Welcome to our first newsletter:

Greetings from the Southwest Regional Art Museum... 

Thank you being a supporter of our plans to establish a Fine Art Museum in Silver City. Our newsletter hopes to inform those who are interested about our progress. Our newsletter is intended to bring you news about our progress for the Museum as well as  information about the art we currently have in our collections.

Contents:

Why an Art Museum?

From the Permanent Collection

The MAKE THE MUSEUM Capital Campaign    

WHY WE ARE NEEDED AND WHAT IS PLANNED

The Southwest Regional Museum of Art and Art Center aspires to be a cultural jewel in southwest New Mexico. It is dedicated to celebrating the Visual Arts, inspiring creativity, and promoting community involvement.

   The Southwest Regional Museum of Art and Art Center is a nonprofit corporation registered with the New Mexico Secretary of State, is a 501(c)(3) educational charity as designated by the Internal Revenue Service, and is registered with the New Mexico Attorney General’s office to solicit capital funding.

Mission and Vision

The Museum’s mission is to foster creativity, to gather community spirit, to educate the public, and to celebrate Visual Art. We envision that the Museum and Art Center will collect, preserve, and exhibit a permanent collection of American fine art of the past, will host contemporary loaned exhibitions, will sponsor juried exhibitions, and will provide educational opportunities through the Visual Arts.

Museum Programs: Meeting the Needs of the Community

Our community encompasses the southwestern corner of New Mexico along the borders of Arizona and Mexico, and its need for visual art learning and outlet. The Southwest Regional Museum of Art and Art Center will afford this community unprecedented accessibility to experiencing fine art as well as to educational and experiential opportunities in the arts through the Museum’s Art Center.

There has never been an art museum in Silver City or its surrounding counties. Art opens people up to experiences they could never have imagined. The Southwest Regional Museum of Art will bring a higher level of appreciation of both the history and cultural significance of the arts to the community. Visual Arts inspire creativity, which in turn facilitates problem solving. The Museum will meet the community’s need to experience fine art through the following programs: loaned exhibitions; art films and discussions; three galleries with two of those galleries changing exhibits every other month and one gallery changing a traveling exhibit each year. Every exhibit will be curated to provide enjoyment and learning opportunity including descriptions of exhibited artworks and histories of their respective artists; accompanying educational lectures, films, or art-making that will enhance each exhibition.

As in many communities, there is a critical need in southwestern New Mexico for strengthening art education at all levels through mentoring and other programs. The Southwest Regional Museum of Art and Art Center will address this need through hands-on opportunities for all ages with specific, targeted programs such as clay camp for ceramics, interactive activities in the Museum’s galleries, and creative art education programs for young people and for adults.

Southwestern New Mexico struggles economically, and one significant source of income to the region is the travel and tourism industry. The presence of a professional fine art museum and art center in the area will create a much-needed economic engine for the region through cultural tourism. The Southwest Regional Museum of Art and Art Center will attract tourists and draw new residents to the area, as well as enriching the lives of current residents, through visiting artists’ series and workshops, juried art exhibitions, and coordination of the Museum’s events and programs with other local organizations’ festivals and events.

The Southwest Regional Museum of Art and Art Center will create a welcoming social environment that offers community enrichment for all cultures, all ages, and all skill levels. It will promote community involvement and foster nurturing and enjoyable learning experiences through Visual Art programs, including: local docent programs for Museum visitors; exciting and lively experiences with interactive exhibitions, creative art - making; outreach programs to rural Southwest N.M. communities and ongoing special social events.

Key Leadership

The leadership of the Southwest Regional Museum and Art Center comprises two groups of community leaders and artists who are dedicated to the success of this cultural center in Southwest New Mexico. 

They are:

1. Board of Directors - Victoria Chick, MFA, art educator, writer, and painter; Chery Fenley, artist; Diane Kleiss, BA, artist and art educator; Christopher Saxman, MFA, architect, author, and retired contractor; Claude W. Smith III, MFA, professor emeritus, artist, and potter; Craig Wentz, BFA, artist and retired electrical contractor; Lucy Whitmarsh, BS, marketer.

2. Capital Campaign Cabinet – James R. Skee, MD, Campaign Chairperson; Christopher Saxman, Communications Chairperson; Lucy Whitmarsh, Finance Chairperson, Ilene Wignall, Media Chair

Key community leaders and artists of the region are dedicated to the success of this visual cultural center for southwest New Mexico. With this support assured, the Museum's board of directors has authorized a capital campaign to raise $1.2 million to fund the purchase and renovation of a building to house the museum and to recruit and hire the Museum’s executive director.  

Join our campaign to create an oasis of culture and beauty in the region by building its first art museum and thereby making history. Let’s Make the Museum!

Our website is:  www.southwest-art-museum.org

FLASH !! Dr.James Skee has accepted Chairmanship of the SWRMA and  Art Center Capital Campaign!

Sentinel Rock - Lithograph 

BIRGER SANDZEN 1871 – 1954

Sandzen was born in Sweden, the son of a Lutheran minister. His parents encouraged his early ability in art and music and his formal education was directed to the visual arts. After graduation from the University of Lund, he went to Stockholm to enroll at the Swedish Royal Academy of Arts. The long waiting list to be admitted was discouraging so he joined a group of young artists studying under several prominent artists including Anders Zorn. In 1894 he left Stockholm for Paris. Up to this time, his painting style was much like those of the Barbizon School. But, in Paris, one of his teachers introduced him to pointillism, a style tried by nearly all the French painters of the Post Impressionist period. The color relationships he learned from this painting approach seem to have affected his later work.

It was during his stay in Paris that he heard of an opening to teach in America at a college founded by Swedish immigrants in Lindsborg, Kansas. He taught at Bethany College for 52 years with occasional guest professorships at The Broadmoor Art Academy (later the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center), Denver School of Art, Stephens College, The Kansas City Art Institute, Utah State College, and the University of Michigan. He was offer professorships elsewhere but loved Lindsborg and was dedicated to Bethany College. He was an associate member of the Taos Society of Artists, and a founder of the Prairie printmakers.

Sandzen’s subject matter rarely included people or still life. He was taken with the landscape of midwest and western America. He had always been a keen student of nature, studying biology and botany in his early school years, as well as geology, a course in which his instructor had the students make enlarged brush and ink images of rock formations.

Sandzen later said he did not paint landscape just to record a picture of a place but rather the place he drew or painted inspired his personal response. Sandzen’s wide directional lines made with brush, litho crayon, or woodblock carving, along with the color harmony developed in his study of pointillism caused many people to compare his work with that of Van Gogh. However, Sandzen developed his style long before he heard of Van Gogh.

In 1940, Sandzen was honored by the King of Sweden for promoting cultural relations between Sweden and the United States. After Sandzen’s death, The Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery was opened in Lindsborg, Kansas. (For more information on the Sandzen Memorial Gallery: www.sandzen.org ) 

Lipstick - Etching     11 ½ X 14 ½

RAPHAEL SOYER 1899 - 1987

Raphael Soyer was born in southern Russia. Both he and his twin brother, Moses, became artists. The family emigrated to the United States in 1912, settling in the Bronx district of New York City.

Raphael Soyer went to the free art schools of Cooper Union between 1914 and 1917 then continuing for two years at the National Academy of Design and later at the Art Students League.. He was greatly influenced by the Ashcan School artists that described the neighborhoods with which he was familiar.

Soyer became associated with the Fourteenth Street School of painters that included Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Peggy Bacon and, his teacher, Guy Pene du Bois. Soyer persistently investigated a number of themes—female nudes, portraits of friends and family, New York and, especially, its people—in his paintings, drawings, watercolors and prints. He also painted a vast number of self-portraits throughout his career. Soyer was adamant in his belief in representational art and strongly opposed the dominant force of abstract art during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

After his time in art school, Soyer did not immediately begin working as a professional artist, and instead painted during his free time while working other jobs. Soyer's first solo exhibition took place in 1929. Beginning in the early 1930s, he showed regularly in the large annual and biennial American exhibitions of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Carnegie Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1967 the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited a retrospective of his work.

Museums with his work include the Butler Institute of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, and others

Thanks for Reading! Watch for our next newsletter in January 2025... We wish you all a great Holiday Season and we thank all those who have contributed and helped this cause. 

Sincerely, your Team...