In a nook of New Mexico’s Website Santa Fe museum—at the moment 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 folks, the Cochiti, they characteristic a grandfather determine, his eyes closed and mouth open, and a bunch of babies perched on his shoulders and arms listening to his story.
Storytelling is on the coronary heart of this 12 months’s biennial, with its predominant 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 12 months’s visitor curator for the Worldwide, tells The Artwork Newspaper. “And Cordero has been so influential. She was in all probability 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 people story. The present options greater than 70 artists and 27 “figures of curiosity” (each dwelling 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 because of the pandemic, Louis Grachos arrived because the museum’s government director and took time to rethink the mission. He had labored on the museum beforehand, working it from 1996 to 2003, and knew that discovering the proper 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.
Thankfully, she accepted, and Grachos is delighted with the outcomes. “Cecilia captured the mission superbly in her exhibition by choosing quite a few artists who dwell and work in New Mexico,” he says.
The Worldwide additionally contains 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 Army 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 battle?
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 attention-grabbing second for doing exhibitions like this on the planet,” she says. “As a customer, I need to go see a present that may solely occur in that place. Even when fewer folks may see it, the concept that you are doing a present that speaks about a spot, a folks and a group may be very related. I wasn’t excited about doing a present of trophies or blue-chip artwork that you can see in all places.”
Whereas there are just a few blue-chip artists included right here (Simone Leigh, Frederick Hammersley), a lot of the others are regional or under-the-radar. They make use of a variety of mediums, together with portray, sculpture, pictures, video and set up. What’s most stunning is what number of inventive folks handed by way of New Mexico and made work there—such because the novelists D. H. Lawrence, together with his sequence of blurry and erotic work, and Vladimir Nabokov, an avid lepidopterist who made a sequence of detailed butterfly drawings. These literary giants’ visible works are proven in the primary exhibition.
When Alemani was appointed curator a 12 months 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 an adolescent, Alemani had fallen underneath the spell of Reggio’s experimental Qatsi trilogy movies—beginning with Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Stability (1982), which pairs a propulsive stream of pictures 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 choices are clearly linked 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 pictures to spotlight deserted uranium mines on the Navajo Nation’s land, constructed earlier than the risks of radiation have been totally 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 must be having a dialog about on this public form of discussion board and area?” Quezada Ureña mentioned throughout a presentation at Website. Her reply was that the dialog ought to “revolve round colonisation, which is form of the idea of that constructing, proper? It was inbuilt 1610, when the Spanish arrived.” She has stuffed one room with each borrowed and created objects positioned into small show instances suspended at completely different heights from assist poles. In a single, three vintage pistols counsel 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 outdated particular person’s hand, the opposite a baby’s hand. She was attempting to convey “one needing the opposite, like elder and youth relationships”, she says.
Different works on view are evocative of the spirit and lightweight 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 robust part of the Worldwide this 12 months. 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 primarily based loosely on fables about folks and animals attempting to make a river crossing. It’s on view within the basement of the Museum of Worldwide Folks Artwork; the complete area is roofed with newspapers twisted into batons that create diagonal patterns throughout its partitions and ceiling.
The movie includes a mouse-deer—representing the Taiwanese folks, 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 mission took him and his workforce three years to finish, completed in time for inclusion each on the Excessive Line earlier this 12 months and within the Worldwide. In Santa Fe, the work is accompanied by a choice of collectible figurines utilized by funereal and Day of the Useless celebrations in cultures all over the world.
It might be stunning that Santa Fe, a small metropolis of 90,000 folks, can assist a global exhibition of this scale. “I feel it is a spot that draws inventive folks,” Grachos says. “The nice bodily great 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 will have the richness of context of place but in addition deliver a global discourse to our group and join artists and curators. Cecilia has accomplished that masterfully.”
twelfth Website Santa Fe Worldwide: As soon as Inside a Time, Website Santa Fe, New Mexico, till 12 January 2026
