#SITElines2016: a multi branch curatorial tree is ready to bloom in New Mexico

Established at first as a biennial exhibition programme and shortly afterwards as an all year-round institution dedicated to fostering contemporary art, SITE Santa Fe was founded in 1995. Priding itself on being the only international contemporary art biennial in the United States at that time – also then one of the few in the world – SITE kept promoting such shows in parallel to its programme every other year until 2011, when it took a break to re-imagine this – by then – saturated format. Irene Hofmann, who serves as SITE’s Phillips Director and Chief Curator since 2010, explains that the pause was an important time for reflection, during which they ‘challenged all previous assumptions and expectations, and ultimately shifted the direction of our work. What emerged was a new biennial series that reaffirmed SITE’s place at the vanguard of international contemporary art, while at the same time created the basis for a greater connection to place and community’. Now branded as SITElines, the biennial aims to look ‘to the history of New Mexico as an inspiration, and to the Americas as a vast territory for exploration’. In view of the region’s peculiar history, this emphasis on the land is a clever move.

 

In spite of its difficult-to-access location, Santa Fe has for long nourished a solid commitment to the arts. It currently possesses twelve museums with various focuses, from Native American to Spanish art, Folk to Modern, in addition to a museum dedicated to the work of the late Georgia O’Keeffe – who spent most of her life in New Mexico – and numerous art galleries. It is an astonishing number, considering that the city has a population of about seventy thousand inhabitants occupying an area of nearly one hundred square kilometres; it is the longest serving capital of the United States, having been designated as such since New Mexico was admitted as the country’s’ 47th state in 1912. The city was founded by Spanish colonisers in 1610 – before that, it has been home to Native Americans since at least 900 a. C., a heritage that is very much alive and relevant to the city – and remained under Spain’s domain until the 1810 Mexican War of Independence. When Texas was incorporated to the US about thirty years later, Santa Fe was claimed as a segment of that state, and thus officially became part of the country. The North American railway boom which characterised the 1800s cut the city out of any major railway path, and while neighbouring cities were prospering with trades of all sorts, Santa Fe never really turned into a significant economic success. More excitingly, it started to build a vibrant cultural scene, with artists, writers and intellectuals moving there since the early 20th century, attracted by its landscape, dry climate, and arguably the very absence of a money-oriented dynamics. Lynda Benglis, Judy Chicago, Lucy Lippard and Richard Tuttle are some of the full and part-time residents of Santa Fe, though none were actually born there.

 

Titled much wider than a line – a quote extracted from a 2011 book by Leanne Simpson – SITElines 2016 is organised by a team of five curators with multiple backgrounds. They are Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, Kathleen Ash-Milby, Pip Day, Pablo León de la Barra and Kiki Mazzucchelli who, according to Hofmann, were chosen for ‘their prominence and experience in the field, their openness to a collaborative process, and for their expertise in contemporary art from a particular region or regions in the Americas’. She justifies the cacophony of voices, ‘one of the fundamental principles of SITElines is that a team curates each iteration and that with each team we have an opportunity to engage and represent many cultural, curatorial, and geographic perspectives. In developing the organising structure of SITElines, we moved away from the more traditional biennial model that privileges a single curatorial voice to one that now makes room for collaboration and for varied ideas and viewpoints at the curatorial table’. Noteworthy, the list of curators is composed in its majority by women, a characteristic that was already present in SITElines’ previous 2014 itinerancy. much wider than a line will present works by thirty-five artists, six of which were commissioned to produce new pieces. They were selected based on their approach to the biennial’s three guiding principles, namely vernacular strategies, Indigenous understandings and shared territories.

 

These are all themes that refer back to the city’s history and context. As Ash-Milby puts it, ‘Santa Fe is a critical locus for Native art, so for me, organising an exhibition at an important contemporary art venue such as SITE was an opportunity to emphasise how these art worlds are already intertwined’. She continues, ‘many of the artists that I brought to the exhibition have a relationship to Santa Fe, and New Mexico, as a powerful location for dialogue, inspiration and conflict, especially for Native people’. Mazzucchelli adds, ‘all the artists we commissioned to create works have specific research interests that we felt could be further developed and expanded within the context of Santa Fe, although their methodologies might be quite different’. Blending newcomers such as Jonathas de Andrade – the only artist on the list to have been born after 1980 – with a series of heavyweights like David Lamelas, Graciela Iturbide and Pierre Verger, SITElines 2016 bears the promise of being an interesting experiment on the quest for the local – even if the local here starts in the microcosmos of the city and grows to encompass all the American continents. This is a premise they have been championing since SITElines past edition, which took landscape, territory, and trade as guiding axises, and, as it all indicates, will continue to explore in the years to come.

May 31, 2016