Because there are only a few gainfully employed people able to attend economic development "celebrations" ironically slated at the plucky hour of 8:30 am on a Wednesday morning-when most people are right in the middle of their personal, weekly economic development rituals-I'm going to suggest that you mark the date now and take a couple hours off: Oct. 26, 8:30 am-10:30 pm, The Lensic (211 W. San Francisco St., 988-1234).
The point of the event is for the city, specifically the economic development division, to touch base with the community (You! That really means you!) about the past year's progress in following The Santa Fe Economic Development Plan. That means presentations from several entities under contract with the city to provide services, including the official launching of both The Lensic's community box office (
) and Santa Fe's arts and culture web portal (
), as well as face time and auto-horn-tooting (and I don't mean cars) by several ED players.
Creative Santa Fe will unveil its three-year strategic plan to bolster the city's arts and culture industry and there will be announcements regarding a Center for Community Sustainability focused on the triad of water conservation, renewable energy technologies and local business opportunities, a rundown of blossoming small business support and loans and a revisiting of Santa Fe's coveted designation from UNESCO under the Creative Cities program as well as information about the first, and presumably the next, Design Week. Whew.
One thing that won't be discussed much this go around, if press materials are anything to judge by, is that nagging affordable housing issue. It seems that two very important demographics, namely the working class and the relatively young, both feel shut out by skyrocketing home ownership prices and demonstrate a tendency to consider investing in communities where they can actually afford to live.
Case in point, I spoke with an artist this past weekend-a relatively long-time resident with ties to Santa Fe and a respectable day job, who would like to buy a house now, but can't. She and her partner, also a hard-working, good-earning young creative type, have looked all over town and not had much luck finding a house to accommodate their needs for, say, $200,000.
So it was fitting that I saw her work on the outskirts of Santa Fe, where many of the most enterprising artists are taking root. Truchas is home to many galleries including recent addition Tichava-Mills Fine Art (County Road 75, Truchas, 689-1280), right on the main drag. A space-an inspiring space for art with high, trussed ceilings, concrete floors, crisp white walls-would run proprietors Nina Tichava and Gigi Mills somewhere between $1,500 and $15,000 a month in Santa Fe, depending on how central they wanted to be. In Truchas, such a space runs, well, considerably less. Plus, sitting up there on its mountain shelf with a breathtaking view of the valley below, snow-blown mountains above and hundreds of miles of forest behind, it's the kind of pretty-a face-puckering, leg-buckling, breath-evacuating, soul-consuming beauty-you just don't find by lurking around in the city limits.
But the artwork holds its own. One of Tichava's paintings, "Study for a Wedding Quilt," does have a quilt-ish patchwork assembly of elements, as the name implies, in the artist's brushwork and arrangement of forms, but also reeks of organic possibility, the painting implying that it will shapeshift the moment your gaze wanders, that it has a built-in evolutionary protocol. It's both terrifying and thrilling to think of a painting as a peer, as an entity that might compete with you for resources. If you're unconvinced by the lure of Truchas, Tichava has another impressive piece called "Hoi An" on view in the New Mexico Originals exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art (107 W. Palace Ave., 476-5072) so you can test the waters. Guest artist Susan Donatucci offers the most complete and intriguing body of work at Tichava-Mills with a series of multiples, dabbing feet into the streams of Carl Andre, Ann Hamilton and Eva Hesse. Donatucci is refining an aesthetic, casting about to an extent, but the work is so pure, so thoughtful and so rich with the artist's hand, that it exudes the exciting sense of an imminent breakthrough. The piece that refuses to fade from my mind is "Private," a grid of antiqued paper folds, secured by twine, alluring still if they prove to contain nothing more than themselves.
The following day, I wound up at the 10-year-old Glorieta fringe space known as Gallery Zipp (exit 297, Glorieta, 757-6428, by appointment), where a group exhibition organized loosely around the idea of collage was in full backwoods rampage. Do go, if not for the sake of being entranced by the rough and wily charms of owners Bunny Tobias and Charles Greeley, go for the view that stretches to Ruidoso and the 20 acres of Sangre de Cristo meadow. If not for that, go for the 240-year-old house/gallery, a former boy's camp for juvenile troublemakers of all economic backgrounds, a former speakeasy smack in the middle of Dalton Gang terrain, now a wild homage to art anywhere and everywhere. And if you need a more specific reason still, go for Greeley's exquisite Japanese paper collaged landscapes, go for Dana Newmann's intelligent and purposeful compositions, like culture molecules caught in the act of self-assembly, go for Richard Solomon's Ilfochrome prints and plant matter assemblages, especially "Seed Sun," with once airborne, stick-like pods trapped and packed tight in a deep frame, and go for Richard B Kurtz' series of boxers depicted on bingo cards, a tenuous and tension-filled blend of drawing and spastic expression, of commercial chance and painterly whim, of hectic violence and peaceful wishes. You'll also find more work by Donatucci who, apparently like the rest of us with more sense than money, is making a home on the outskirts.
