SANTA FE, NM.- Gerald Peters Contemporary presents Stories Retold: New American Perspectives. The group exhibition of seven contemporary artists weaves together narratives about American history and everyday life. Drawing on realities, fantasies, and myths, the artworks on view offer a sometimes idealistic and nostalgic and at other times critical and discerning portrait of the American experience.
Born in Acuña, Mexico and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Fernando Andrade’s (b. 1987) imagery captures the emotional complexity of the immigrant experience. His narrative works emphasize humanity, isolation, loss, and celebration.
Andrade graduated from San Antonio College in 2008 and has received numerous honors including Fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and most recently, the International Artist Residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. His work is in the collections of the San Antonio Museum of Art, the Argo Group and numerous private collections.
Carefully observed and chromatically inventive, Tom Birkner’s (b. 1966) paintings of Main Street American seek to illuminate the direct, personal, common, and unsung. The subjects- a toddler reaching for his teenage mother’s hand, a romping graduation celebration in an abandoned factory, the loneliness of an empty street late at night- are rendered in Birkner’s signature gritty realism. Building his canvases through the application of numerous layers Birkner aggressively applies and scrapes away paint until the everyday circumstances take on a vivid liveliness. And although far from Rockwellian, Birkner remains sensitive to idiosyncrasies, depicting places and people who are endearing, mysterious, and wholly themselves.
Birkner received his B.A. from Rutgers University and his M.F.A. from Pennsylvania State University. He is a two-time recipient of the New Jersey State Council on The Arts Fellowship, and his work was recently exhibited at the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas and Centro Cultural de las Fronteras, Juárez, Mexico. He has been featured in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and has earned reviews in the New York Times and ARTnews.
A MacDowell fellow and Pollock-Krasner award recipient, Maurice Burns (b. 1937) weaves together ideas and iconography from the Harlem Renaissance, Pop Art, and the School of London in pursuit of a cultural territory unbound by 20th-century conceptions of racial identity and the conventions of high culture. As Burns remixes art history and pop culture on his postmodern canvases, a distinctly personal imaginary emerges––one as complex and uncompromising as the jazz legends, Native American chiefs, mathematicians, and everyday people who populate his world.
Andrew John Cecil (b. 1960) has devoted more than 40 years of his life to working in the fields of visual art and cultural heritage. Cecil received an MFA in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1989. After graduation Cecil returned to the West to continue his work in the studio and to raise his family. Cecil’s knowledge and understanding of cultural heritage as well as his own sculptural expression shared in museums and galleries, provide for a dynamic exchange between his work as both a contemporary sculptor and curator. Cecil’s work has been shown regionally, nationally and internationally for 40 years. Cecil was one of six contemporary artists invited to exhibit in Currently West; Koumi Machi Kougen Museum of Art, Nagano Prefecture, Japan.
Growing up in the American West, Cecil spent his formative years in Kalispell Montana. His family’s deep connection to the land, industry and people of this vast and traditionally complex region informs what Cecil creates in the studio. His work often depicts a contemporary narrative about the American West, giant tools, iron trucks, fence lines, irrigation gates, fishing lures and spent toolboxes. These icons of a passed agricultural and industrial century speak to a lost innocence, a failed cultural notion of a bountiful landscape with limitless resources. Cecil strives with his work to challenge our relationships with one another and land stewardship in the American West today.
Patrick Dean Hubbell (Diné, b. 1986) is an Indigenous artist, living and working on the Diné Nation. Hubbell’s early approach to painting built upon gestural abstraction. Incorporating Diné philosophy and contemporary western aesthetics and ideologies, his large-scale canvases were characterized by expressive brushwork and the inclusion of Navajo geometric designs.
Continuing his exploration of abstraction through the lenses of both modern and Indigenous art, Hubbell began reconstructing the canvas in reference to textile, shawl, blanket and medicine bags. Unencumbered by stretcher bars, Hubbell would cut, fold and collage loose canvases. The resulting works transformed his medium and the context in which it is viewed. In his most recent series, Hubbell interrogates biases about Native peoples and histories of the American West, puncturing romanticizing imagery by deconstructing it. His blind contour portraits reveal the clichéd cowboy hats and warbonnets of nineteenth-century paintings produced by the likes of George Catlin, Frederic Remington, and Charles M. Russell, albeit reduced to faint yet eminently recognizable core imagery, indicating just how deeply such stereotypes have been internalized by Native and non-Native audiences alike.
Hubbell received his BFA in 2010 from Arizona State University and his MFA in 2021 from the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ; The Autry Museum of the West, Los Angeles; Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Rochester, NY; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, Utah. Hubbell’s work is in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO and the Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL. In 2017, the artist was awarded a prestigious Pollock-Krasner grant.
Sculptor and printmaker, Luis Jiménez’s (1940-2006) works blend pop cultural and social commentary with allusions to his Mexican-American heritage. Replete with irony and reverence, Jiménez’s narrative works of rodeo queens, lowriders, and dance halls cast poignant personal narratives. Jiménez’s works are both a celebration of the history, culture, and traditions of the southwest, with particular homage to the Chicano and working-class communities, while also addressing the region’s social and political concerns of immigration and oppression.
Roger Winter (b. 1934) is an American contemporary artist and educator, best known for his landscape paintings of rural Texas and realist depictions of New York City. Winter has charted an idiosyncratic course across the field of painting, generating novel forms of realism while resisting the imperative to stay in only one place. A long established contributor to the history of painting in the second half of the twentieth century, Winter has simultaneously remained an illuminating figure late into his career, producing some of his most perceptive paintings over the past decade.
