine relics, regal weaponry, and garments worn by the samurai class are the main features of the Samurai arts exhibition at the Ellsworthy Gallery in addition to photography chronicling the end of one of...

Aren’t there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? –Denise Levertov, “Annunciation” One of the highlights of a semester abroad in France during the spring of 1974 was viewing the Joan Miró retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Among my favorite...

Classic European paintings - Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo, with images of bacchanals, figures in the landscape, characters from myth, and scenes from Christian llegories - provide source material for Elise Ansel's contemporary abstractions. Her reinterpretations...

IT HAPPENED OVER A BONFIRE. REPRESENTATIVES OF ELLSWORTH GALLERY, A NEW ART VENUE WITH THE GOAL OF SHOWCASING ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY ART, APPROACHED MEOW WOLF MEMBERS GATHERED AROUND THE FLAMES AND ASKED THEM TO CO-CURATE THE GALLERY’S FRIDAY, JUNE 7, OPENING....

There’s something unexpected leering from the roof of Ellsworth Gallery, a new establishment on East Palace Avenue. You’ve probably noticed the dragon slithering from the top, grinning down at you on your way to El Palacio for a sandwich or to Nicholas Potter...