Taos Reimagined: Modernist Experiments in the High Desert, on view through May 10 at the Taos Art Museum, gathers 29 works tracing how modernist ideas from Europe and New York actually reached Northern New Mexico. Not as one movement arriving intact — through Mabel Dodge Luhan's patronage first, then visiting artists, then later through the wave of postwar teaching that brought GI Bill students to study under painters like Louis Ribak and Beatrice Mandelman at the Taos Valley Art School.
"Taos Reimagined highlights the complexity of modernism in Northern New Mexico and the many ways artists in the region interpreted new ideas through their own practices," says Christy Coleman, the museum's executive director.
The museum itself makes the same point without meaning to. Nicolai Fechin built the house by hand between 1927 and 1933, fusing Russian woodcarving with adobe construction — modernism arriving, quite literally, built into the walls before the exhibit inside ever opened.