New Mexico Literary Arts

Each month, a different artist will present a workshop in such areas as poetry, sugar skull-making, self-portrait, and micaceous pottery at the Marco Trujillo Hands Across Cultures Teen Center in Española.

 

Featured Artists Include:

Akeem Ayanniyi, Santa Fe resident and ninth-generation traditional drummer from Oshogbo, Nigeria. He is bilingual and has divided his time between Nigeria and the US for the past decade. He is a master drummer, well-known to Santa Fe, and has performed around the US and Canada. As a master drummer, he is intimately connected with West African dance. 

Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Agalu, the Yoruba Cultural Troupe of Nigeria is an ensemble of remarkable dancers and drummers from Oshogbo, Nigeria. They preserve traditional Yoruba stories, rituals and mythology through exciting masquerades. Agalu offers school or community workshops, classes, demonstrations, and performances on drums, dance, and African Music and Culture.  

Julie Bennett has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Alfred University and Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Ohio State University. Bennet has lived in New Mexico since 1980. Her pursuits as a manic mono-printer, industrial welder, cabinetmaker and carpenter, props-maker and scenic decorator at the Santa Fe Opera, elementary and college art educator, exhibit designer, and most recently, interior and residential designer, have all informed her love of creative collaboration. Bennett is a married mother of two, and active participant in community, synagogue, and ecosystem. 

Geraldine Fiskus Since graduating from The Cooper Union in 1965, Geraldine Fiskus has moved toward an uninhibited expressionism that has gained momentum as she worked in the mediums of oil painting, wood & lino-cut printmaking, pastel painting, and back to oil painting.

Fiskus has had numerous regional exhibitions, exhibited nationally; and internationally in Israel, China, Mexico and England. Her work has been published in 2 volumes: Women Artists Of The American West, by Susan Ressler, Mc Farland, 2003, and Fixing The World: Jewish American Painters In The 20th Century, by Ori Z. Soltes, University Press of New England, 2003. In Santa Fe, She had a solo exhibit at Red Dot Fine Art in 2005 and her work is included in Group Shows at Gold Leaf Fine Art. Her work has been shown at Capitol Arts Network in Bethesda; the District of Columbia Art Center, and the upcoming international art installation, Women of the Book in Jerusalem, 2010. 

Susan Jay studied fine arts at UCLA and art history at UC Berkeley and the Sorbonne in Paris, France. She has exhibited her own work in the Bay Area, New York, Denver, and Santa Fe.  Jay completed the professional training program with the Expressive Arts Training Institute and has been teaching Expressive Arts in Santa Fe since 1996, as a visiting artist in the SF Public Schools, the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Georgia O’Keefe Art & Leadership Program, Artworks, Hands On Community Art, the SF Indian School Evening Program, Boys & Girls Club, International Folk Art Museum, etc. 

 

Joan Logghe is a poet in La Puebla, New Mexico where she and husband, Michael, raised three children and built three houses. Awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry Grants, A Mabel Dodge Luhan Internship, and a Barbara Deming/Money for Women grant. Her books include Twenty Years in Bed with the Same Man (La Alameda, a finalist for Western States Book Award), Blessed Resistance (Mariposa Printing and Publishing), Sofia (La Alameda) and Rice (Tres Chicas Books). The Singing Bowl is forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press.

Logghe has taught poetry from kindergarten at Santa Clara Pueblo, in Ghost Ranch, Vancouver, and Bratislava. She has also instructed for Artworks in Santa Fe, CultureNet’s Poets in the Schools, University of New Mexico-Los Alamos, and Santa Fe Community College.

She founded Write Action: Writing from the Heart of AIDS that offered free writing workshops for 13 years. She founded Artist of the Month, free art workshops, to honor and support local artists and offer learning opportunities in traditional and non-traditional arts.

Logghe has been part of the Chimayo Baby quilters who had two small shows at Museum of International Folk Arts. 

Beatrice Maestas Sandoval, weaver, Colcha embroiderer, and instructor, values her craft for the way it honors New Mexico’s Hispanic heritage and uses the many resources available here. She has worked at El Rancho de Las Golondrinas as curator of textiles and volunteer coordinator. She is a regular participant in Spanish Market and has taught basic weaving and Colcha embroidery at Española Valley Fiber Arts Center. 

She respects the process that is undertaken to produce a work of art. Her introduction to Spanish Textiles taught her the intricate process that is undertaken in its creation. Both textile making and Colcha embroidery are Spanish Colonial art forms that use material that is hand-woven from the spun wool of churro sheep. Colcha employs natural earthen-dyed yarns that are used to embellish Sabanilla, hand-woven cloth, with vibrant embroidery. The textiles are also woven from the yarn.

Together with her friend George, they have been making furniture for about ten years in tin and woodwork. They have made furniture for the churches in San Miguel and Villanueva. They are making furniture for the Sangre de Cristo Church in upper Anton Chico. 

Sabra Moore is a Texas-born artist living in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Her work is based on the reinterpretation of family, social, & natural history through artists’ books, sewn & painted, constructed sculptures, wall works, and installations. She has exhibited extensively in New York City, Canada, Brazil, and New Mexico. She is committed to the idea of placing artwork within a social context and has worked with feminist/political art groups.

She spent many years in New York City and was a long-time member of the Heresies Collective, a feminist journal on art and politics. She was the former President of NYC/Women’s Caucus for Art and worked with the art collective RepoHistory. She has organized several large-scale women’s collaborative exhibits, including Reconstruction Project, based on a Mayan codex and Connections Project/ Conexus, a collaboration of women artists in Brazil and the United States. The artists’ books created for those exhibits were included in the Museum of Modern Art exhibit, Committed to Print. Her artists’ books are in many museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (NYC). She has published a book on rock art, with l0l drawings of petroglyphs and pictographs, entitled Petroglyphs: Ancient Language/ Sacred Art. Over the past decade, Moore has worked with farmers at the Española Farmers Market and has created several art-related projects with them, including the Farm Show and a series of artists’ books, A Farming Chapbook. She held a solo exhibition at the Harwood Museum in Taos in 2007 entitled Out of the Woods. She has almost completed her book, On the Move: A Memoir from the Women’s Art Movement/ NYC, 1970-1990 and did a reading last fall at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. Moore has hand-built her straw bale studio in Abiquiu with fellow artist Roger Mignon, and has learned how to raise a garden in a dry place. 

Mindy Newby has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Oklahoma and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Film from the University of Colorado. Newby has painted most of her life, and took several painting classes in college and minored in art history. She has made numerous documentary and experimental films.

Newby resides in Vallecitos in an old adobe home that she is renovating. In Vallecitos, she enrolled in furniture-making and retablo classes at Northern New Mexico University. She made a small chair in the furniture class and painted it in the retablo class. The chair earned Best Retablo and Best of Show in the NNMC Spring 2009 end-of-semester art show.

Newby has a long and varied background. She built, owned, and operated a several businesses, worked on the political campaign of Colorado Governor Dick Lamm, and later on his staff. She has also worked as a legal assistant. In New Mexico, she has worked as a tutor at the Pojoaque Middle School and Carlos Vigil Middle School., and works part-time at Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs.

 

  

New Mexico Literary Arts inspires and develops the imaginative use of language and creates opportunities for the integration of the literary arts with other art forms throughout New Mexico.