Gina Pugliese

Tag: Art Writing

  • My Embarrassing and Enduring Attraction to Taos, New Mexico

    My Embarrassing and Enduring Attraction to Taos, New Mexico

    The Big House, now the Mabel Dodge Luhan Hotel and Resort

    Before Christmas, I had the pleasure of spending a night at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos, New Mexico, and have written about it for Southwest Contemporary. Luhan was a writer and wealthy patron of the arts from upstate New York. She moved to Taos at the beginning of the 20th century, divorcing her third husband, who had lured her there, and marrying her fourth and final husband, Tony Lujan, from Taos Pueblo. Mabel and Tony spent the rest of their lives together in the “Big House,” the sprawling adobe structure they erected, which now exists as a three-star hotel and resort.

    You can find the article here.

    Taos Gorge Canyon Bridge with the dust spots on the lens of the camera I borrowed

    The article won’t tell you that I saw Santa Claus and Kit Carson serving hot cider outside of the Kit Carson Museum on Kit Carson Road. It also doesn’t mention that I was taking a photography class and was running around taking bad pictures with a rented DSLR Canon, including of the bighorn sheep crossing the hiking trails near the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, which my grandfather helped engineer during his long stint working for the New Mexico highway department. I also made my partner pose among the white paint on white canvas in the white cube gallery space at the Harwood Museum, where the abstract expressionist work of Agnes Martin is on permanent display.

    My partner in the Agnes Martin room at the Harwood Museum

    Before retiring to the Nicolai Fechin room at the Luhan House, I went to a “Meet the Donkey” party in Talpa, a sort of artist-cowboy debutante ball for a Jerusalem donkey named Minister. Its owner uses Minister as a source of transportation, riding him down the busy Paseo Del Pueblo Sur to Smith’s grocery store.

    Minister with my partner and Minister’s owner in the background

    I also ran into old friends from Taos and met new ones, including a Palestinian woman from New York who finds herself in rural New Mexico learning about historical and enduring community irrigation systems—the same kind you see at the Georgia O’Keefe House in Abiquiu. This system fed her flourishing secret garden, which the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe maintains, fully restored to its former glory.

    There’s something to say about this Palestinian woman working on community water irrigation in relation to the water scarcity and the mass forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. But I’ll leave those dots hanging in the air for you to connect.

    Bighorn Sheep on the Western Rim of the gorge with more dust spots

    The next morning, at a long banquet table in the dining room of the Luhan House, I met an elderly woman who identified herself as a writer, proudly beaming that she was staying in Mabel’s room. Outlining her latest manuscript, a historical account of a 19th-century Virginian woman’s integration into the Swanee tribe, I nodded my head, affirming the fitness of her pursuits in relation to her affinity for Mabel.

    The Nicolai Fechin Room at the Luhan House

    Reluctantly, I admitted to her that I write as well. Instead of asking me what I write, however, she asked me about what I was reading. When I told her Second Place (2021) by Rachel Cusk, she raised her eyebrows in non-recognition.

    “It’s loosely based on Mabel and her memoir, Lorenzo In Taos–about D.H. Lawrence’s visit to this house in 1922,” I clarified.

    In her New Yorker review of Second Place, Rebecca Panovka rightfully criticizes Cusk’s simplified version of Lorenzo in Taos, which renders Tony an adopted child of uncertain ethnicity. By deracinating Tony, Cusk glosses over the complicated relationship Mabel and he shared. Mulling over the sudden rise of interest in a divisive figure like Luhan after the 2021 publications of Cusk’s novel and a new biography of D.H. Lawrence, Panovka bitingly concludes: “Not every forgotten woman is in need of a bio-pic.”

    What might be a picture of Tony Lujan in a book on display at the Harwood Museum

    Yet, when I visit Taos, immersing myself in its dramatic landscape, I find myself in a position similar to Luhan’s, wanting to establish roots here and build a creatively fulfilling life. While watching the sunsets over the mountains and hearing the grass rustle over uninterrupted prairies of undeveloped, Pueblo-protected land, no amount of rationality and education in social politics helps me see this place as anything but mystical and available to me, too.

    Returning to Taos always feels like returning home, and this desire to belong to a community that continues to grow and gentrify and push my artist friends to the brink of their ability to survive there makes me feel guilty. In my article, I write about this guilt, connected to the history of Western expansion and exploitative modernist art-making in the region.

    Mabel and Tony as found in a common area of the Luhan House

    However, in this piece, I also neglect to inform you that I lived in Taos from August 2017 to August 2018. Fleeing the East Coast, and, although I didn’t realize it at the time, also a long-term relationship and my life in academia, I joined my best friend, Damien Moreau, in Valdez on the outskirts of Taos, where he had secured a house to rent on a cliff in Gallina Canyon right next to the D.H. Lawrence Ranch.

    I’ve often referred to this year as a life highlight and consider Taos one of my favorite places to live. It’s complicated and bittersweet to admit as much, though. Damien was in a steep slide down into a depressive state that he couldn’t overcome. I watched his character radically change under the murderous magenta sunsets over a mesa dusted with minty sagebrush. In December 2019, he succumbed to his stubborn death wish. I’ve written a lot about his suicide in a secret blog that is formed as a series of missives to him. Maybe I gave you access, and you have read it. At any rate, Taos can never fully be home for me again because it no longer exists on the same dimensional plane as Damien.

    My friend, the artist Eli Walters, and my partner outside of the Luhan House before going to meet Minister. Walters lived with me briefly at the house on Gallina Canyon after Damien left to work in Denver. Later, I would follow Damien to Denver.

    Although I ceased writing to Damien directly, I still think of topics for these letters to him. I’ve, of course, been angry at him and dismissive of his sincere desire to leave this planet, thinking that he was stronger and could have endured it better than he thought. But with the pandemic, rise of authoritarianism, burning of the planet due to climate change, increased legal protections for narcissistic, comic-book-villain billionaires, and genocide in Gaza, I’m not so sure.

    Another photo of Minister

    This was not the introduction I intended to write for this article! But it is the one I have written. Although it has little to do with my essay’s contents, it feels right.

    Please find a very different exploration of Taos and its history in Southwest Contemporary here.

    You can also find a list of my other publications here.

    And, if you haven’t subscribed to my Substack yet, please do so here.

  • The Moniker Monk of Jeffery City, Wyoming

    A Day Well Spent With Byron Seeley of Monk King Bird Pottery

    Inside Monk King Bird Pottery

    I left Lander, Wyoming at the end of August, running away from another Fremont County winter. Slowly making my way to Albuquerque, I visited Byron T. Seeley, proprietor of Monk King Bird Pottery. You can read about him, his shop, and Jeffery City in the article I wrote for Southwest Contemporary.

    Byron Seeley outside of his shop and studio.

    Here’s a small excerpt:

    Despite local interest in him as an artist and muse, internet searches provide scant documentation of Seeley beyond some travel blog posts and YouTube videos, including one where he takes “pot shots”—shooting his work with a gun. You also won’t find much information about Jeffery City, the former uranium mining town in Central Wyoming that boomed in the 1950s and busted in the 1980s, holding onto a paltry population of twenty-two. 

    Seeley shares a work-in-progress “primordial soup dish.”

    Sometimes passersby mistake Seeley’s shop for a restaurant since one of his signs reads “Home of the Primordial Soup Dish.” The dish, in fact, is a plate he makes using the same multi-clay technique as his mugs. “They’re my Moby Dick,” he jokes, admitting that he has none for sale due to the difficulty of stripping the surface layer and polishing the clay with steel wool without puncturing it.   

    Pondering the mascots and monikers surrounding Seeley—cowboy, mad potter, jailbird, abstinent monk, and muse—he strikes me as best represented by a tumbleweed–blown into one dusty Western town after the next, attracting interest and curiosity. In a similar vein, Seeley reminds me of the Dude from The Big Lebowski (1998), which opens with the song “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” following one of the sagebrush before introducing us to the film’s protagonist, a Gen-X hippy with a zen-like level of chill. While Seeley’s equanimity makes him guru-like, and perhaps also fails to shield him from the hyperbolic chaos and evil of the world according to the Coen brothers, he certainly doesn’t share the Dude’s lazy lack of production. And, you can’t placate him with a white Russian. 

    Read the full article here. Check out a full list of my publications here.

  • Land Art in a Wyoming Uranium Mine Ghost Town

    Hyperlink and Land Report Collective Members Install Work in Shirley Basin, Wyoming

    Photo by Donald Fodness of a hand-drawn map of the Shirley Basin ghost town, noting the placement of a few artworks. The “cow” refers to a dead cow found on the property.

    Find my latest art review for Southwest Contemporary, where I witnessed Theresa Anderson, Tobias Fike, Alicia Ordal, and Julie Puma get ready for an exhibition in remote Wyoming.

    Photo by Donald Fodness of work by David Lawrence Jones

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Sitting forgotten on an unmarked county road on the East side of Highway 487, you probably won’t find Shirley Basin, Wyoming, a uranium mine ghost town founded nearly seventy years ago. Its remote coordinates place it beyond unimpeded prairie hills, thirty miles north of Medicine Bow and sixty-seven miles south of Casper. If discovered, your reward is an eyeful of unhurriedly toppling structures, letting you witness over three decades of ongoing decay and abandonment.

    Photo by Tobias Fike of work by Summer Ventis

    As Hyperlink artists Theresa Anderson, Alicia Ordal, and Julie Puma erected their mixed-media sculptures in the only copse of still-standing trailers, the town blossomed under returned human interest.

    These artists traveled from Denver to participate in Re-Activate, a group show in collaboration with the Land Report Collective, which shares Hyperlink’s mission to meaningfully unite artists with various communities. Including geographically dispersed members from Colorado, Georgia, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Washington, Wyoming, and more, these collectives also seek to connect creatives across physical and digital boundaries and barriers.

    Photo by Gina Pugliese

    On my own unguided treasure hunt for art, I found a small, windowless white building with an attached cylindrical metal tower, I trepidatiously tip-toed through the open door next to Patrick Kikut’s Snowman Hospice and Wellness billboard (2020), with a snowman advertising ice cream in Laramie, Wyoming. Although I wasn’t trespassing, I felt like an intruder needing a hazmat suit to explore the depths of this miniature Chernobyl. Yet no uranium was mined and no nuclear reactors exploded in this spot.

    Inside were tall boxes with switches, dials, and gauges–clunky technology from a bygone telecommunications era. A disorderly vomit of binders and files spilled across the floor. Above me hung Daisy McGowan’s Biopsychosocial (all works 2023 unless otherwise noted), a disco ball, which, at night, scatters luminescent confetti onto an uninviting dance floor.

    Photo by Gina Pugliese

    Their gusto made me wish that I, too, was an artist invited to visually convey my perverse fascination with a place still bearing the scars of economic, ecological, and industrial devastation. Instead, I shared their productive curiosity about Shirley Basin and their excitement for an exhibition that compellingly blurs the distinction between art and detritus.

    Photo by Tobias Fike of work by Daisy McGowan

    Check out the full article and find a list of all of my publications here.

    Photo by Julie Puma of work by Alicia Ordal

  • Studio Visit with Esther Hz

    Curator and Artist Esther Hz Discusses Her Art and Soil In Her Studio In Denver’s City Park Neighborhood

    Esther Hz in her studio in Denver. Photo courtesy of the artist.

    Read my latest article for Southwest Contemporary about Esther Hz’s art practice, including her past as a farmer and recent biodynamic farm-inspired zoetropes for the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition agriCULTURE (on view until October 1st).

    “Celestial Beings” on display in the agriCULTURE show at BMoCA.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Hz has always considered herself a practicing artist, but, as a former farmer, she found little time for art-making. Additionally, having attended a permaculture school in Eugene, Oregon, before urban farming at Produce Denver and then managing the urban Blue Bear Farm at the Colorado Convention Center, Hz remains passionate about agricultural work as an act of self and communal service—providing self-sufficiency and the opportunity to deeply nourish the masses. And, as Hz informed me, it all starts with good soil, the micro-biomes that line our digestive tracts, betraying where we source our food (which, under capitalism, is not necessarily where we live). 

    Hz and BMoCA’s curator, Jane Burke.

    Tones of spirituality, comedy, and healing emerge as powerfully legible focuses in Hz’s oeuvre. Occasionally working in the non-profit sector, including with girls and women from the foster care system, Hz has invited others to play with her in her studio, listening to their histories and visually replicating their stories into art pieces that might offer pathways to self-repair. 

    “Genesis”

    In her 2018 sculpture Genesis, Hz cast a young woman’s face in plaster, creating a visage in which oyster mushroom mycelium overtakes half of the head cast. Hz met this person, dealing with dying and deceased parents and substance abuse, through her non-profit work. Both Hz and this woman agreed that a mushroom mask justly represented her experiences. 

    “Many Eyes”

    Read the full article here. Check out more of my writing on Substack here. And visit my blog here.

    “Untitled”
    “Untitled”

  • Land Suffering/Land Healing: Marguerite Humeau’s Orisons

    The meek, reverent sculptures of Marguerite Humeau’s Land Art puncture 160 acres of unusable potato farmland in Hooper, Colorado.

    Read my review for Southwest Contemporary about the White Cube Contemporary Art Gallery artist’s land art, curated by Black Cube Nomadic Museum, on view in the San Luis Valley for the next two years. For more information about the piece, find Orison’s website here.

    Here’s an excerpt:

    Competing with a backdrop of the Collegiate Peaks—a range of grandiose mountains each breaching 14,000 feet—and the bright, amorphous slopes of the Great Sand Dunes, Humeau’s numerous but camouflaged flora-and-fauna-inspired sculptures grovel before this macroscopic drama. Fortuitously arriving at golden hour, many of us remained distracted by the natural landscape, snapping pictures of ourselves in the pre-gloaming light, the dust storms on the horizon, and the play of our shadows stretching over scorched earth. Meanwhile, Humeau’s visual renditions of “prayers,” the definition of orisons, waited for reverence.

    While whimsical Americana characterizes the arguable Land Art of the UFO Watchtower, Humeau’s big, sundry thoughts make her work more difficult to specify, and subvert the impact of her small, poetic orisons. Despite Humeau’s extensive research and sensitivity, some melancholic lack haunts Humeau’s engagement with these 160 acres. Perhaps I wanted a more compelling motivation behind European Humeau’s “health report” (to use her phrasing) on a piece of indubitably struggling United States farmland undergoing unavoidable megadrought and the unprecedented effects of global climate change.

    As I beheld thirty-six spinning Spurge Dancer sculptures (numerically reflecting the artist’s age) on a patch labeled “150-year-old Sadness” on the Orisons map, I contemplated Humeau’s drive to offer such unavailing amelioration. I further pondered if I unjustly judged Humeau’s impulses to study, classify, map out, sanctify, and remedy a piece of land as too dangerously adjacent to ongoing and harmful settler-colonialist mentalities and epistemologies.

    This portrait of Humeau appears on her Instagram. She wrote the caption about her piece in the accompanying image (below). Since the publication of my review, she changed her caption, no longer referring to Orisons as a “health report.”

    Find a full list of my publications here.