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Fall is here at Victoria Price Art & Design (26, Oct 2008 12:44:12)
Check back frequently for special events, high-end vendor sales, and exclusive design services.
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It's summer again in Santa Fe (07, Oct 2008 21:05:45)
It's summer again in Santa Fe. The busy season. The monsoon season. The tourist season. The Opera Season.
It's all of these things, and more.
If you've never been to Santa Fe, summer is a glorious time. The days start out clear and blue, but cool from the previous evening's rain. Just as the heat starts to build around midday, so do the thunderheads, and by mid-afternoon, we usually get a good soaking. And
if we're really lucky, it clears out by the evening, and you can walk to town for dinner.
Santa Fe is in full bloom in summer--not just the flowers, but the all of the sights, sounds, smell, and cultural events flourish during the summer.
From a quiet town of 65,000, we mushroom to 200,000 come Indian Market in mid-August. Every night there's something to do. So why not join the fun, we thought? And on the Opening Weekend of the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, we did. With a Product Launch of wonderful furniture, tableware, gift items and more from over 20 companies from around the world.
What was my impetus for this? A wonderful new business partnership with Margarita Waxman. Margarita and I have worked together on various art and design projects over the years, finding out that two women from very different parts of the globe could have a lot more in common than people might think. Growing up, a WASPy blond girl in Hollywood, I always wanted to be more exotic than I was. In high school, my friends and I called ourselves the mini-United Nations, because we represented so many different countries and ethnic backgrounds. Sadly, I was the least exotic. . . Margarita grew up literally in the shadow of the UN. Born in the Dominican Republic, her family moved to the US when Margarita was five years old, after pleading asylum. (Her father's attempts to launch a mobile library program to raise the literacy rate in his homeland had met with great opposition from the Trujillo dictatorship.) Her father spent the rest of his career in the US working for the UN library--while Margarita, growing up a Dominican-American girl on the North Shore of Long Island, fantasized about being, well, Peggy Sue.
Our collaboration is the place where our WASPy and exotic tastes, backgrounds, and dreams mesh. You'll find high-end Italian furniture alongside Native American textiles. You'll find colorful, well-designed, affordable gifts from around the world--from South Africa to Finland to Colombia to Canada. And you'll find a wonderful representation of art and design from right here in Santa Fe. Margarita and I are looking forward to expanding both the retail aspect of the store, as well as the Victoria Price Collection. And of course, our interior design and custom furniture businesses continue to flourish.
So take some time to stop by this summer, or to visit our ever-expanding website, and check out some of the changes at Victoria Price Art & Design.Victoria Price
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Home Away from Home: VPA&D in San Francisco! (31, Dec 2008 15:55:44)
Sitting on the dock of the bay, VPA&D comes to San Francisco for the Western Interiors Design & Home Show.
I’m sitting on a pier that juts out into the San Francisco Bay. From one side of the pier I have an unadulterated view of Alcatraz, and from the other side, the Golden Gate Bridge signals the end of the continent I have just driven halfway across to get here.
When I wrote last month’s entry, it was deleted from the web program before I could even upload it. I never found time to rewrite it—but it was an ode to fall in New Mexico. September and October are the best months of the year in the Southwest. The cottonwoods and aspen turn a glorious shade of gold, the days are warm and the sky cerulean. Nights are cool and crisp, presaging the onset of winter. This afternoon, I spent a wonderful 15 minutes chatting with Western Interiors’ publisher, Jennifer Matthews, about autumn in New Mexico. She grew up in the Land of Enchantment, but now lives in Connecticut. She misses fall in New Mexico so much that she often burns pinon incense in her fireplace, just to feel like she’s at home. One of the things she loves the most is the mercurial autumn weather—days when it can go from sunny and warm to rain to hail to evening snow showers in the span of twelve hours!!
But all that seems far away now, sitting on the dock of the Bay at the Western Interiors Design & Home Show in San Francisco. We loaded up our trailer on Monday and drove across the desert, through the Santa Ana winds, past the clouds of smoke billowing over the mountains of Southern California, and up to this pier, where we recreated a mini VPA&D in San Francisco. The response has been gratifying. My favorite remarks have come from young people, who find our look fun, eclectic, and refreshing. We brought along the work of many of our artists and designers, as well as new furniture and home furnishings from the Victoria Price Collection.
Everyone keeps asking if the things that they are seeing are up on our website. As anyone who is reading this can see, we have fallen behind with uploading pictures and descriptions to our website. There are just not enough hours in the day!!! So, if anyone knows of a young person in Santa Fe who would be interested in uploading pictures and images to our website, please contact the gallery. We’re desperate for help!!!
And, pretty soon, we hope to have some of our new products online—from our punc*t pillows to the Cygnus line to the Berkeley table!
In the meantime, I am enjoying being on the water, even if my only foray is to step outside and let the wind blow on my face from the end of the pier. San Francisco is a wonderful city, and the food is amazing, but I love Santa Fe and our high desert mountains. I am looking forward to winter—the smell of pinon fires, skiing in the Sangres, In the meantime, I feel right at home in our little gallery on a pier in the San Francisco Bay, proving that home is where you make it!
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My Busy Season (31, Dec 2008 14:03:46)
August in Santa Fe--There's nothing like it!
My friend Sara Karloff told me that her father, Boris, used to call the weeks leading up to Halloween his "busy season." It certainly was for my father as well. So, I found it not surprising at all that he passed away on October 25, 1993--six days before Halloween, the time of year when his movies are on almost every channel. He had uncannily good timing, my dad.
August is my busy season. Not just for me, of course, but for all of us involved in art and design Santa Fe. August brings with it Indian Market, all of the ethnographic shows, the Parade of Homes, and the end of the Opera season--just to name a few of the major events that take place this month!
Although summer traditionally ends on Labor Day weekend, Santa Feans know that summer comes to a crescendo on the third weekend in August, when the town swells from around 70,000 to 200,000--all here for Indian Market. But even the weeks leading up to Market are a frenzy of activity. Art and antiques dealers from around the world descend on Santa Fe for a series of elegant art fairs in a variety of locations.
For fans of Native American art, Santa Fe in August is the place to be. Most of the art galleries in town host a show of art by Native American artists. Some of these shows have become annual traditions--such as Andrea Fisher's festive unveiling of Nancy Youngblood's newest pots. Marti Struever's Thursday night opening at the Eldorado is another crowd pleaser. Marti has the creme de la creme of Native American jewelers and potters, including Charles Loloma and Dextra Quotskuyva. But Marti also has the finest of the young Native American jewelers. Every collector in the know respects Marti's exceptional eye!
This year we are very excited to join the throng downtown with our own show (Fresh!) at the Inn at Loretto, opening on the Thursday night before Indian Market. Fresh will feature the work of young and exciting Native American artists, who are taking their cultural and artistic traditions and giving them a new spin. Over the next few weeks, I will use this blog to describe some of the pieces that we will be featuring in our own contribution to Santa Fe's Indian Market experience.
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Summer in Santa Fe (29, Jul 2007 18:49:00)
Around the World in One Weekend
Summer arrived in Santa Fe on the last weekend of June with blistering hot weather and a flurry of people in town for the opening of the Opera. Some Santa Fe residents have a love-hate relationship with summer and the influx of people and increase in activity that this season brings. However, most look forward to the hustle and bustle of all of the cultural activities-Opera Weekend, Art Santa Fe, the Folk Art Market, Spanish Market, Indian Market, and much more. Summer means seeing old friends, socializing late into the night, attending countless gallery openings, musical events, and other festive occasions. Those of us who work in the arts in Santa Fe know that our "summer" vacations will take place in the fall. Summer is our busy season. It's when the rest of the world comes to us!
Like much of the West, we were under the thrall of a blistering heat wave for a couple of weeks. Fortunately, living in the high desert, we have much less humidity than other places, and so it is more bearable. But we all eagerly await the arrival of monsoon season, which cools each day off with afternoon thunderstorms. This week, the monsoons arrived! So did planeloads of artists and art lovers from around the world-all here for two very special events.
Art Santa Fe is the biennial art fair organized by Charlotte Jackson, at which art dealers from around the world set up booths and show the work of the artists they represent. This year it's taking place at El Museo Cultural in the Railyard, and galleries from as far away as London and Germany are represented. Just up the hill this weekend is an even more international event-the International Folk Art Market. Started just four years ago, this event has become one of the most eagerly anticipated of the summer. Artists from around the globe-Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe-bring their work to sell for two days up on Museum Hill. Santa Fe has a rich tradition of folk art and folk art collecting-and this wonderful event (along with our wonderful International Folk Art Museum) has put our small town firmly at the center of the folk art map.
These two diverse events exemplify why Santa Fe continues to be an exciting place for lovers of art of all kinds to visit. From folk art to fine art, ancient traditions to cutting-edge contemporary, on one weekend you can feast your eyes and travel the globe!
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Victoria's Very First Blog (25, Sep 2007 19:33:17)
Victoria's very first blog attempt. . .
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. . .