Sunday, September 16, 2018

Trip to Albuquerque

My parents went to their country club every weekend most of the year to play golf and it took 45 minutes to an hour.  Yet a trip from Santa Fe to Albuquerque which takes a similar time seems to be a far rarer occurrence for us.

Last weekend, however, we joined a group called “Conexiones” started by the Spanish Colonial Society in Santa Fe to make the journey.  Joseph Diaz, director and Jana Gotshalk, curator were with us.

Our first stop was actually to old friends of ours Judy and Ray Dewey.  They used to live in Santa Fe and Ray was a dealer here, one of the most honest dealers I ever met.  We became good friends and for that matter clients as well.  Even though he kept repeating that they had sold and given away so much in the last years it was still a collector’s dream to walk around the rooms ogling the collection.  Though we were told nothing was for sale… you never know! People in our group even made discoveries of objects they did not seem significant enough to show but were true treasures even if not worth great amounts.  Judy and Ray enjoy talking about the chase and the capture of works that they had been looking at in other collections for long periods of time.  This is, of course, a time honored theme for collectors.  Here is a sample of the many fields that the Deweys are interested in including their most recent in modern Mexican painting.


From there we went on to a well known restaurant in that area, El Pinto, which was a huge place with several patios and rooms.  The food was good southwest though like on many group trips the service was exceedingly slow meaning we spent more time for one course at the restaurant as we did at the collectors’ house!


Our final stop was at the gallery of Martha Egan in Corrales, also a suburb of Albuquerque.  Her card says she is with the Department of Cultural Affairs for the State of New Mexico as a “Research Associate” at the Museum of International Folk Art.  Marth was well known by many because she had had a gallery in Santa Fe called, Pachamama, named after a goddess revered by the indigenous people of the Andes.

Martha talked about collecting, a disease that most of her audience suffer from!   She had restored an 18th century building and put back the Vineyard that had originally been there, quite a beautiful spot.  There was a main room and a number of smaller ones; everyone enjoyed poking their heads inside to see how the objects fit into the realm of Spanish Colonial Art.


One of the pleasures of these trips is to meet new people and sometimes you even find you have interesting tangential connections with them.  I was chatting with one lady who was very well versed in Spanish Colonial art and her son worked on a news desk for Fox news… I told her I would forgive her that.  I was happy to hear he dealt with less inflammatory news than we sometimes here!

I don’t know about you, but I find that whenever I do something that I rarely do I am doomed to do it again in very short order.  So, 2 days later, sure enough, we were back to Albuquerque.  Medicine in this part of the world is not what it is in the big cities back East.  Sometimes finding the right doctor means driving a bit.  We had planned it out and after the doctor we were headed for the art museum to see an exhibition of New Mexico Jewelry.  We just forgot one thing.  The Museum is closed on Mondays! 

We went then to the Science Museum where they had a summer show on the scientific models of Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific instruments.  Only problem was that exhibit had closed the week before!  We contented ourselves with looking at the permanent dinosaur exhibition.  My wife who had to help our son when he was in second grade with his science project on dinosaurs took far more interest than I did though this 2-story model was impressive.


Our final stop on this journey was lunch where we were invited by Emily Blaugrund Fox.  Emily is the President of the Albuquerque Museum Foundation.  I was fascinated by the name Blaugrund because it is a German word and means blue ground.  What was the derivation of that name I wondered.  Maybe, a painter?  Who knows?  You learn something every day and I found out that all the Blaugrund’s are related and there are some all over the country … who knew.

The Albuquerque Museum is opening a major exhibition in early November of Treasures from the Hispanic Society in New York.  The latter is something of hidden treasure there, as well, since it is on West Broadway taking up the block between 155th and 156th Street.  I will leave the details for when the show comes to town but suffice it to say that while the Hispanic Society Museum is closed for major renovations they have created an incredible loan exhibition which showed at the Prado Museum in Madrid and will come to Albuquerque possibly being it only U.S. venue.  That should bring a few of our friends to town!

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