In a nook of New Mexico’s Website Santa Fe museum—presently that includes the twelfth Website Santa Fe Worldwide: As soon as Inside a Time (till 12 January 2026)—is a show case of painted terracotta figures by the New Mexico-based artist Helen Cordero. Impressed by the folklore of her individuals, the Cochiti, they characteristic a grandfather determine, his eyes closed and mouth open, and a bunch of young children perched on his shoulders and arms listening to his story.
Storytelling is on the coronary heart of this yr’s biennial, with its essential show on the Website constructing within the Railyards part of Santa Fe and, for the primary time, artistic endeavors in different places across the metropolis—a dozen of them, from inside museums to a former foundry and in storefronts. “I used to be doing plenty of analysis about Indigenous artwork, just like the Pueblo artists,” Cecilia Alemani, the director of the Excessive Line in New York and this yr’s visitor curator for the Worldwide, tells The Artwork Newspaper. “And Cordero has been so influential. She was most likely the primary artist I thought of together with, as a result of I knew it was going to be a present about storytelling.”
The exhibition’s title, As soon as Inside a Time, references the opening line of many a folks story. The present options greater than 70 artists and 27 “figures of curiosity” (each residing and historic) presenting the artist as storyteller, conveyor and creator of narratives—like that of the Cochiti grandfather.
Set up view of As soon as Inside a Time, with Helen Cordero’s Storyteller collectible figurines (left) and Simone Leigh’s Untitled (2025)
Website first launched its biennial in 1995. In 2021, after a pause in programming as a result of pandemic, Louis Grachos arrived because the museum’s govt director and took time to rethink the venture. He had labored on the museum beforehand, working it from 1996 to 2003, and knew that discovering the precise curator for the biennial was essential. “I used to be actually impressed by the Venice Biennale that Cecilia curated, The Milk of Desires,” he says, so he invited her to do the honours at Website.
Luckily, she accepted, and Grachos is delighted with the outcomes. “Cecilia captured the mission superbly in her exhibition by deciding on quite a few artists who reside and work in New Mexico,” he says.
The Worldwide additionally consists of artists from elsewhere across the nation and the globe, all of whom have a connection to New Mexico or storytelling. For instance, the Lebanese artist Ali Cherri’s elegant quick movie about an exhausted soldier in Cyprus, The Watchman, has been positioned within the auditorium of the New Mexico Navy Museum. Within the movie, a soldier is so exhausted that he begins to see lights shifting within the distance—are they actual, or simply his extended anticipation of conflict?
Set up view of As soon as Inside a Time, with Penny Siopis’s Atlas (2020-ongoing) and D.H. Lawrence’s erotic work (1926-29)
For Alemani’s half, she needed to work with Grachos and in New Mexico. “I feel it is an fascinating second for doing exhibitions like this on this planet,” she says. “As a customer, I need to go see a present that may solely occur in that place. Even when fewer individuals may see it, the concept you are doing a present that speaks about a spot, a individuals and a neighborhood may be very related. I wasn’t all for doing a present of trophies or blue-chip artwork that you would see all over the place.”
Whereas there are a couple of blue-chip artists included right here (Simone Leigh, Frederick Hammersley), many of the others are regional or under-the-radar. They make use of a spread of mediums, together with portray, sculpture, images, video and set up. What’s most shocking is what number of inventive individuals handed by way of New Mexico and made work there—such because the novelists D. H. Lawrence, together with his collection of blurry and erotic work, and Vladimir Nabokov, an avid lepidopterist who made a collection of detailed butterfly drawings. These literary giants’ visible works are proven in the principle exhibition.
When Alemani was appointed curator a yr and a half in the past, she instantly began doing analysis—studying what she may discover, visiting native museums and assembly artists. As soon as Inside a Time is the title of a 2022 movie by Godfrey Reggio, which is on view on the biennial. As a teen, Alemani had fallen below the spell of Reggio’s experimental Qatsi trilogy movies—beginning with Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Stability (1982), which pairs a propulsive stream of photographs with a Philip Glass rating. Throughout Alemani’s analysis, she found that Reggio was a long-time Santa Fe resident.
Daisy Quezada Ureña’s Previous [between] Current (2025) on the New Mexico Historical past Museum’s Palace of the Governors
A few of Alemani’s picks are clearly related to the Southwest, equivalent to Cordero’s figures, the etchings of M. Scott Momaday and Pablita Velarde’s work. The artist Will Wilson makes use of images to spotlight deserted uranium mines on the Navajo Nation’s land, constructed earlier than the risks of radiation have been absolutely identified. In the meantime, Daisy Quezada Ureña makes use of conceptual modes in a historic location, the Palace of the Governors, which is a part of the New Mexico Historical past Museum.
“What will we should be having a dialog about on this public form of discussion board and house?” Quezada Ureña stated throughout a presentation at Website. Her reply was that the dialog ought to “revolve round colonisation, which is form of the premise of that constructing, proper? It was in-built 1610, when the Spanish arrived.” She has stuffed one room with each borrowed and created objects positioned into small show instances suspended at totally different heights from help poles. In a single, three vintage pistols recommend how the Southwest was gained—with violence. In one other, she has positioned porcelain items onto an vintage scale, one with an image-transfer of an previous individual’s hand, the opposite a toddler’s hand. She was making an attempt to convey “one needing the opposite, like elder and youth relationships”, she says.
Different works on view are evocative of the spirit and light-weight of the territory—equivalent to three work by Agnes Pelton and one other close by by her fellow Transcendentalist Florence Miller Pierce.
Zhang Xu Zhan’s Compound Eyes of Tropical (2024) on the Museum of Worldwide Folks Artwork
Transferring footage are an particularly sturdy element of the Worldwide this yr. One of many early favourites amongst Website guests has been Compound Eye of Tropical by the Taiwanese artist Zhang Xu Zhan, who wrote and directed a stop-motion quick made up of paper-mâché puppets and surroundings, with a narrative based mostly loosely on fables about individuals and animals making an attempt to make a river crossing. It’s on view within the basement of the Museum of Worldwide Folks Artwork; your complete house is roofed with newspapers twisted into batons that create diagonal patterns throughout its partitions and ceiling.
The movie incorporates a mouse-deer—representing the Taiwanese individuals, says Zhang—trying to cross a roiling river stuffed with snapping crocodiles. “He’s a little bit of a performer,” says the artist of the character, so the mouse-deer dances backwards and forwards over the backs of the crocodiles to a hypnotic beat. “The music is made by drums, Indonesian gamelans and a little bit of digital music,” says Zhang, who as soon as had a residency in Indonesia. The venture took him and his workforce three years to finish, completed in time for inclusion each on the Excessive Line earlier this yr and within the Worldwide. In Santa Fe, the work is accompanied by a number of collectible figurines utilized by funereal and Day of the Useless celebrations in cultures all over the world.
It might be shocking that Santa Fe, a small metropolis of 90,000 individuals, can help a global exhibition of this scale. “I feel it is a spot that draws inventive individuals,” Grachos says. “The nice bodily fantastic thing about New Mexico, the legacy, the mythologies round Santa Fe. The standard of sunshine within the sky is so inspirational and energising. It feeds the inventive intuition. When our founders considered Website Santa Fe, they envisioned an exhibition that might have the richness of context of place but additionally carry a global discourse to our neighborhood and join artists and curators. Cecilia has completed that masterfully.”
twelfth Website Santa Fe Worldwide: As soon as Inside a Time, Website Santa Fe, New Mexico, till 12 January 2026
