please wait
Everyone tells me that blogs are the way of the future--except for Hollis, our Gallery Director, who thinks that this will become just one more on my lengthy to-do list. But I'm all for trying it. So, here goes.
About a month ago we decided to move from the Railyard District in Santa Fe to a new location in Pacheco Park, a very hip new area catering to Santa Fe's burgeoning design industry. We are across the way from Santa Fe Modern Home, at the top of the parking lot from from Santa Fe By Design, and next to the famous "Pink Church"--home of FACT, Fine Art for Children and Teens. We couldn't be in better company!!
Even more exciting, there are 140 paved parking spaces at our disposal! We loved being in the Railyard, really believe in its future, and loved the Railyard Galleries most of all. But our new location allows us to work one on one with clients in a way that wasn't possible with our huge overhead (both in terms of dollars and square footage).
Santa Fe is changing almost daily, it seems. The art business is changing most rapidly of all. I still hear people wishing it was "like the 80s or early 90s". Well, it's not. Sure, selling art was like shooting fish back in the day, and Santa Fe Style was all the rage across the world. But how realistic is that? Personally, I think that Santa Fe Style was not necessarily a great thing for Santa Fe. Anything that becomes a huge design trend like that is bound, eventually, to fall out of fashion. But the authentic style that was behind that trend is still here-and with the increasing influence of contemporary art and design, it's actually becoming even more interesting!
So where do we fit in to all this? I hope that Victoria Price Art & Design is taking what is authentic about our past and what is exciting about our future and helping to bring Santa Fe into the 21st century.
My approach to this business has been informed by my family background as well as my education. I grew up with an actor/art collector father (Vincent Price) and a designer mother (Mary Grant Price). Art and design went hand in hand in my household--as did African art and a Modigliani, a 17th-century New Mexico trastero and a Diebenkorn, a Chief Blanket and a Jackson Pollock.
When I went on to study art history at Williams College, I found that I didn't fit into just one area. I liked that place where different cultures or styles intersected and then seeing what came out of that. My thesis on the German Expressionist group, die Bruecke, was not just about their art, but about the influence of African art and culture on them as artists and as people. I went on to do my doctoral work in American Studies, which is all about the intersection of different ideas and influences and what arises from that. And that perspective is what I bring to this business.
It doesn't seem strange at all to me to have art and design under one roof. After all it's how most of us live at home. Having a Navajo textile next to a Le Corbusier chaise longue makes perfect sense, because Corbusier and all the rest of his Modernist pals were completely turned on by the wonderfully graphic elements in Native American and African and Oceanic art. And why not sell contemporary Italian sofas in Santa Fe, because this little town has always been a place where people from around the world have gathered and shared their cultural heritage for centuries.
So, this is what we do. I'm looking forward to writing more about our creative endeavors here at Victoria Price Art & Design as well as in Santa Fe, in general.
But for now, I'm going to press the send button and put my very first blog entry on the web. Thanks for reading. . .