The New Mexico Museum of Art Highlights a Solo Show of Works by James Drake

Written by Clint Westinghouse Saturday, 12 November 2011 02:05

Santa Fe, NM.- The New Mexico Museum of Art is pleased to present "James Drake: Salon of a Thousand Souls" on view through April 22nd 2012. Throughout his career, James Drake has examined the theme of humanity in all of its triumphs, failures, and follies—including war; love and desire; greed, gluttony, and vanity; and the realities of life along the U.S.-Mexico border. The New Mexico Museum of Art exhibition James Drake: Salon of a Thousand Souls includes 19 sculptures and works on paper by the Santa Fe-based artist spanning nearly 25 years. The contrast of baroque embellishment and hard-edge geometry characterizes Drake’s work as a whole in the exhibition, whose title suggests a meeting place where ideas and images are gathered for discussion. Salon of a Thousand Souls highlights the recurrent use of guns, mirrors, and vehicles of industry to explore modernity’s impact on human civilization. It also includes examples of Drake’s use of appropriation and allegory as strategies to underscore the cyclical nature of history.

Among the works to be shown are a never-before-exhibited 21-foot red pastel drawing and a wall drawing executed by the artist in the museum specifically for this exhibition. James Drake has dedicated much of his creative life to a critique of social, political and economic issues faced by American society. In doing so, he has positioned art as a catalyst for social change. This is true for much of the most powerful art through the ages: Goya’s condemnation of war in the 1810s, Daumier’s lambast of political folly in the mid-1800s, Picasso’s lamentation of the destruction of the Spanish Civil War in 1937. “Drake’s work has a sense of gravitas in terms of subject matter; it could be described as epic in its scope,” says exhibition curator Laura Addison. “Salon of a Thousand Souls analyzes how art can be a vehicle to address inequities that remain, unfortunately, timeless. Through his masterful handling of steel, charcoal, pastel, and collage, he brings beauty to rawness and gives voice to the marginalized.” Drake’s earliest works in the exhibition are of steel and charcoal, and were a response to the tensions along the U.S.-Mexico border, which have only intensified in recent years. Living in El Paso at the time, Drake interpreted the border issues as just one chapter of the larger human story. He continues to view the world through this same lens, universalizing war, industry, and progress as narratives of the human condition that repeat endlessly. Since moving to Santa Fe, Drake’s work has been primarily large-scale charcoal drawings, as well as cut-paper works and red-pastel drawings. The source material for his imagery is not only particular news reports, but also mythology and the personal struggles and stories of family, friends and strangers. Salon of a Thousand Souls brings together all of these narratives and draws a picture of James Drake as a humanist telling cautionary tales.


During his 35-year career, James Drake has worked with equal fluency in video, photography, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. He has had over 60 one-person shows and has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2000 Whitney Biennial and the 2007 Venice Biennale. Drake is the recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and a Nancy Graves Award for Visual Arts. His most recent accolade is a Texas Medal of Arts (2011). His work is in more than 30 museum collections, including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Blanton Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Phoenix Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the New Mexico Museum of Art. Born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1946, Drake lived for many years in El Paso, Texas, and presently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The New Mexico Museum of Art building dates only to 1917, but its architects looked to the past, and based the design on the 300 year-old mission churches at Acoma and other pueblos. It shares the graceful simplicity of pueblo architecture and the sense of being created from the earth. In turn, the building established the Pueblo Spanish Revival style of architecture, for which Santa Fe is known. It was built to become the art gallery of the Museum of New Mexico, which had been founded in 1909 by archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett. He had begun holding art shows in the historic Palace of the Governors, then realized that an art gallery would be needed to effectively promote art throughout the region. The architects, Rapp and Rapp, had built the wildly successful New Mexico pavilion for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. They enlarged and modified that design and proposed it for the new art gallery. The Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico opened in 1917, and many of the works that were exhibited at the opening remain in the collection today. The early Art Gallery’s “open door” policy encouraged artists working in New Mexico to exhibit their work, since Santa Fe’s commercial gallery network was years away. That welcome, mixed with the excitement about New Mexico that was generated by the tourism industry, enticed artists with formal training from other parts of the country. The resulting blending and cross-influences of Native American, Hispanic, and European-based cultures created a unique body of work that is the basis of the New Mexico Museum of Art collection. The museum changed its name over the years, as it grew and redefined its mission. The current name, The New Mexico Museum of Art, was adopted in 2007 to reflect the breadth of New Mexico art.  Its previous name, "The Museum of Fine Arts" had been adopted in 1962. The core of the 20,000-item collection is artwork inspired by the Southwest, particularly New Mexico, made by artists who have worked in, lived in, or been inspired by the region. Famous New Mexico artists represented in the museum include Georgia O'Keeffe, Elliot Porter, Gustave Baumann, Fritz Scholder, Maria Martinez, Bruce Naumann and Luis Jimenez. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.nmartmuseum.org

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