Art in the West: Judy Chicago x Donald Woodman's Art Mecca in New Mexico
🏜 We love a historic building out West, and even more so when an iconic American artist reinvents it ~ Enter Feminist Artist @judy.chicago x her husband, Photographer @donaldwoodman’s New Mexico Art Mecca, Hotel Belen, Est. 2019. The creative pair transformed a one time hotel in a remote desert town into a center of imaginative output. 🌵 90min south of Santa Fe, Belen has been Judy's home for nearly 30 years.
Hotel Belen ~ Belen, New Mexico
🍽 Via @archdigest: "When you set out to give the women who were largely shut out from the history of Western civilization a literal seat at the table, you need a big table. By the time Chicago completed The Dinner Party in 1979, her triangular banquet table stretched 48' in each direction, big enough to accommodate a fantasy league of all-female power players: the Greek poet Sappho; suffragist Susan B. Anthony; and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female physician in the United States."
🛤 Belen was a thriving railroad town in the early 20th century. Near its still active rail yards, they stumbled upon the Belen Hotel, a derelict former rooming house built in 1907 - still on the #NationalRegisterofHistoricPlaces. They paid $20,000 for the building. “There wasn't a window that wasn't busted out,” Woodman recalls. “The roof leaked like a sieve.” But Woodman, who had grown up in New England, saw the romance in the building’s hulking Victorian lines.
📍In the decades since they blazed a trail to Belen —pop. 7,152— their own dinner table has hosted its share of pilgrims. Among the signatures in their old-fashioned, ledger-style guest book are museum directors & curators who have come to pay homage, plus old friends like Gloria Steinem. “People from Santa Fe view Belen much like New Yorkers see the world beyond the Hudson Valley—i.e., is there life there?” Chicago says. “We used to joke that it was easier to get visitors from China than from Santa Fe.”
🌸 Visit their sister space, @throughtheflowerartspace - reopens this Friday, 6/17/22. It was founded in ‘77 as a non-profit org to manage the overwhelming public support of The Dinner Party (1974-1979). It continues to provide opportunities for learning about women's history through art. // #emotifExplores
