Opening Reception Friday, January 26, 5 – 7 pm
Angela Ellsworth and Raphaelle Goethals are powerhouse women artists working in Santa Fe, making a big mark on the national art world in very different ways. Angela Ellsworth is an iconic figure in feminist and LGBTQ+ art circles. It’s widely known that her ancestor was notorious Morman prophet Lorenzo Snow, a polygamist who married a 16-year-old girl in his 50s. Ellsworth has dedicated her art practice to healing that legacy, often referencing the pain of women in her heritage who were silenced and oppressed. Ellsworth is well known for her “seer bonnets,” modeled after those her female ancestors wore. While beautiful on the outside, appearing adorned with pearls, the bonnets are instruments of torture on the inside. Ellsworth uses pearlized corsage pins as her prima materia, with their needle-like prongs cutting into the flesh of the female wearer. Ellsworth is enjoying massive exposure this year, with numerous works featured in Vladem Contemporary’s opening exhibition and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s Cowboy exhibition that will travel to the Amon Carter Museum simultaneously with Ellsworth’s opening at Turner Carroll.
Raphaelle Goethals is well known in the Santa Fe art community for her moody encaustic abstractions. Her works create a quiet, poetic space for viewers to lose themselves in their expanse. Goethals has long referenced her works in connection with the natural elements of water, air, fire, and earth. She describes our New Mexico sky as our desert ocean, often titling her blue painting series Liquid Sky. When Michael Carroll and Tonya Turner Carroll made the curatorial decision to pair Goethals’ quiet, pensive paintings with Ellsworth’s specific feminist works, they immediately envisioned the real lived experience of Ellsworth’s ancestors, walking beneath Goethals’ warm liquid sky.