Flight of the navigator

Santa Fe-based installation artist and curator Jerry Wellman likes to put art in unusual places. In 2025, his work appeared in a shop window in Santa Fe, a shed in Taos and a barber shop in Albuquerque.

“When you’re a kid, you love art. Every kid loves art. But then something happens, and it becomes something untouchable and elevated,” Wellman said. “So, I wanted to reintroduce that feeling of wonder and unexpected experience.”

On Friday, Jan. 16, Wellman’s latest exhibition, “Navigators: Edges of Becomings,” will open in a somewhat more conventional venue — Santa Fe’s El Zaguán, a former 19th century merchant’s home, which now houses a contemporary art gallery. Wellman considers the upcoming show and the previous site-specific installations to be part of a single art “tour,” which he plans to extend to 40 different venues, both conventional and unconventional.

Although his work often addresses heady concepts from mysticism to quantum physics, Wellman uses everyday objects and non-art locations to engage people who don’t frequent galleries and museums.

“I think my work has a vernacular look to it, but if you’re willing or interested enough, it could take you a lot further,” Wellman said. “And if you’re not (interested in going that deep), I think you will enjoy seeing it anyway.”

He calls this body of work “Navigators,” because he believes ordinary objects can serve as guides for people on their life journeys. Influenced by the “object-oriented ontology” of thinkers like Bruno Latour and Graham Harman, Wellman uses art to learn from the world of nonhuman objects.

“I started this whole project thinking about how you can gather advice or direction from anywhere,” Wellman said. “Hence, navigators are everywhere.”

Wellman’s own creative journey began with a desire to escape from what he called a “rural and provincial” life in northern Wisconsin.

“The notion of hanging out and doing something weird was very appealing,” he said.

So, at the age of 16, he joined a carnival. Later, he moved to San Francisco “at the tail end of the hippie movement,” where he studied speech and film at the San Francisco Art Institute, and he began making art.

“I loved meeting all these strange people, learning about all these different philosophies and wisdoms, and (enjoying) all the freedom,” Wellman said. “Super creative times back then.”

His journey eventually took him to New Mexico, and, in 2010, Wellman and fellow artist Matthew Chase-Daniel created a not-for-profit art gallery on wheels, which they dubbed Axle Contemporary.

“I don’t know how we got enthused or crazy enough to actually pull the trigger and do it, but we found an old bread delivery truck up in Colorado Springs,” Wellman said. “Fortunately, Matthew is very handy, so he was able to fix it up, and we took it out and showed it at the (Santa Fe) Railyard.”

A few weeks later, a reporter from The New York Times stumbled across their mobile art gallery and wrote about it.

“Some New York hot-shot guy wrote an article about Axle Contemporary,” Wellman said, “and — boom — we said, ‘Oh, this is actually something.’”

The impetus behind the project, and much of Wellman’s art, was a desire to take art out of museums and galleries and introduce it into people’s everyday lives.

In 2025, Axle Contemporary was featured in the SITE Santa Fe International, curated by Cecilia Alemani. In collaboration with the Diné/Chicana multimedia artist, Autumn Chacon, Axle housed a community radio station, which they parked at various locations throughout the city, allowing anyone who wanted to, the opportunity to converse live on air.

Reflecting on his life in art, Wellman said one guiding principle has been authenticity.

“I like that word, ‘authenticity.’ I think that’s a very important word. It’s difficult to find your authenticity,” Wellman said. “Meaning, purpose, authenticity – all these are really good words for us to dance with.”