one cool thing is i remember when i was young, my dad, who is an art collector, took me to meet Agnes Martin, in galisteo. that is where Agnes lived and where my parents home is in New Mexico. i was young, can't remember how old, maybe 12. i knew her work it is very minimal. anyways, she was quiet and old and sat on the portal and i asked her how she drew her lines so straight. she said, "with a ruler." alright, good enough for me. i'm greatful for my dad for taking me there to meet her. he knew that was an opportunity for me and something i'd remember for ever. that Galisteo community is tight. lots of stories have come out of it. For one, my dad's favorite artist is Fritz Scholder, and Agnes was one Fritz's ex wife's portal, there in Galisteo. Also, my parents good friend, artist Partick Mehaffy, was working as a young artist out in Galisteo and was assisting Agnes for a while. she'd call on him to help clear out her studio from time to time and he's make trash runs of things she wanted out of her studio. He noticed, on one run, there were tablets of drawings. he saved them and i think gave them back to her and said she should keep them, that she might want them someday. also he set aside some of her old paint brushes...he'd kept them all these years, and one day, while we were visiting Patrick and Erica's home, he very subtly handed me one of those brushes. i cried. it was such a kind, thoughtful, and heartfelt gesture that you'd have to know Patrick, to know how much it was appreciated, coming from him. i also just thought, this is so special, but there's no need to make a big deal out of it. it's what it is. it's a material thing. but it is special and for whatever reason i feel like sharing it now.
Agnes Martin at Tate Modern in London
03.02.2011
Santa Fe Reporter
A Creative Life
Santa Fe loses Linda Durham Contemporary Art–but not Linda Durham
By Zane Fischer and Rani Molla
Stumbling into an exhibition at Linda Durham’s former gallery space on Canyon Road sealed my love of Santa Fe. Artist Erika Wanenmacher had painstakingly created a kind of entomologist’s fantasy—hand-carved giant insects were pinned to the wall with equally oversized pins. Amid these sci-fi specimens, an elegant, confident woman—Linda Durham—was calmly fielding the confused reactions of tourists who wandered in expecting to find landscapes and blankets. It was my first step through the door to a different Santa Fe, a community beneath the veneer and a diverse assortment of serious artists.
Durham and her gallery have been a force in Santa Fe’s creative community since she first happened on her career and developed a habit of representing New Mexico and its artists locally and internationally. Now, after 33 years in business, Durham will close her gallery on March 11.That Durham’s enterprise has survived for so long, but is coming to an end now, is a testament both to her talent and commitment, as well as the reach of the nation’s shifting economic sands. “I never made a great deal of money, but I made enough to keep the gallery going and growing,” Durham says. “I invested all the profits into advertising, art fairs, PR, design—because the gallery was my passion.”
Durham suggests, in a comparison to the food movement Slow Food, that she is interested in Slow Art. But that’s not where the art trends are moving at the moment. “I have no interest in changing just to capture a temporarily fickle art economy,” Durham says. The exhibitions she has arranged over the past year or two are a source of pride to Durham, even if they failed to be a source of income. And that’s not something she wishes were different. “I would do them all over again. I would make the same careful mistakes—with pride.”—Zane Fischer
Artist Erika Wanenmacher pinned her specimens to the wall of Linda Durham’s Canyon Road Gallery in 1993.SFR: We’re here to talk about you closing your landmark gallery and moving on to other endeavors. It’s a big moment but, before we talk about that, how did you get here? Talk about arriving in Santa Fe.
LD: I moved to Santa Fe in 1966. I was, at that time, married to my second husband, and I left a glamorous New York life to move to New Mexico. We were the first wave of the hippie movement and we bought land near Cerrillos on Highway 14, but back when it was called Highway 10. We built our own house; we lived completely off the grid before the term was popular. I went from glamour to chopping wood and carrying water. I wasn’t really involved in the visual arts at that time—my background was more theatrical.Is that what you were doing in New York?
I was doing theater, but I’m well-known in this little community for having been one of the original New York Playboy bunnies.So you were a Playboy bunny? In the mansion in LA?
No, there was no mansion in LA. I’m talking 1962. There was a mansion in Chicago, but I was in New York and I only saw Hugh Hefner twice.How did you get the gig?
I moved to New York when I was 19 and I was naive, believe it or not—I still am—and I wanted a job in theater. It was during the newspaper strike, so there were no want ads. I went to an employment agency and said, ‘Yes, I’d like to get a job as an actor.’ They said, ‘Well, we don’t have any of those jobs but what about a bunny?’ I said, ‘What’s a bunny?’ You had to show up for the interview in a bathing suit or a leotard. Not too long before that I was in the Miss Camden County Pageant, so I had a black leotard and it had three white buttons on the front and I got that job. I also worked as a cigarette girl and a hat-check girl in some seedy and not-so-seedy nightclubs.
In 1966, Durham swapped a life as a Playboy bunny in New York for living off the grid in New Mexico.
How did you end up opening a gallery in Santa Fe?
I didn’t open the gallery until the late ’70s. By then, we were living in Santa Fe and I would drive on the Paseo and pass the Fenn Gallery and think, ‘How did that go so quickly from this little trinket shop to this big business?’ I decided the only way to really know would be to work there. I conspired to get a job at the gallery and I became Forrest Fenn’s director of research. I met a lot of people and I saw a lot of art. I had always dreamed of traveling, and I decided that I would like to mount traveling art shows. I spoke to Forrest and…he didn’t like the idea. This was 1977 and there were no art fairs yet. But one of the people I met during my time at Forrest’s had a big gallery in New York and we had become friends, and he said, ‘Why don’t you start your own gallery?’ I thought, ‘How would I do that? I don’t have any money and I don’t have any art.’But I knew a lot of people who made art, just my friends, and I thought maybe I’d put together a traveling show. I decided it would be in Toronto, which made it exciting for me because it would be international and I was all about, in my mind, maybe being international. So I bought a ticket to Toronto. I assembled a notebook of snapshots of work by my friends. I had a contact with one person who was a designer there. I said, ‘I’m going to be producing an exhibition in Toronto and I’m looking for a venue…’ And, see, this is beginner’s luck, because that person introduced me to William Louis-Dreyfus, a big collector, an international man of money who was later famous for being the father of Julia Louis-Dreyfus. But back then, he was building a big, upscale shopping center in a primo area of Toronto, and he told me I could have this 5,000-square-foot unfinished space for my show. I flew back to New Mexico and began assembling art. I went to the bank and borrowed $25,000.
Durham began her gallery career by riding a Luis Jiménez sculpture all the way to Canada.
What work did you show?
In that show was Larry Bell, Luis Jiménez, Carol Mothner, Paul Pletka, Paul Sarkisian, Allan Graham, John Fincher, Forrest Moses, Ken Price—lots of people. I also had a couple of O’Keeffes to try and sell. We put all the work in a truck, I rented an apartment near the venue, and I got a mailing list from a few different people and I designed an invitation. I said I was the Linda Durham Gallery, but I didn’t have a gallery. We addressed about 2,000 invitations to unknown people in Toronto, and the day I put them in the mail was the day of the great Canadian postal strike. So these invitations languished and weren’t sent in time. We installed the show and, of course, no one came. Nobody knew about it. I was in that big space alone with all the art.
I managed to sell a couple pieces to Dreyfus but I lost $15,000. But I had some instant credibility. A little later, Larry Bell introduced me to some real collectors from the Bay Area, and they wanted to come to Santa Fe with a group and look at work. Iarranged a gallery in my living room and gave a very nice cocktail party. I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was charming. One of the women asked if I would consider doing a show in the Bay Area. So I did my second show, called New Mexico in the Bay Area. Right after that, some people from the Scottish Arts Council came through town and they thought it’d be great to have some art at the Edinburgh Festival. And so we put together a show in Scotland and, by then, I was kind of the expert of the contemporary art scene here, after coming from what was almost complete ignorance about art.And that led, finally, to having a gallery?
I bought a building on Canyon Road and called it Linda Durham Gallery and started showing things. Suddenly, there were artists and people interested in looking at art and talking about art and showing art to one another. The first gallery really was in my house, and then Canyon Road and then two locations in Galisteo and then New York and then on Paseo de Peralta and finally on Second Street.
A stately brick building at the head of Canyon Road was Durham’s flagship gallery.
Now that you’re closing the gallery, is there heartbreak?
Well, I have done this for 33 years and I have loved it. My father worked for one company for 35 years and retired, and they gave him a watch. So 33 years is almost as long, although no one is giving me a watch. Do I want to do it forever? If I had a whole lot of money and could have a giant staff and I could travel and be gone a lot of the time, I’d do it forever but, absent the fortune and the staff and the ability to also do other things that are interesting to me, I know it’s time.Are you worried about your artists?
I’m worried about the world. Not just the artists or myself or our community, I’m worried about what’s going on in the world. I don’t represent that many artists on a full-time basis, and the ones I do have a few things in common: They’re brilliant, they’re resourceful and, of course, they’re really good artists, I think. So good things will happen for them. But I think the art world has changed a lot in the last few years, so it’s not what it used to be. The gallery used to be a vehicle for communication, and I love what I’ve learned from artists, what I’ve learned about art, what I’ve learned from people who love art and artists, and the conversation about the importance of art in culture and in life has been central to the gallery. But that’s changed a little bit.
In between art fairs and exhibitions, Durham relaxed by, for example, climbing the highest free-standing mountain in the world.
Describe the change you see in the art world.
I feel that art is a really, really important component of a good life and important to society. I think real artists are at the vanguard of society and that we learn about ourselves as a culture through art. How do we know cultures of the past? From the architecture and the sculpture and the music and poetry and paintings that remain. What is art teaching us now, and what will the future know about us and our culture and our time from the art that we’re producing? What I’ve noticed is that it’s gotten to be really chic to be involved in the arts. It’s attracting a wider and wider array of people, some whose passion for what they do is deep and profound, and some for whom it’s a whim and a game. And that goes for the art that’s being made, the people who are displaying or showing the art, and the people who are collecting it. It’s different than it was even 20 years ago. It used to be that one became an artist because one had passion for it. And people opened galleries out of love and respect for the work. And people collected for the same reasons.
We’ve lost, as a general group, lost the interest, willingness, ability to slow down and look at something and let it talk. There’s celebrity art, there’s expensive art that makes people salivate—some people—because of its price, because of its fame. Now, anyone can become an artist and anyone can open a gallery and anyone can be a collector. When I started, I didn’t know much, but I spent a lot of time asking, learning, looking, making mistakes and honing a point of view. I don’t think you can have a point of view about art without looking at a lot of art. And I don’t think you can look at a lot of art with a few visits to The Met or the Guggenheim or by taking one class in college.How do you see those changes playing out in Santa Fe?
I think this is a remarkable part of the world, and I believe that northern New Mexico is a magnet for the creative person or creative personality. We have more than our fair share of everything. I think the problem is that it’s hard to differentiate between a great collection and a collection built on money, between a great gallery and a vanity gallery. In Santa Fe, right now, let’s say there are 300 galleries. In my opinion, there might be 20 great galleries among them. In terms of all the galleries in Santa Fe, which gallery do I like the most? Mine. My idea was never, ‘How can I put work that will sell in the gallery?’ but, ‘How can I create a market for what I want to put in the gallery?’ I picked people and showed work that I felt answered my criteria. I limited the gallery to New Mexico-based artists and they had to be really smart in my opinion because I just like really smart, interesting people. Unlike some galleries, I know all my artists really well.
When Durham tired of the scene on Canyon Road, she relocated to Galisteo.
From an outside perspective, it seems like your concern with larger issues and the world outside the gallery may have begun when you ran for mayor of Santa Fe in 1994.
At the particular time when that mayoral race was coming together, there were two candidates and, from my perspective and I think many other people, one person was pretty much in the pocket of the developers and another person was pretty much a west side ‘tourists go home’ kind of person. And people were talking all over town about how somebody should do something. I remember waking up one morning and thinking, ‘Who are the somebodies that everybody says should do something?’ Because it’s a common expression. So I thought, ‘I’m somebody.’ So I went down and put my name in the hat, right at the deadline. There ended up being 13 candidates in the end, and one of them was channeling a dead person. I came in third out of 13, so not bad. People would stop me in grocery stores for years and tell me they had voted for me.
Durham’s criticism of the art world was evident early on. This interview ran in THE magazine around the time of her mayoral campaign.
And did that launch your engagement in politics and your own writing projects, which have ranged quite far afield of the gallery?
That’s on my mind a lot these days. I’ve been writing my entire life, and I have the journals I wrote in 1960 and I have the whole manuscript I wrote about my three years as a Playboy bunny and I have several other rough projects. Travel and culture have always been important to me. Santa Fe is a special place—if we only stay here, we have an unusual idea of how it is for people and what’s going on.You also have gone to some harrowing parts of the world to engage artists and to engage women. What’s compelled you to go to Gaza and Baghdad and the other places you’ve been?
That it was possible. What I have found is that people everywhere are basically kind, and they need and want more or less the same things. They want to be heard; they want safety and respect and to have access to information and to have the right to celebrate.
People will tell you not to go to a place when there’s a war going on…but when you’re there, the people are living and having birthdays or struggling or making art. When I went to Baghdad, it was right after the Saddam statue had been felled, and there was danger and I saw things that were tough but, in the middle of that, the people were living their lives. One of the things that became of great interest to me was that maybe I have an ability to go somewhere, to be received warmly, to have experiences and to come back and be able to talk about it—not in terms of facts and figures…but from the heart because that’s what is most interesting to me: the heart of a situation. To go to Gaza and celebrate with the women on International Women’s Day, to make bread with them, still makes me cry. When I was in sixth grade, we learned about propaganda, and what we learned was that the enemies have propaganda and we have the truth. And you kind of believe that for a while.
Linda Durham and renowned New Mexico minimalist Agnes Martin pose in one of the Galisteo galleries.
What are you going to do now?
I already have some opportunities to consider curating some exhibitions at other galleries. I can do some private consulting. I’m creating a workshop for women with a good friend of mine and I’m writing my second monologue. I teach at [Santa Fe] Community College. And I’m going to have an opportunity to work with artists in a different way. What I won’t have and what I don’t want to have any more is the obligation to be in the gallery every day and mount shows and do press releases and create invitations. But exactly how this is all going to work out…until I actually close the gallery, it’s hard to see the other side because I’m still coming in every day and I’m still dealing with closing down 33 years. I want to do it honorably and elegantly and artistically. SFR
Great article.. thank you for sharing it.
ReplyDeleteJennifer Drucker
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