The Railroad to Trinity: Selections from the Permanent Collection

Fine Arts Museum, Museum of New Mexico

Left: Plaza, Looking North, Santa Fe, February, 1997; Right: Detail of Front Facade, Fine Arts Museum, Santa Fe, 1997, photos by John Hazeltine

Santa Fe, NM

505-476-5072

http://www.museumofnewmexico.org

The Railroad to Trinity: Selections from the Permanent Collection

"The Railroad to Trinity: Selections from the Permanent Collection," curated by Joseph Traugott, opens at the Museum of Fine Arts on Friday, July 14, 2000. The exhibition presents a brief history of New Mexico art from the 1880s to the end of World War II with works from the museum's permanent collection. "The Railroad to Trinity" includes paintings, photographs, drawings, prints, and popular images.

The exhibit begins with documentary photographs and paintings from the 1880s that revealed New Mexico's culture to the outside world. The work then moves onto popular postcard images, the arrival of academic painters from Taos, the Modernist painters who worked in Santa Fe, including Georgia O'Keeffe, and the development of the Transcendental Painting Group.

Themes prevailing include the depiction of Native American life and religions, the marketing of New Mexico through tourism, the search for spiritual values, the borrowing of ideas between cultures and the translation of ethnic New Mexico into mainstream popular culture.

"'The Railroad to Trinity' presents a short chronological record of New Mexico art from the arrival of railroad tourism to the detonation of the atomic bomb at the Trinity Site in 1945," says curator of contemporary art Joseph Traugott. "It has been fascinating to document the changing versions of modernity in New Mexico during a time of rapid cultural and artistic transformation."

The exhibition notes the artistic relationship between New Mexico painter Mary Regensburg Feist and her painting instructor John Sloan. Regensburg Feist studied with Sloan in New York City and followed her teacher to Santa Fe during the summer of 1936. Two paintings which are recent gifts by the artist- an expressionist landscape and a self-portrait in a fiesta dress both done in 1936 -- will be shown with a collection of prints by Sloan.

The exhibition opens with a free public reception hosted by the Women's Board of the Museum of Fine Arts from 5:30 to 7:30 pm on Friday, July 14, 2000. Regensburg Feist will attend the opening reception.

Read more in Resource Library Magazine about the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe.

Please click on thumbnail images bordered by a red line to see enlargements.

For further biographical information on selected artists cited above please see America's Distinguished Artists, a national registry of historic artists.

This page was originally published in Resource Library Magazine. Please see Resource Library's Overview section for more information. rev. 3/2/11

Search Resource Library for thousands of articles and essays on American art.