Currents 826 celebrates the light at the end of the tunnel Steel yourselves for a sea of stories from arts outlets about how shows that were in process have been tragically canceled. In better instances, they’ve just been postponed. Then rejoice, because, as pop-punk band MXPX once mused, some things are better late than never. Case in point: CURRENTS826, that ongoing gallery bastion/satellite arm of the annual CURRENTS festival (which is slated for a smaller but no less powerful appearance at the Center for Contemporary Arts this year) has a doozy. Despite postponement during the great lockdown of 2020, its theme is eerily appropriate for the current era of spring/renewal/mass vaxxing.
No medium captures the dance of color and light more fully than the luminosity of glass.
Archaeological evidence suggests glass-making dates at least back to 3,600 B.C. in Mesopotamia, Egypt or Syria. Stone Age societies used naturally occurring obsidian glass for cutting tools and weapons.
“Raven Steals the Sun,” Preston Singletary (Tlingit), 2017. (Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico Press))
Venetian glass artists have produced glass from the island of Murano for more than 1,500 years.
Glass gestated in Indian Country in the 1970s. And the legendary glass artist Dale Chihuly played midwife.
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When Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts rose from high school to a two-year college, its co-founder Lloyd Kiva New turned to the Rhode Island School of Design to help develop an art center. RISD sent Chihuly, who had created the glass program there, to New Mexico to set up a glass-making hot shop and to teach for one semester. Faculty member Carl Pon
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Venue Plus continues “In Case You Didn’t Know,” a weekly feature with fun tidbits about New Mexicans and their projects.
After months of slowing down, things are picking up for Melissa Chambers.
The New Mexico-based actress has had three good auditions in the past week.
“Usually out of three, I get one,” she says hopefully.
New Mexico-based actress Melissa Chambers will appear in two films due out in 2021. (Courtesy of Melissa Chambers)
Chambers has popped up in quite a few films in the past and is awaiting the release of two films: “Deadly Illusions” and “Walking With Herb.”