GREEN Inaugural Exhibition

December 9, 2006 – January 27, 2007

December 9, 2006–January 27, 2007

GREEN, the inaugural exhibition of 516 ARTS, featured a cross section of artists who make New Mexico their home, with internationally known as well as up-and-coming artists working in a variety of visual media from painting, sculpture and fine craft to photography and digital arts. The exhibition celebrated the regeneration of the arts at 516 ARTS, New Mexico’s premier independent museum-style gallery, and reached out to a broad mix of artists and audiences, young and old, traditional and contemporary.

GREEN pulled from the past and looked to the future, giving an expansive view of the state of art in New Mexico today. The wide range of artists spanned from Acoma potter Mary Lewis Garcia, who is working today in a tradition that has existed for thousands of years, to Santa Fe painter Grant Hayunga, whose abstracted contemporary paintings celebrate the vast sky of the New Mexico landscape with an untraditional approach, to internationally renowned Albuquerque photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, whose masterful black and white compositions honor life in the face of death and darkness, to Cerillos artist Bill Gilbert, whose digital map compositions chart a human’s path through the landscape like constellations mirroring the heavens on earth. Each of the 23 artists in the exhibition expressed a powerful thread of the rich artistic life of New Mexico, reflecting our unique time and place in world culture.

The exhibition featured 56 pieces by 23 artists who come from Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, Acoma, Hondo, Cochiti and Apache Creek. The exhibition was curated by 516 staff, Suzanne Sbarge and Andrew John Cecil, and was accompanied by an exhibition catalog with an essay by author Sharyn Udall.

Artists: Larry Bell, Cynthia Cook, Anne Cooper, Tom Dixon, Mary Lewis Garcia, Bill Gilbert, Douglas Kent Hall, 
Frederick Hammersley, Grant Hayunga, Luis Jimenez, Tom Joyce, Orlando Leyba, Jennifer Lynch, Beverley Magennis, Iva Morris, Delilah Montoya, Marc Ouellette, Florence Pierce, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Diego Romero, Mary Tsiongas, Joel-Peter Witkin and Melissa Zink.