Abstracting Nature' at the Albuquerque Museum a must-see despite flaws

Editor's note: The Journal would like to clarify that Joan Weissman works with paid Indigenous artists to produce her designs.

The exhibition “Abstracting Nature” at the Albuquerque Museum includes nine women artists and one male artist. Six of the 10 are absolutely amazing.

It’s refreshing to see an almost all-woman show that doesn’t essentialize gender or even put gender front and center. A mark of progress, for sure. Unfortunately, the curatorial framework has other flaws.

For one, the idea of artists “abstracting nature” in New Mexico is a tiresome cliche. Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Dasburg, Agnes Pelton and many others were “abstracting nature” almost a hundred years ago. Indigenous artists were doing it long before that.

It’s also odd to step into a show called “Abstracting Nature” and be confronted by Karen Yank’s welded steel sculptures, which are about as “natural” as a fleet of Cybertrucks. I’ve heard Yank say in interviews that the circles in her pieces reference the shape of the Earth. But is that all her art has to say about nature? That the Earth is round? Aesthetically, she’s still stuck in the 1960s — the era of boxy Tony Smith sculptures and B-movies about robots — which is where Cybertrucks belong, too, as far as I’m concerned.

Next to her hangs Agnes Martin — an even weirder choice, since Martin stated multiple times in her lifetime that her works were not abstracted from nature.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s always great seeing Martin’s work in the flesh. After staring at “Untitled #6” for only 15 seconds, the six fat stripes of pink, yellow and blue started quivering, then disappeared and became a single, glowing white square. Try it; it works! Martin’s countless imitators rarely obtain such reality-warping effects, which is why she’s the master.

But if we continue past Yank and Martin and turn the corner, this is where the exhibition gets really interesting: Judy Tuwaletstiwa and Marietta Patricia Leis, two phenomenal artists who use abstraction to think about the tension between what’s natural and what’s not.

Tuwaletstiwa has several great works in the show, but her most affecting is “Song 1,” which resembles a bombed-out desert viewed from above. Beige fabric is scarred with thousands of burn marks and embedded with blackened, shriveled clay “frogs.” A text panel explains that the artist was thinking about the desert frogs that perished in the Trinity blast. According to the nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s brother, thousands of frogs were singing and mating just hours before the explosion.

Leis is a great artist, too. She makes playful abstractions of natural phenomena using the language of minimal painting, although not always the medium of painting. Her gemlike “Air” series, which I initially thought were paintings, are in fact 18 metal-printed photographs. They come in a veritable crayon box of colors — red, purple, yellow and even a wispy green one, evidently taken during the aurora. Like the conceptual colorist Byron Kim, Leis gives us close-up fragments of larger pictures — in her case, the sky. And, although a text panel incorrectly identifies her as a “monochrome” painter, most of these works, whether photographed or painted, contain two or more colors. What makes them so extraordinary is that the colors are all technically “natural,” but they don’t seem so at all.

Leis’ only true monochrome works in the show are her shiny black rubber “Inferno” sculptures, which look like chunks of obsidian glass or black tourmaline crystals, at least from afar. Such materials protect against negative energies, according to crystal healers, although Leis’ artificial ones are more in line with the synthetic aesthetic of Lynda Benglis or Ugo Rondinone. I am thoroughly intrigued by the interplay between the simulated and the real in Leis’ work.

The back wall is devoted to monumental works on paper by Yoshiko Shimano, who stamps thousands upon thousands of prints on top of each other to create shadowy, swirling, multicolored dust clouds. Technically, these are not abstractions of nature. They’re abstractions of abstractions of nature, since she begins with plum blossom motifs appropriated from the work of Edo-era artist Ogata Korin. As a Japanese-born artist who lives in New Mexico, the process of turning plum blossom prints into dust storms feels autobiographical. It shows how radically a new landscape can alter a person’s sense of self.

On the final perimeter wall, which is also the shortest, are two well-known artists of Indigenous heritage, Lydia Madrid and Emmi Whitehorse. It’s never a good look to lump your two Indigenous artists together on the gallery’s worst wall, but at least they were included.

In Madrid’s works on paper, Wassily Kandinsky-like expressive bursts of color waft in and out of the faint graphite outlines of petroglyphs, agave plants and antlers. Like spirits who freely transgress the bounds of bodies, rocks and sky, her colors drift and float, unencumbered by the laws of physics. There’s a spareness to her work but also an incredible freedom, which I always find moving. Color is permeable in Whitehorse’s works, as well, so perhaps there’s a logic in pairing them with Madrid’s. I still think it does them both a disservice.

Moving into the middle of the gallery, we encounter Joan Weissman, a commercial rug and terrazzo flooring designer who works with Indigenous weavers from around the world to execute her rug designs. A text panel states that Weissman worked with the same family of Tibetan weavers in Nepal for over 20 years, but their names are not mentioned. Their identities remain as invisible as their labor. Of course, the conceptual rug artist Faig Ahmed, whose work I love, doesn’t list his weavers by name, either. But Weissman is a commercial designer, not a conceptual artist. And while I’m sure my mom’s retirement community friends in Florida would find Weissman’s silvery rug with its big floppy ginkgo leaves appealing as home decor, I’m not convinced it merits more floor space than literally any other work in the exhibition.

Now, before you accuse me of being a fiber art hater, let me go ahead and name two artists who would have been better: Emily Trujillo and Eric-Paul Riege. Trujillo is an eighth-generation Chimayó weaver who makes experimental abstractions. Riege is a Diné artist who makes highly original fiber art installations and performance art pieces. Both have deep roots in New Mexican weaving traditions, and both do their own weaving. Also, unlike Weissman, they’re interesting.

To the left of Weissman is a painting from Richard Diebenkorn’s “Albuquerque” series. It’s nowhere near as good as the “Ocean Park” paintings that came later, but it’s a step in that direction.

Finally, to the right, is an outstanding installation by Joanna Keane Lopez that combines black-and-white images of New Mexico with squares of hand-daubed adobe. The work references the artist’s now-derelict ancestral home in Lópezville. The images, which have been cut into circle, square and lozenge shapes, look like black marble. Similar shapes, made of adobe, are installed on the floor. But what happens when you stand a lozenge on the floor? It becomes a tombstone. Others become upside-down tombstones, balanced precariously. So, there’s a deadpan humor in Lopez’s shapes and in her transposition of materials, not unlike the subtle humor of Richard Artschwager’s sculptures. Her title, “Ghost Spell,” suggests that she’s trying to exorcise the ghosts of her family’s past, yet her clever use of materials shows she’s got one foot in the future, too.

I don’t think I learned much about nature from this exhibition, but I loved seeing how the different artists approached abstraction, sometimes through an autobiographical or historical filter. A more rigorous curatorial framework could have helped tease out connections between the works, but sensitive and observant visitors will discover their own connections regardless. There are true masterpieces in this show by Martin, Tuwaletstiwa, Leis, Shimano, Madrid and Lopez, which is reason enough to add “Abstracting Nature” to your must-see list. And despite its flaws, I know this is a show I’ll be mulling over in my head for quite some time.

Abstracting Nature' at the Albuquerque Museum a must-see despite flaws

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.