Red, White, and Brown

At Maye’ Torres gallery, STUDIO-107-B, on July 21, Saturday, during Fiesta from 4 to 7, your hostess presents “Red, White, and Brown,” a Taos commentary on the visual arts from the artists, named below. In effect, Maye is injecting the “Soul of the Southwest” with a necessary reminder of identity on the historic Plaza, El Corazon de Taos. The visual arts manifest the spirit of what Heidegger might call “essential strife” wherein the object embodies the repose and motion of earth and world that emerge in a work of art. Essential strife might also characterize the funky authenticity of Taos.

Just as Taos Pueblo has emerged from the earth in its architectural adobe glory among these historic peoples, so the art work below reflects the resonating spirit of nature and the cosmos, whether in the play of surface and color, the cosmos in geometric figures, or the subtle shapes and colors that form impressions and representations of that which can be seen and not seen as the unknown unfolds, touching the eye with beauty or the heart with feeling.

And all this takes place where Tano’s bar once hosted the hoi-polloi, where la gente raised a glass to the spirit of Fiesta lo’ these many years ago. At one of Maye’s previous openings, Larry said to me, “Maye’ is creating a scene.”

Like her grandfather, who presided over a shop that sold local, regional, mainstream and radical news periodicals in the sixties and seventies, along with books, booze, and tobacco, so Maye’ has revived the art scene in plain sight for those who can see and hear the spirit of art, a spirit manifested in objects.

According to archeologists, the spirit of art existed more than a thousand years ago among the indigenous Taosenos, whose work existed not just as devotional objects but as art, as a way of fulfilling the creative and imaginative spirit.

While the “Broken Wheelers” or Taos Society of Artists began the modern marketing and public relations campaign, so the indigenous visual and performance artists, including Taos Pueblo natives and the Hispanic-Catholic santo and retablo makers, not to mention adobe makers and builders, expressed their own creative spirit in shaping the place and people, a place which continues to attract newcomers and natives.

In this otherwise chaotic nation-state, one sees hope in this eloquent presentation. Even as Fiesta has become a kind of homecoming so Maye’ brings back in contemporary guise the spirit of Taos. Viva Fiesta. Viva Maye’.

Artists represented.

Larry Bell                                       Luis Barela
Anita Rodriguez                            Angie Coleman
Augustine Mirabal                        Michael Vigil
Bianca Maestas                             Jodi Herrera
Dawning Pollen Shorty                 Ron Davis
Diane Reyna                                  Peter Chinni
Francisco Benitez                          Michael Hensley
Sharon Dry Flower Reyna            Gina Ortiz
Hank Saxe                                     Randy RoughFace
Huberto Maestas                           Soge Track
Jack Smith                                     Leonard Salazar
Jerry Track                                     John Suazo
Paul Dancebow                              Suzanne Wiggin
Gretchen Ewert

and Studio 107-B Core:
Frank Seckler, Izumi Yokoyama, Isaiah Trujillo,
and Maye Torres

S.O.S. Help a working girl!