In Review roundup: Three art shows to see

at Duende Gallery

GALISTEO — Entering Duende Gallery, I am transported to the frozen north. Photographs of beached whales and sustainably harvested whale blubber by Johanna Case-Hofmeister share space with Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich’s painted wood sculptures of gutted fish and gallery owner Robert King’s ceramic vessels, whose crackling white surfaces take on a distinctly glacial appearance in this context. Meanwhile, the air is filled with the sounds of Arctic winds, courtesy of Perri Lynch Howard’s field recordings. Surround-sound speakers throughout the gallery ensure that we hear the wind before we see her video of the cold grey ocean, which takes up the back wall of the gallery. The field recordings becoming an atmospheric soundscape of sorts for the entire show.

Although the photographer Case-Hofmeister is based in New Mexico, she frequently travels to arctic regions to document dead whales — both those hunted by Indigenous communities and those killed by human pollution and collisions with ships. “Harvested Beluga” (2018) is a gorgeous, if somewhat disturbing, close-up of a snow-white whale bleeding from a wound in its head. The gently rippling water looks viscous, almost like honey, as it commingles with the whale blood. And as the creature lifts its tired eye above the surface of the water, we can see the life force leaving its body.

Ivalu hangs strings of sparkly red beads from her wooden fish sculptures to connote blood. A Koyukon Dené and Iñupiaq artist from Alaska, Ivalu is inspired by the sustainable hunting and fishing practices of her ancestors, and like Case-Hofmeister, she finds beauty in the midst of death.

All four artists express a close connection with nature without sentimentalizing it. Life and death go hand in hand in this world of mud, bone, blood and ice.

The exhibition runs through Nov. 30 at Duende Gallery, 5637 NM-41, Galisteo. Gallery hours are noon to 6 p.m. Friday through Sunday. For information, visit duendegallery.net.

Judy Tuwaletstiwa

at Pie Projects

SANTA FE — It is often said that in the novels of W.G. Sebald, the Holocaust is rarely mentioned, but its trauma haunts every page. The same is true for the artist Judy Tuwaletstiwa, whose family escaped the Holocaust. Many of her sculptural wall pieces resemble burned books, broken tablets and shattered or disintegrating artifacts.

Using an unusual process she pioneered of kiln-firing silica and pigment together at low temperatures, Tuwaletstiwa creates gritty glass sheets that look like sandpaper, velvet or diamond dust, collaging them on canvas in minimalist-inspired compositions that often crack and fragment at their edges. Three small red, white and black square pieces from the current “Facti. Totum” series are especially evocative of destruction. These broken, illegible texts made from shattered glass seem to conflate Nazi book burnings with the destruction of Kristallnacht, since, after all, those events went hand in hand, the destruction of historical and cultural memory begetting acts of physical violence and terror.

But the two largest pieces in the show really surprised me. The first — a series of painted panels from Tuwaletstiwa’s 1989 “Chaco” series — uses a comforting palette of mauve, turquoise and earth tones, a big contrast from the starkness of red, white and black. It’s also a work of biomorphic surrealism, featuring what appear to be microscopic astronauts and toy cars navigating a universe of mitochondria and other sub-cellular structures that I vaguely remember from high school biology class.

The other surprise is “Garden of Dreams 1,” a large five-panel piece she just completed, which uses the same color palette but applies her kiln-fired glass technique. Instead of her usual fragile sheets, though, she scoops the colored silica to create high-relief forms that resemble soft, plush chenille yarn. There are figurative elements here, too, although not as many as in the 1989 work. But there are human figures, footprints and a spiral. It’s obviously the work of a more mature artist, but to return to the colors and ideas of the earlier work at this stage in her career is noteworthy. A return to innocence, perhaps?

“Facti. Totum” by Judy Tuwaletstiwa runs through Oct. 4 at Pie Projects, 924B Shoofly Street, Santa Fe. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For information, visit pieprojects.org.

‘Sentient Structures’

at Indian Pueblo Cultural Center

ALBUQUERQUE — On the surface, Skye Tafoya (Eastern Band Cherokee, Santa Clara Pueblo) and SABA (Diné, Jimez Pueblo) belong to very different worlds. Tafoya makes meticulous woven paper art, often hand-dying her paper with natural pigments, and she exhibits widely, including galleries in New York City, Santa Fe and San Francisco. The mononymic street artist SABA, by contrast, improvises with spray paint and is only beginning to have his work shown in museums. Additionally, Tafoya’s work is geometric, while SABA’s is figurative. But it was a stroke of genius for curator Michelle Lanteri to bring them together in “Sentient Structures,” since they both draw on Pueblo architectural forms and iconography, connecting a shared past to an imagined future.

In works like “Future Old School Spacehut” and “Pueblo Joe and Juliette,” SABA playfully imagines a sci-fi dreamscape where adobe-inspired spacecrafts rise from the New Mexican desert. In Tafoya’s “Mudbricks,” eye-popping moiré patterns emerge from a reddish sepia landscape pockmarked with craters — one of the most innovative works of abstraction I’ve seen in recent years. And even though Tafoya’s works-on-paper point to basketry and SABA’s to aerosol murals, they are united in a quest to make art that’s at once ancient and forward-looking.

In another room of the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, SABA’s art collective, Arrowsoul, has created a series of murals, titled “Indigenous Freeways.” The work blends the idea of ancestral trade routes marked by petroglyphs with a vision of pan-Indigenous borderless connectivity, and it expresses the scope of SABA’s artistic project more fully than the works in “Sentient Structures.” So, see them both during your visit.

“Sentient Structures” runs through June 28, 2026, at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, 2401 12th Street NW, Albuquerque. Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. For information, visit indianpueblo.org.

— Logan Royce Beitman