Site Santa Fe Releases Spring 2024 Exhibition Schedule

Erin Shirreff, Empty sidewalk, 2020, Cyanotype photogram, fabric over panel

For the Spring 2024 season, SITE SANTA FE presents a calendar of exhibitions championing a range of voices and culminating in a monumental intergenerational dialogue between leading land artists Teresita Fernández and Robert Smithson.

Carmen Herrera, Adios, 2010, Acrylic on canvas © Estate of Carmen Herrera, Courtesy Lisson Gallery

Carmen Herrera: I’m Nobody! Who are you?
March 1, 2024 – May 27, 2024

SITE SANTA FE presents a solo exhibition of later works by Cuban-born American abstract minimalist artist Carmen Herrera (1915-2022). The iconic painter dedicated herself to exploring abstraction through minimalist principles for over eight decades, striving for what she believed to be the most basic and pure visual solutions, simplifying compositions to shape, line, and vibrant color. She considered lines not only the building blocks of all shapes and forms, but also the power to construct, connect, simplify, and define. The exhibition’s title I’m Nobody! Who are you? originates from an Emily Dickinson poem, noted as one of Herrera's favorites by her close friend and fellow artist Tony Bechara. This brief yet impactful poem highlights the virtue of anonymity and isolation, celebrating the value of solitary reflection. At age 105, Herrera echoed similar sentiments: "Being ignored is a form of freedom. I felt liberated from having to constantly please anyone." Despite her undeniable talent, movements such as Minimalism and Abstraction were largely dominated by men, often overshadowing invaluable contributions by women like Herrera. Her work emerged alongside celebrated male peers such as Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, and Leon Polk Smith, yet her genius was only acknowledged much later in her life, marked by her inaugural museum retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2016, a remarkable achievement at the age of 101. This delayed recognition sheds light on persistent challenges in the art world today. I’m Nobody! Who are you? focuses on works made between the ages of 95 and 102 (2010 to 2017), including paintings and two early Estructuras (three-dimensional works), conceived in the 1960s and ’70s and fabricated in 2019.

Arturo Herrera, Untitled, 2001 Graphite on paper, image courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Arturo Herrera: You are here
March 8, 2024 – May 27, 2024

You are here is the first solo exhibition in New Mexico of German-based/Venezuelan-born artist Arturo Herrera. The exhibition spans almost three decades of Herrera’s work (from 1998 to today), showcasing sculpture, relief, painting, mixed media works on paper, collage, photography, glass, felt wall hangings, and two newly commissioned works, an architectural intervention titled Split, 2023, installed in the Wallerstein Family Courtyard and Terrace, and Quarry, 2024, a large-scale site-specific wall painting

Erin Shirreff, Spatial Moto, 2023 (detail). Dye sublimation prints on aluminum, latex paint. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Erin Shirreff: Folded stone
March 8, 2024 – May 27, 2024

Folded Stone is a solo exhibition of new and recent multimedia works by Canadian artist Erin Shirreff, whose spare, evocative works pose fundamental questions about how art is received and remembered. Though trained as a sculptor, Shirreff works across mediums and centers her practice on acts of material translation, revealing how sculpture’s defining traits—real space and live encounter—adjust when filtered through other formats. These “hybrid scenarios,” as the artist describes them, recur throughout the exhibition: a new monumental sculpture, for instance, is inspired by grainy images of a mid-century example; photographs are printed and then cut or creased to gain near-sculptural dimension; the glacial pan of a digital video conflates still and moving image. Each work is a wedge that pries open the space between representation and the thing itself, and shares a visual language drawn from the stark geometries of mid-century abstraction—a touchstone for Shirreff, whose work loosely channels the authority of that bygone era, asking what (if any) of its utopian aspirations are still palpable in the present. Ultimately, Shirreff points to how art is accessed, both in person and in reproduction, delivering a heightened viewing experience that defies the leveling effects of our screen-based world.

Jeffrey Gibson, POWERFUL BECAUSE THEY'RE DIFFERENT, 2019, Cotton, linen, wool, nylon

U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale: the space in which to place me
April 17, 2024 – November 24, 2024

SITE SANTA FE and the Portland Art Museum have commissioned the U.S. Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which will present Jeffrey Gibson’s the space in which to place me, making him the first Indigenous artist to present a solo exhibition at the Pavilion.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty [still] (1970) © Holt/Smithson Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York Distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York

Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson
July 5, 2024 – October 28, 2024

Presented in collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Teresita Fernández and Holt/Smithson Foundation, Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is a subjective, intergenerational conversation between two practices. This landmark exhibition marks the first time famed sculptor and land artist Robert Smithson’s work has been placed in conversation with an artist working today. Including both iconic and rarely seen works by Fernández and Smithson, the exhibition centers on a shared artistic dialogue and desire to recontextualize the complexities of art addressing the land. Teresita Fernández / Robert Smithson is initiated by Fernández’s long-term engagement with challenging, socially constructed ideas about place and landscape, as well as her deep research on the art and ideas of Smithson. The exhibition operates as a platform to question how we define place, land, and landscape—as well as who has agency in such places. In doing so, the exhibition seeks to radically shift the art historical perspectives that have sidelined voices of women artists, Indigenous artists, and artists of color.