Santa Fe's multi-media festival: an arts smorgasbord

!FESTIVAL! 1980 heralds new directions for Santa Fe, N.M., and the Southwest art world, as the entire city once again celebrates the arts for 10 days in aspen time (Oct. 9-19).

Since the late 1880s, Santa Fe has been an enticing artists' colony. Its rugged mountains, blue skies, sculptural adobe architecture, and mixture of three cultures attract artists nearly as powerfully as does Europe's centuries of artistic tradition.

Artists like Robert Henri, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe and Joseph Henry Sharp put Santa Fe on the map. Many works by early Santa Fe and Taos artists may be enjoyed in Santa Fe, as well as a vast array of works by contemporary artists. Santa Fe has grown from that picturesque artists' colony to a stimulating art center with artists working in range of style and media -- from representational landscape to abstract expressionism, form western bronzes to conceptual sculpture -- and much in between.

Santa Fe has been recognized as an important center of art in the United States. Artists from coast to coast have made Santa Fe their home in order to partake of its ambience and history.

Through a series of four exhibitions, each specifically organized as a comprehensive experience in itself, !FESTIVAL! will present a panorama of visual depth and contemporary perspective centering on New Mexico and Western artists.

The 1980 !FESTIVAL! has secured the last and only Southwest showing of the acclaimed First Western States BienniaL Exhibition, which will be shown in the new Convention Center (Oct. 9-19). This exhibition includes work by artists from 10 Western states, including New Mexicans Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Sarkisian, Fritz Scholder, Andrew Dasburg, Fred Hammersley, Luis Jimenez Jr., and JEan Promutico. This gathering of work of Western artists is the largest survey of current Western art ever seen in the East (at the National Collection of Fine Arts in Washington) and has been seen in Denver, San Francisco, and Honolulu.

Presented in tandem with the Western States Show will be a "A Santa Fe Salon, " an invitational exhibition selected by the director, Jan Adlmann, and Robert Ewing, former curator of the New Mexico MUseum of Fine Arts. This show will be a "gathering of works of the widest range of expression, but of a certain quality" and is intended as a tribute to the colorful legand of Santa Fe, the Salon en el Estilo Dona Tules.

A third exhibition planned for !FESTIVAL! is a New Mexico Juried Show, which will hang in the Armory for the Arts. Including painting, sculpture, grpahic art and photography, it will be juried by Diane Vanderlip, curator of Contemprary Art of the Denver Art Museum.

As a tribute to Santa Fe's (recently deceased) famed photographer, Laura Gilpin, a fourth exhibition, a Laura Gilpin Memorial, is also being presented. Her famous photograph, "Storm Over La Bajada," has been chosen as the 1980 !FESTIVAL! poster and is the first photograph to be utilized as a hallmark of the Santa Fe !FESTIVAL!