1. RECENT ACQUISITIONS
New Mexico Museum of Art
The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States
T
he New Mexico Museum of Art
has been selected to receive a gift
of fifty works of art from New York
collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel,
with the help of the National Gallery
of Art, the National Endowment for
the Arts (NEA), and the Institute of
Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
The art is part of a national gifts pro-
gram titled The Dorothy and Herbert
Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty
States. The program will distribute
2,500 works from the Vogel Collection
of contemporary art throughout the
nation, with fifty works going to select-
ed art institutions in each of the fifty
states. Among those whose work will
be at the museum in Santa Fe are Neil
Jenny, Katherine Porter, Lucio Pozzi,
and Richard Tuttle.
The best-known aspects of the Vogel
Collection are minimal and conceptual
art, but these donations also explore
numerous directions of the post-minimalist period, including works of a figurative and expressionist nature. Primarily a collection
of drawings, the 2,500 works the Vogels are donating also gather paintings, sculptures, photographs, and prints by more than 170
contemporary artists working mainly in the United States. Gifts to the first ten institutions were announced in the spring of 2008.
The IMLS is providing funds for the disbursal of the art to the fifty institutions and for the development of a Web site to serve
as an information center and exhibition area for this project. A book titled The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for
Fifty States, published with funds from the NEA, was released in November 2008.
Works from the Vogels’ collection have appeared in numerous exhibitions around the world, including two major exhibitions
organized by the National Gallery that were selected solely from the couple’s collection. In 1994, From Minimal to Conceptual
Art: Works from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection was on view at the National Gallery of Art in 1994 and at the Archer M.
Huntington Art Gallery in Austin and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon in 1997. In 1998, the exhibition traveled abroad to
the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, and the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku, Finland. Following its 2002 presentation in
Washington, Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the Vogel Collection was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.
The New Mexico Museum of Art plans its exhibition in 2010. ■
Katherine Porter, American, 1941–, Untitled, 1974, graphite, colored pencil, and glue, with incised and scraped lines,
on paperboard, 12 x 18 in. New Mexico Museum of Art (MNM/DCA), The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty
Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National
Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library
Services. Photograph by Lyle Peterzell.
4. 22 E l P a l a c i o
El Palacio celebrates the state’s centennial by putting the first
ten years of the magazine online, offering a window onto the
state’s first decade.
A vision of most magazine publishers, including that of
El Palacio’s, is to see their publications live on in our digital
age. The New Mexico State Library’s State Document Program
shared this goal for El Palacio because of its historical content,
focus on New Mexico, and compatibility with the library’s
mission of increasing access to state publications. The New
Mexico Museum of Art had scanned many volumes and was
able to fill in gaps in the State Library’s collection. And thus a
partnership was born.
Putting nearly a century’s worth of a publication online
presented many challenges. The editorial side of the magazine
had to consider culturally sensitive content, knowing that
increased access via the Internet enhances the possibility of
causing offense or misuse. Regular contributor and consultant
Susanne Caro wrote recently about the difficulties of navigat-
ing our responsibilities to cultural sensibilities, cultural trea-
sures, and the law (“Going Digital: A Newish Look for Old El
Palacios,” El Palacio 115 [4], winter 2010). While El Palacio
currently does not publish photographs of excavated burials
or sacred artifacts out of respect for Native culture and beliefs,
such information does appear in the digital version because
the magazine is both a record of this state’s patrimony and an
official state document that under New Mexico’s Inspection of
Public Records Act (NMSA 1978, 14-2) cannot be altered.
On the other hand, we are required to redact from the digital
version detailed information on archaeological site locations
in New Mexico in accordance with the New Mexico Cultural
Properties Act (NMSA 1978, 18-6-1).
El Palacio began as a broadsheet in November 1913 and
evolved over the decades into a magazine. In its early years, El
Palacio printed articles on architecture by Carlos Vierra, find-
ings from archaeological excavations by A. V. Kidder, poetry by
Alice Corbin Henderson, memorials to New Mexico soldiers
lost in WWI, art criticism by Marsden Hartley, and early pho-
tographs of Poh-We-Ka (Little Blue Corn Flower), later known
as the famous potter Maria Martinez. Over the first decade
(and beyond), El Palacio occasionally reflected on archaeology
El Palacio Online
Explore the first ten years of El Palacio, from 1913-1923, on the Web at:
archives.elpalacio.org. The entire 100-year archive will go online in 2013.
Excerpts from recent issues and web-only content is online at elpalacio.org.
Look for El Palacio on Facebook and find exclusive content, news updates,
behind-the-scenes reports, and snippets from print articles that wound up on
the editing-room floor.
El Palacio’s First Decade Goes Online
BY STEVE CANTRELL AND CYNTHIA BAUGHMAN
FROM THE ARCHIVES
worldwide, though it concentrated then as now on “the art,
history and culture of the Southwest.” A representative issue is
Volume 8, Numbers 7–8, that was published in July 1920 and
contained “The Crooked Fir,” a story by Mary Austin; a finan-
cial statement showing how the School of American Research
and Museum of New Mexico spent $43,078.40 to complete a
museum building, pay salaries, cover maintenance, and more;
and a lengthy report from Director Edgar Lee Hewett covering
the previous year’s successes and plans for the coming year.
The old El Palacios are in themselves their own archaeo-
logical site. Digging through the volumes online will unearth
idiosyncratic social mores, dated cultural norms, and quaint
customs. Significant art criticism nestles alongside social news
and gossip, as in this news bit first reported in the Santa Fe
New Mexican: “Gustave Baumann of the art colony had another
runaway with his new Chevrolet. Just after the DeVargas pro-
cession had returned to the Cathedral from Rosario Cemetery,
he turned down San Francisco Street and lost control of the
car at the southeast corner of the Plaza. The Chevrolet jumped
the curb and dashed into a tree scattering in flight quite a
number of people who were sitting or standing in that part of
the Plaza. Fortunately no one was injured” (El Palacio 8 [7-8],
July 1920). That volume also included a letter from Dr. E. B.
Bernard of the University of Denver, spending his vacation
in upstate New York. El Palacio, he reported, “proved to be a
delightful vacation reading in the shade of an eastern orchard
although it made me long for the great Southwest which I
have loved since I first saw it.”
The balance of El Palacio’s hundred-year archive will
become available online in our centennial year, 2013. In the
meantime, we invite you to explore those early issues that Dr.
Bernard admired, whether in your favorite reading chair or
with a leafy orchard shading your screen. ■
Steve Cantrell is Public Relations Manager for the Department of Cultural Affairs
and El Palacio Web Editor. Cynthia Baughman is El Palacio Managing Editor.
