Artists in the Desert
The idea of art as therapy was established in the late 18th century when it was used as “moral treatment” for psychiatric patients. The term “art therapy” came from a British war artist named Adrian Hill who used to go out on patrols with his sketching kit in World War I and who later recognized the therapeutic value of art while he was recovering from tuberculosis. This concept grew with the establishment of the British Association of Art Therapists in 1964 and the American Art Therapy Association in 1969, as well as similar associations in about a dozen other countries and it is now a well-recognized form of therapy. For example, the Southwestern College here in Santa Fe offers an MA in Art Therapy, focusing on “the healing process of making art.”
But what if you have one hundred mental patients and no therapist or even an instructor and can only infrequently afford the necessary paint and art supplies?..
Breaking Apart – Sentiments of Secession in Spain
“After I vote, I look up into the sky and say a prayer that it will turn out alright,” says a Spaniard named Francisco Noviola. It’s November 9 and I’m in Barcelona, Spain to observe the referendum on independence that was taking place throughout the region of Catalonia, of which Barcelona is the capital. Noviola was one of the many voters I interviewed...
Five Questions for New Mexico Authors – Sharon Oard Warner
This week we ask author, UNM English professor, and founder and director of the Taos Summer Writer’s Conference Sharon Oard Warner about her intriguing new novel Sophie’s House of Cards, published this year by the University of New Mexico Press.
New Mexico Mercury: One of the many fascinating aspects of this novel is the use of tarot imagery as an organizing principle for the story. How did you come to that idea?
Sharon Oard Warner: Many years ago, I listened to a fellow writer, Wayne Johnson, talk about his writing aspirations. He said he wanted to write a novel that took its structure from a metaphor or recurring motif...
Michael Datcher takes ABQ on a distinct ‘trip down memory lane’ this Saturday at the Outpost
Sometimes nonfiction is just not quite creative enough. Not even creative nonfiction. “With fiction, my goal is to remind people about the vitality of fiction. In our world people prefer nonfiction,” says Loyola Marymount Professor and New York Times Bestselling author Michael Datcher. “Because it is made up material people don’t respect it as a way to talk about the real world. They don’t look at it as a way to learn something about the real world, as opposed to a book of theory…people want to be entertained, rather than learn something about the past or themselves.”
This Saturday, Datcher is bringing his newest work to Albuquerque thanks to 516 ARTS and Outpost Performance Space. AMERICUS is a uniquely American story swaddled in Egyptian mythology and set in East Louis circa 1917...
Immortal Desires & the Seduction of Art
If you ask me what the most important, let’s say intellectually challenging, non-fiction, book written in the 20th century, it would have to be Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown. First published in 1959, when I read it in 1968 I found myself re-reading almost every page just to make sure what he said was what I thought he said. The sub-title is The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Brown was profound.
When he wrote LAD Brown was a professor of classics at Wesleyan University, and later at UC Santa Cruz, in California, where he died in 2002 at 89. During the 1960s the Movement raised him up to an icon. Remember the Movement?...
On Stage: A Thinking Animal, a Beastly Man
At the start of Act I, a rooster talks and acts like a man. At the end of Act II, a man talks and acts like a rooster. That in a nutshell is the story of Year of the Rooster, the current offering of the Fusion company at the Cell Theater in downtown Albuquerque.
How and why the rooster becomes humanoid and the human becomes beastly is the plot of this funny, violent, difficult and provoking story by the 20-something Eric Dufault that opened Off-Broadway in New York less than a year ago...
Give people a chance
Nov. 1 was Day of the Dead but in Albuquerque it was an exceptional day of life. What made the day was a unique musical gathering called OneBeat. The performance Saturday night was a rare conjunction of time, place and people, an occasion to be not only remembered but treasured.
Some 25 young musicians from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Australia and North America joined to produce some three hours of music that blended a wide range of genres, traditions, styles and instruments into an evening that was a celebration—of youth, of international collaboration and harmony, most of all of music that can stir our souls and ignite our passions like nothing else on earth...
Mercury Poetry: Between Portales and Clovis
On the road from Portales to Clovis
sand mixes with cloud,
the air thick with grainy patches where dust
joins with air in a raucous dance
ignoring the people below
ignoring the animals in their burrows
ignoring the cows eating, heads down, haunches up,
not a care in the world...
Five Questions for New Mexico Authors – Paula E. Morton
This week we ask Florida author and journalist Paula E. Morton some questions about her enthralling new book, Tortillas: A Cultural History, from the University of New Mexico Press, 2014.
New Mexico Mercury: How did you come to think of the tortilla as a vehicle with which to study history and society across cultures?
Paula E. Mortan: Before I was an author, I was a farmer in York County, Pennsylvania. It was a rich but demanding lifestyle, and after more than twenty years we headed west to Las Cruces in the southwest corner of New Mexico. The most I knew about tortillas was that they tasted good in Pennsylvania and were best at the borderlands, handmade and warm off the griddle...
“Greese” at the Albuquerque Little Theater
The year 1959 may have been the last cry of normal adolescence: the year before the ‘60s, John Kennedy’s election, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the freedom rides, the sexual revolution, the pill, miniskirts, the Beatles, the drug revolution and the endless war in Vietnam.
When the Albuquerque Little Theater ’s current production of Grease burst upon the Duke City stage with gleeful songs, acrobatic dancing and fresh-faced actors, the nearly sold-out audience was filled with those who can recall that period of their own youth...