TAOS, NM.- The Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico presents acclaimed art and culture writer Dave Hickey on Saturday, August 1st from 6:00 to 7:30 pm. Hickey, will moderate a panel with Dennis Hopper and the artists of the Hopper at the Harwood exhibition. This discussion will explore the West Coast art movement that began in the early 60s at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the participation of these artists in this vein of expression, and discuss the unique circumstances that brought these artists to Taos, New Mexico.
Hopper at the Harwood, opened May 9 and runs through September 20, featuring two exhibitions: one focusing on Dennis Hopper's work, "Selected Photographs and Paintings" and the other, "Forty Years of Friendship: LA to Taos," a curatorial expression with the work of Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Ronald Davis, Ken Price and Robert Dean Stockwell.
Hickey has also written the forward for the exhibition catalogue for the exhibition. The stunning, 34-page full-color catalogue is a beautiful companion to the show, presenting select pieces and commentary by Hickey and Hopper. From Hickey's essay...
"Even so, places might be found, where the work itself might continue to be created under chastened circumstances, and in my experience Taos is one of the most beautiful and chastening places in the world," Hickey write in the catalog's essay on Taos. "It has an encouraging history of harboring fugitives, killing priests and assassinating governors. In the twentieth century, it has probably produced more serious art and literature than any other non-metropolitan area in the United States, and, throughout this century, Taos' virtues have remained more amenable to producers of art than to it's consumers. It has resisted gentrification because, for all its beauty, Taos is not a cozy place. There is not much that architecture or landscaping can do to mitigate the daunting hegemony of the sky, the sweep of the flat, the looming scale of the distant mountains, and the perpetual inference of Lawrence's ghosts. Day in day out, year round, Taos is hardly ! even a human place. It is the Top of the World, more the Wild West than the Southwest---more Tibet, in fact, than Palm Springs. So if you want a beautiful place to work that bears with it the perpetual reminder that all you do will be broken, buried, blasted and blown away---a place that makes you brave and serious, Taos is the place for you."
