Three exhibitions to see this week

‘Herman Maril: Legacy of an American Modernist’ at LewAllen Galleries

“Doctor’s office art,” I thought to myself, upon entering Herman Maril’s show at LewAllen Galleries. The colors were muted, the subject matter generic and the human figures featureless and stiffly posed. There were faint echoes of Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse in Maril’s reductive approach to form, but none of those artists’ passion for life, it seemed. Cézanne may have reduced his bathers to architectonic forms, but those forms still pulsed with energy and motion, whereas Maril’s beachgoers in “Kendall Lane Beach/Cape Beach” stood like wooden posts on a jetty, as if someone with a megaphone had just commanded the entire shoreline to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. In “Sunset at Cape Cod,” his stick-figure people seemed to turn into crosses.

I walked through Maril’s show several times. Each time, new details emerged — colors reflected in a varnished wooden floor, a cat’s slender legs dangling off a radiator. As much as I wanted to dismiss the paintings as boring and derivative, I couldn’t. When I first passed by his painting of a dour dining room — a plain wooden table with a slender pitcher and empty plate, no fruit — I barely registered it. But when I turned around, I noticed that the tree in the window above the table was painted in a completely different style. Its wild, bushy top seemed to be blown sideways by hurricane-force winds — a stark contrast to the placid interior. I looked more closely. A large, feathery brushstroke, the color of the wall, intruded on top of the pitcher — how strange! It felt like a mistake — this overlapping of background onto a foreground object — but obviously it wasn’t; in a painting this spare, every detail is considered. So, why did Maril deliberately destroy the painterly illusion?

Perhaps he wanted to show that he was keeping up with formalist art theory — that he, too, could affirm the flatness of the picture plane as emphatically as any abstract expressionist. That’s part of it, I think, but I sensed something more. Maril was not just reflecting the art of his time but the culture of upper-middle-class suburban Baltimore, where he lived and worked, and Cape Cod, where he often summered. Maril was a Jewish artist in a social milieu defined by the Protestant virtues of aesthetic and moral restraint, or what the cult filmmaker John Waters (who grew up in suburban Baltimore four decades later) called “the tyranny of good taste.”

Could it be that Maril’s puncturing of painterly illusion had a subversive edge? By painting scenes that looked far more rational and orderly than actual reality, then undermining that order with aberrant brushstrokes and stylistic incongruities, was he calling attention to the artificial nature of middle-class social codes?

Maril probably didn’t think of good taste as tyrannical. In 1961, another artist named Eliot O’Hara made a short documentary film about Maril’s tastefully restrained style of painting, titled simply, “Restraint.” Maril was exceedingly restrained even in his use of paint — more dry-rubbed than marinated or basted. He used paint the way my grandparents used scraps of tinfoil; like Maril, they had lived through the Great Depression and valued frugality.

But Maril was not a killjoy. A charismatic painting professor, Maril cultivated friendships with fellow painters Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Milton Avery, among many others. His daughter, the writer Nadja Maril, described him as warm, confident, relaxed and gregarious, and he seems to have enjoyed a happy life.

Perhaps the restrained style came naturally to him, and he wanted viewers to enjoy the pleasant simplicity of his compositions. Whether intentionally or not, though, Maril’s rigidly geometric renderings of bland interiors and lonely resort towns reflected the cookie-cutter conformity of postwar American suburbia. By injecting those scenes with techniques borrowed from abstract expressionism, he disrupted the happy-go-lucky illusion, and it’s hard for me not to interpret those anti-illusionist gestures as anything other than a social critique, subtle but deliberate.

“Herman Maril: Legacy of an American Modernist” is on view at LewAllen Galleries, 1613 Paseo de Peralta in Santa Fe, through March 7. For more information, visit lewallengalleries.com.

‘The Armor We Wear’ at 516 Arts

In “The Armor We Wear,” clothes are not simply markers of social status or vehicles for personal expression, but armor against a hostile world.

“In an era of state-endorsed censorship and conformity, dress endures as metaphor: a woven act of protest, a celebration of pride, and a resilient form of becoming,” Olivia Amaya Ortiz writes in her curatorial statement.

Shaunté Glover’s “Court Order No. 1” consists of cut-up basketballs, stitched into a gridded pattern reminiscent of leather samurai armor. The orange, brown and white basketball fragments form an abstract image of a basketball court, while the double meaning of “court order” in the title alludes to structural racism inherent in the criminal justice system.

Angela Ellsworth is a direct descendant of a 19th century Mormon prophet and was raised in the Mormon church. Her “Seer Bonnets” resemble bonnets worn by pioneer-era Mormon women — not dissimilar to those described in Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” — but she punctures them all over with thousands of pearlized ball-head pins, creating an armor-like exterior but a very prickly interior. On one level, the inward-facing pins symbolize the oppression of women in conservative religious communities. But the bonnet can also be read as an armored helmet, with the pins acting as defense mechanisms, as they do in Lucas Samaras’ straight pin sculptures from the 1960s and ’70s.

Camryn Growing Thunder (Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux tribes) has retrofitted a pair of vintage roller skates with hand-beaded buckskin and other materials, fusing the freedom represented by 1970s roller disco culture with symbols of Indigenous pride. The photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) and fashion designer Peshawn Bread (Comanche, Kiowa and Cherokee) have also made work about roller skating and Indigeneity in recent years, perhaps pointing to a larger cultural trend. Growing Thunder’s beadwork creates an armored effect, similar to Ellsworth’s pins — a form of symbolic protection in the midst of self-expression.

Carrie Wood (Diné) fuses traditional Palestinian and Diné clothing in her “Solidarity Look” — a strong statement of cross-cultural resistance. Wood, who was featured in the inaugural SWAIA Native Fashion Week in 2024, is primarily a fashion designer, but her “Solidarity Look,” as well as a dress made of corn husks, function well as conceptual sculptures.

Alejandro Macías’ “A Land that Remembers (Jennifer S.)” consists of a painted portrait with an embedded video depicting life in the border town of Douglas, Arizona. In addition to nostalgic images of families sharing carne asada, the video shows the border wall, a cemetery and rows of Purple Heart medals in a military museum — details that reflect the conflicted feelings of patriotic pride and betrayal felt by many Mexican Americans in the area. Amaya Ortiz said she was born in southern Arizona and has familial connections to Douglas, so she traveled there with the artist while he worked on the project. The curator’s willingness to go the extra mile — 390 miles, to be precise — shows just how committed she is to ensuring that the stories artists tell are authentic.

Lizz Denneau’s room-sized installation of nontraditional altars, mannequins and sheets of toile fabric took a week to install. The toile pattern depicts white, Colonial-era figures on romanticized plantations. The fabric is partly wallpapered to the gallery walls but also juts out to form a regal canopy, like those that topped beds in 17th and 18th century European castles. The toile is ripped and restitched in places, and Denneau has scrawled words over top of it in a fast, loose, cursive script, sometimes listing the dates and names of historical places where Black people were massacred — such as Seneca Village, New York — and elsewhere incorporating evocative snippets of narrative, such as the phrase, “She calls to the ancestors.” Bottles of Florida Water — a citrusy fragrance used as a perfume, laundry additive and element in hoodoo protection spells since the days of slavery — are placed at the base of the altar-like assemblages, at least one of which takes the shape of a female reproductive system. An extraordinarily complex installation that would take days to fully parse, Denneau’s work shows how Colonial toile — a Eurocentric fabric glamorizing slavery — can be upcycled into anti-racist art.

The exhibition is rounded out with extraordinarily strong works by Eric J. Garcia, Anthony Hurd, Papay Solomon, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya and Vicente Telles. Some of the artists made work specifically for the show, bringing thought-provoking interpretations to the theme of clothing as armor.

“The Armor We Wear” meets the current political mood without lapsing into didacticism. Even Wood’s “Solidarity Look” — the closest thing to an overt political statement in the show — focuses on cross-cultural histories and embodied experiences. All of the works are complex and nuanced, and they just might make you see your own clothing choices in a different light.

“The Armor We Wear” is on view at 516 Arts, 516 Central Ave. SW, through April 25. For more information, visit 516arts.org.

‘Virtuosos’ at Obscura Gallery

A two-person exhibition of black-and-white photographs by Ansel Adams and his student, Paul Caponigro, “Virtuosos” not only highlights the virtuosity of both artists but also their distinctly different approaches to landscape photography.

Adams is known for his sweeping vistas of the American West, marked by the sublime grandeur of rugged landforms. His images prompted lawmakers to expand the National Parks program to preserve the so-called “wilderness” areas he depicted, which made Adams a hero to many conservationists, then and now. The lands he depicted were not uninhabited wildernesses, however, but the sacred ancestral homelands of Indigenous communities. Adams was born in 1902, 12 years after the U.S. Census Bureau declared the American frontier to be “settled.” It was not entirely settled, though. Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona had not yet been incorporated into the Union, and some of the Southwestern landscapes he photographed were still in Indigenous hands.

The artist Albert Bierstadt’s monumental paintings of Western landscapes — some over 10 feet wide — served to encourage the colonization of the West in the 19th century. Bierstadt accompanied Col. Frederick W. Lander’s 1859 Honey Road Survey Party, and the paintings he made on that trip were used as high-end advertisements for continued Western settlement. Adams was born the year Bierstadt died and arguably continued his mission.

Paul Caponigro studied with Adams, and you can see the teacher’s influence in Caponigro’s mastery of tonal range, including the richness and detail of his shadows. But their differences are much more interesting to me than their similarities.

Adams always aimed for crispness — a rebellion against the soft-focus pictorialist photographers who came before him, whom he derided as “fuzzy-wuzzies” — whereas Caponigro brought some of that fuzzy-wuzziness back into photography, including — yes — the use of blur. His most famous image, “Running White Deer, County Wicklow, Ireland” from 1967, depicts a herd of white deer, wispy as ghosts, rushing through a dark forest. You can see that photograph in “Virtuosos.” It’s as unnerving as it is beautiful. Whereas Adams’ landscapes are timeless and majestic, Caponigro’s are restless and haunted.

Caponigro once told a Smithsonian Institution interviewer, “I knew that the forces of nature were a language… a way of life (that) could inform you.” He referred to nature as his teacher. Adams had a great reverence for nature, of course, but he focused on the dramatic, awe-inspiring vistas, much as 19th century landscape painters like Bierstadt had done. Caponigro found mystery in the details.

At Obscura Gallery, you can see photographs Adams took of waterfalls that show the dramatic crashing of water on rocks, but there’s also a photograph by Caponigro, “Reflecting Stream, Redding, CT,” depicting a short step fall or sloping cascade, which he shot from the rear so the crashing and splashing are not seen. The displacement of water being pulled over the edge causes an otherwise placid image of reflected trees to bend and distort, but only slightly. Adams’ waterfalls are beautiful but banal, showing us exactly the drama we expect from waterfalls. Caponigro’s photograph, by contrast, does not even read as a waterfall at first. He places us in the water at the moment before the fall, when reflected images begin to bend, so that we experience the waterfall, not as a moment of high drama, but as a subtle and mysterious force pulling us downstream — and into the center of his image.

Adams’ majestic images are beloved by many, but I prefer Caponigro’s humbler approach. Closely attuned to the rhythms of nature, his photographs don’t just show us what clouds, rocks, forests and waterfalls look like visually; they give us a vivid sense of texture and touch. Echoes of the unseen penetrate his images — gravitational forces, watchful animals, whispering breezes. Adams’ landscapes, grand and imposing though they are, can be understood in an instant. And if we can understand something, we can control it, according to the logic of the colonialist gaze. But perhaps there are things about a dark forest or a prehistoric rock wall that we will never understand. Caponigro honors those mysteries.

“Virtuosos” is on view at Obscura Gallery, 225 Delgado St., Santa Fe, through Feb. 20. For more information, visit obscuragallery.net.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at @loganroycebeitmen.