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Jordan Eddy

@obscuratorial

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Editor-in-chief of @swcontemporary. Contributor to Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, + Hyperallergic.

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To make strange. 👽 “We have a disease,” said Dorothea Lange (1895-1965). “It’s Jap-baiting and hatred.” The documentary photographer, famous for her Dust Bowl imagery, accepted a World War II–era assignment to photograph the incarceration of Japanese Americans. Her employer was the War Relocation Authority, mandated by FDR to imprison over 120,000 citizens.

“Lange was an odd choice, given her leftist politics and strong sympathy for victims of racial discrimination,” writes scholar @meganasakaphd, noting that Lange expressed “guilt stricken” feelings about signing on to the 1942 project. Lange was forbidden to capture “the wire fences, the watchtowers with searchlights, the armed guards or any sign of resistance,” according to @nytimes.

With her frame constrained, Lange focused on her subjects’ faces as they waited on city streets, boarded mass transportation, and grappled with deplorable conditions at the rural camps. By pushing in on all the impoverished tedium, she forced viewers to imagine the brutality filling her subjects’ sight lines. She visited twenty-one sites in a few short months before quitting.

Lange later said that she’d “learned a lot, even if I accomplished nothing.” She didn’t live to see an exhibition of the images in the ‘70s, which helped stoke a campaign for an official apology and modest reparations in the ‘80s.

By the time contemporary artist @tt_takemoto—whose ancestors were imprisoned—started studying official imagery from the camps, they faced a new challenge: re-weirding the space. Artists focused on this history “all use the same footage, because it’s… in the public domain. You always see the same grandpa eating, the same military policeman with the rifle.”

Takemoto has worked “to use simple techniques to make strange” the imagery, fragmenting and time-shifting it in video installations and performances. Takemoto appears in my feature “Enemy Aliens” for @swcontemporary Vol. 14: Alien, on the exhibition “Reclaiming the Future: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration” at @newmexicoartmuseum Vladem Contemporary. I came upon Lange’s images while reporting, and used some of them in the story. Link in bio. by @obscuratorial

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New ceremonies. 🌙 When the bones arrived in @ericalord’s home village of Nenana, Alaska, there was no clear protocol for their reburial. “We were the closest village they could identify them to,” says Lord, who spent part of her childhood in the Lower Tanana Athabascan community. “I remember my dad being like, what are we supposed to do?”

The return was a result of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a 1990 law requiring museums and federal agencies to surrender Native remains and sacred objects to lineal descendants. For much of American history, Lord points out, “it was perfectly legal to dig us up.”

Receiving the remains was one matter, but Athabascan grief traditions—potlatches, songs, dances, purification, and burial—are informed by the deceased person’s identity and family. Who did these uprooted bones belong to? Amid the deliberations, Lord recalled conversations with her mentor, the Native performance artist James Luna.

“We had talked about the fact that we don’t have ceremony for pollution or global warming or these things, so we need to make new ceremonies,” says Lord. “And performance being that.” And so they gathered for a reburial, to “treat [the remains] as nicely as we could.”

Lord, who now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has spent months preparing for her own quasi-wake. That’s how her friend and colleague Lara Evans (@art_allovr) has described her performance Artifact Piece, Revisited, a sanctioned reinterpretation of Luna’s most famous work Artifact Piece (1987). In the work, she lies motionless in a display case on a bed of sand, surrounded by personal possessions and placards describing her in anthropological detail.

I recently wrote a @swcontemporary story (link in bio) about Lord’s protracted return to the piece, which she hadn’t performed since 2008, in @sitesantafe’s current exhibition Indian Theater. This Saturday at 12:30 pm at Site, she’ll perform it again as part of a full day of performances, readings, and a book launch. The event also features @ericpaulriege, @kentmonkman, @cannupahanska, Tara Evonne Trudell, @jrickardmakes, and curator Candice Hopkins of @forgeprojectny. taken in SITE SANTA FE by @obscuratorial

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Loops. 🪡 Carolina Franco recently scooped up Edgar Picazo Merino, sweaty and triumphant, at a U.S.-Mexico border crossing. The curator and artist was ferrying one of those huge, flat cardboard boxes from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso. Whatever was inside was framed, and heavy.

If you want to get some art together in this particular place, you’d better hone your customs banter. Franco, Picazo Merino, and a host of other collaborators are gathering *a lot* of artworks over the next few months, but their true aim is to propel people across the line.

The fall event series they’re planning functions as a literal and conceptual border zipper. It’s called Sutura—“suture” in Spanish—and demands constant motion from its participants, who will alternate between Juárez and El Paso, dropping into tight-knit (and interlinked) art scenes. The five-day circuit comprises more than twenty spaces featuring over 100 artists.

I spoke with Picazo Merino, founder and lead organizer of @sutura_sutura, ahead of today’s announcement for the “binational art encounter.” He had a lot to say about “contraband,” more than I could fit in the resulting breaking-news Q+A (link in bio).

“Contraband, not only meaning the stuff that you cross back and forth that’s not allowed, but just this idea of going against the rules,” he says. Contraband as an ethos, or a practice, is what Picazo Merino embodied for eight years after he lost his U.S. passport. He’s a dual citizen, and rather than replacing it he would just talk his way through to Texas.

This experience inspired his 2022 text-based artwork Contraband is a Human Right. “Each letter was covered with material that has been banned from crossing between the U.S. and Mexico,” he says. “There’s leather, gold, silver, pills, feathers, dog food. If they catch you, they will ask you for a bribe.”

When the artwork went on view at the Rubin Center in El Paso, “I actually got hate mail from some dude… it said, ‘How dare you?’ I loved it.” Picazo Merino’s new project is more about fostering cross-border connections, but he and his cohort have never been afraid to provoke. Sometimes that’s how you get things moving in the direction they need to go. taken in El Paso Texas/Juarez by @obscuratorial

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Webs. 🕸️“But you know, grandson, this world is fragile,” says Laguna Pueblo medicine man Ku’oosh, in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony. The passage continues, “The word he chose to express ‘fragile’ was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs… where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web.”

My guess at the lesson, imparted to a character with severe PTSD, is that it’s the nature of the world to collapse around us. Things are fragile but cyclical; the sun is bound to rise, and your web will catch its rays so long as you’ve strung it again.

The passage summoned another weaver for me: Agnes Martin, with her gossamer painted grids. Martin publicly spoke about “visions” and an “inner voice” that guided her artistic practice. However, she did not discuss her schizophrenia, which sometimes plunged her into distressing delusions and auditory hallucinations. Is it right or fair to posthumously associate Martin’s creations with her collapses?

I’m considering Martin again because my story about her, Queen Agnes, won third place for feature writing in the @nmpresswomen journalism contest.

The piece (link in bio) is about Martin’s late-in-life turn toward community. It appears in @swcontemporary’s “Obsession” issue, and I fretted about being an armchair psychologist as I wrote it. I worked with living subjects to capture moments of direct connection with her. But memories tangle, and besides, Martin concertedly contradicted herself in the retelling of things. For all my fact-checking, there’s a layered fiction to a story like this.

So, why tell the story at all—at least in a journalistic mode? Because the narrative can and will and should pull apart again. To gather today’s threads is to offer them up for future harvest.

Looking at photos of Martin from her visits to Maine’s Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (images 1-2) calms my discomfort with this idea. Martin is among fellow artists, preparing a lecture and gazing out at the lake. My story feels true. But her expressions are ambiguous, entirely plumbable to the next hopeful fool who takes up the story. taken in New Mexico by @obscuratorial

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New Talent. 🔺That’s the theme of @artinamerica’s summer issue, which features studio visits with twenty early-career artists, including my piece on Santa Fe–based artist @terranlastgun (Piikani). I focused on Last Gun’s artistic practice in the issue, but our interview surged through his other creative pursuits: curating, archiving. Emerging in 2026 seems to involve cultivating at least three “new talents” at once.

Last summer, Last Gun opened shows in Santa Fe, New York, and Los Angeles in quick succession, including @sitesantafe’s 12th biennial. We joked that he’d completed the “Terran triangle,” an enviable but highly pressurized formation with a new set of challenges. He seemed invigorated by his production schedule for new art, but frustrated by his ongoing pursuit of older work for a database.

Last Gun wasn’t trying to get his work back, just determine the current location of everything, but was running into the varied client disclosure policies of the galleries he’d engaged. The archive will help furnish key loans for a growing slate of curatorial projects.

First up is the binational traveling show Connections: Niitsitapi and Winold Reiss, debuting at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture in Missoula in fall 2027. It features portraits that Reiss, an early-20th century German American painter, made of Niitsitapi (Blackfoot/Blackfeet) people throughout their homelands—which are now divided by the U.S.-Canada border—and also includes work by Last Gun and other co-curators.

Among the Reiss works Last Gun dreams of showing are separate portraits of Kainai Nation chief Shot Both Sides and his wife Long Time Pipe Woman, which are in museum collections on either side of the border. Their prospective reunion reveals the true thrust of Last Gun’s cross-disciplinary work, which transcends individual careerism in pursuit of post-colonial wholeness.

Thanks to @keys_wallet_phone for the assignment, and to my editor @andybattaglia9. My centerfold story includes an art insert—dreamy! The piece isn’t online yet, but you can get the issue on newsstands or at the link in bio. taken in Santa Fe, New Mexico by @obscuratorial

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The heat, the dust. 🌬️The New Mexico Field Guide 2026 is out today, in print and on the @swcontemporary website (link in bio). It’s our annual guide to the arts and culture of NM, including a big ‘ol events calendar that has me fantastically excited for the high season.

But even if you’re not in the state, the feature stories are worth a read—particularly @badd_ribbon’s report on Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros (link in bio), an exhibition of monumental adobe installations that spans @harwoodmuseum, @fortgarlandmuseum, and over thirty adobe sites across NM and CO. The group show, principally curated by @nicoledialkay and @a_damn_guitar, has a stacked artist list: rafa esparza, Ronald Rael, @tino_ufo, @soychaile, @jokeanelopez, and @chsandoval44.

I wrote about @indianpueblo Cultural Center’s 50th anniversary for the issue (link in bio), focusing on its position as a center of Indigenous sovereignty in a city—but at the periphery of Pueblo life. Thanks to collections curator Amy @_lunarjohnson (Isleta Pueblo) for the quotes, and head curator @mlanteri80 for the background.

I particularly loved Johnson’s description of IPCC’s courtyard: “It has that plaza feel: the blue open sky, the heat, the dust—you’re just drenched in sunlight and the crows are hanging around.” The whole issue carries that brightness and dynamism. Oh, New Mexico!

As always, gratitude to my colleagues @yes.trespassing and @nataliehegert, and to our interns @rociorodriguezstudio and Nancy Martinez. And to issue contributors @ricaroux, @adeledeo, @olivia.amayaortiz, @kathryne.lim, and Maggie Grimason. Congrats to @jaketrujilloart, our cover artist and studio visit subject. taken in New Mexico by @obscuratorial

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Marfas Everywhere. 🐉 The coup de grâce for Jen Zakur’s Los Angeles career was a dehydrated poop capsule—or actually 100 of them, sealed in a ziplock bag. The shitter was an artist named Matty Mo, known for his rise in LA producing viral stunts as @themostfamousartist. @jenzed was the creative producer for Mo’s artwork “The Most Shittiest NFT” (2021), which aimed to sell real and virtual versions of his microbiome to spread the word about cutting-edge microbial science.

“I was producing 7 projects at once, that was just one of them,” says Zakur, who was working overtime for a biotech startup and planning a remote Alaskan vacation. “It had to be finished before I went off the grid.” She was still hustling on the way to the airport, ferrying the loaded baggie—car windows down—to a colleague’s house ahead of a photo shoot. (Later, someone opened the bag “aggressively, not knowing what it was,” and got a full whiff.)

“I knew I was burned out before this project was pitched to me,” Zakur recalls, “but the idiocy of it really was just like, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’” She’d tapped herself out—and “abused [her] own community”—to float someone’s fecal matter among layers of glass in a flawless cube. It never sold. Right after her shares in the startup vested she was out, moving to New Mexico for art therapy school.

Mo, whose real name is Matthew Monahan, was meanwhile careening toward a similar epiphany. Even the begetter of the piece wasn’t keen on the smell of his own shit. “Was the work… aesthetically or intellectually interesting to me? Not always,” he says. “The Most Famous Artist was a cynical thing. That doesn’t mean I’m a cynic.”

By the time I met Mo, he was living in Tucumcari, NM, and seemed as sincere as a Boy Scout. He was somewhat thanklessly assembling arts infrastructure in the tiny Route 66 town, in an attempt to turn it into the next Marfa, TX. Mo and I wandered @visitartcity, a roadside attraction he designed to magnetize artists and catalyze a creative boomtown. Find out how it’s going at the link in bio, in my feature story “Marfas Everywhere” for @swcontemporary Vol. 13 — The Road. by @obscuratorial

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Licorice. 🧚 Like any upstanding art world citizen, Marisa Sage has stoked her fair share of hedonism. In 2006, she founded @likethespice gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a 1,200-square-foot space that championed emerging artists and served Two Buck Chuck at its openings. Then the neighborhood gallery association landed a sponsorship with @pernod_absinthe.

“The Williamsburg scene blew up so hardcore that at openings, you literally could not move,” says Sage. “The whole gallery would smell like Pernod for, like, two weeks after Second Friday. No matter what you did, you could not get licorice out of your gallery.” She’d sell artworks at a private dinner before each opening, and then fret about their safety amid the mayhem.

Sage is the new executive director of @newmexicoartmuseum, and I just met up with her at @lamamasantafe, seven days into her tenure. The resulting Q+A (link in bio) is pretty serious—she’s at the helm of the state’s most historically freighted art museum, after all—but outtakes from our conversation reveal Sage’s scrappy curatorial roots.

She organized her first exhibitions as a graduate student at @marylandinstitutecollegeofart, in a Baltimore studio called the CopyCat Building. “They let me use this ginormous space, and we also could go down the hallways because the live-work spaces were off that,” recalls Sage. She soon branched out, teaching at charter schools while “rogue curating with a couple of friends” in spaces all over Baltimore.

The Brooklyn gallery project came next—hosting sixty-five shows over six years—but while the absinthe-soaked version of the story sounds glamorous, she’s quick to clarify that the gallery was built on “family loans and credit cards.” “I don’t understand why people lie about that in the art world,” Sage says. “It’s like, great, someone’s gonna read this and think they can start a gallery with, you know, one credit card and $50k. Don’t do it.”

After closing Like the Spice in 2012—“in the positive,” mind you—Sage started down an institutional path passing through @remahortmannfund, @salisburyartgalleries, and @nmsuartmuseum, eventually leading to NMMA. Read more about that in @swcontemporary today. taken in Williamsburg by @obscuratorial

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Mother Road. 🚗 Route 66 was bound to haunt @swcontemporary Vol. 13: The Road (out today, read it on the SWC homepage—link in bio), but it took me a while to realize we had a poltergeist on our hands. It’s the 100th birthday of the iconic highway that linked Chicago and Santa Monica on a meandering diagonal, slashing across the American Southwest.

I wasn’t afraid to field 66’s ideological cargo—its capitalistic imports and romantic exports—but then things got personal. First, the Mother Road nearly infiltrated our editorial process by winding her way through the AI hive mind—and into the pen of an infamous scammer (“Ghost Roads,” @nataliehegert, also linked in bio). Then I opted to winter, alone, in a Route 66 roadside attraction, a ghostly tale I didn’t pitch for the issue because I’m still feeling scrambled by it. (I know this is tantalizing, more soon.)

Finally, @yes.trespassing and I broke down in the Route 66 town of Holbrook, AZ, on our way to launch the issue at @scottsdale_art_week (images 2-6). Holbrook has about 5,000 people (including an excellent mechanic named Marco) and some historical specters: derpy dinosaur sculptures roam the streets, and infamous outlaws populate folk art panels in the steakhouse.

Holbrook’s thicket of histories and mythologies had me thinking again of the outsized legend of Marfa, Texas, which inspired my feature story in Vol. 13 (also linked in bio). It also includes writing by @clouds_de_september, @socialmalpractice, Laura Neal, Chris Shaw, @anikatodd, @ricaroux, @theroyalyoung, Parker Yamasaki, Pete Wardell, @artmusingsaz, @aurora__tang, @eeeeeeeeerin, @emma_snow, Maggie Grimason, @joshua.ware, @maxxenemyy, @crabgod, @scottiaustinhill, and @badd_ribbon. Gratitude to my collaborators Lauren Tresp, @nataliehegert, and Blake Osmond, and to our lovely interns Nancy Varela and @rociorodriguezstudio. The cover of this issue is by @madelinerupard.

If you’re in Scottsdale, hit me up for an invite to our launch party, Saturday night at @desarthe_usa. And if you’re anywhere else, read Vol. 13: The Road online now. taken in Scottsdale, Arizona by @obscuratorial

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Fire ecology. 🌱 Before @rinkokawauchi photographed Aso, Japan, she dreamed of it. She saw a village at the foot of a volcano, with “many people and horses together in a green meadow.” The next morning, still “half-asleep,” she flipped on the television and saw strangely similar footage of Aso. Its citizens have practiced yakihata, a controlled-burn farming technique, for 1,300 years. The town’s verdant hillsides are born of fire and ash.

One of Kawauchi’s images from Aso, of a blazing knoll, is the final cover of @artpapers. As a contributor to the issue, seeing it was a dreamlike moment linking two passages of my life. When I was gallery director of @formandconcept in Santa Fe, we featured Kawauchi’s Aso imagery—including a different view of the same hill—in a 2024 group exhibition (images 2-5). I remember feeling seduced and haunted by Aso’s flame ribbons, which encircle the village for a few days each fall. The works visualize grief: its creep, crackle, sear, and eventual passage.

My engagement with Art Papers is more recent but just as fiery and grief-ridden: I met Sarah Higgins (@pistachiocake), the Atlanta-based publication’s executive and artistic director, at an arts writing symposium last fall. She was immersed in Fire Ecology, a three-year initiative to sunset Art Papers and share wisdom from its half-century run, so that younger magazines like @swcontemporary might survive and thrive.

It was a solace to give back to Art Papers amid the torch pass. My story in the issue features side-by-side interviews with Higgins and @tempestthazel of the Chicago-based experimental arts platform @sixtyinchesfromcenter. Their sentiments are often stark. Hazel told me, “If we, as a community, don’t value these publications [then] it’s almost like we have to feel the pains of their absence.”

Art Papers only exists in print, so watch my stories for a link to order a copy! My piece is paired with artwork from @jamesperkinsstudio’s Burying Painting series—more art that swirls life and death, oblivion and gardening (image 6). taken in Atlanta, GA by @obscuratorial

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Ambition. 🐝 In her New York years, Lucy R. Lippard saw twenty to thirty exhibitions a week. “I knew she was busy,” @alexandra__terry told me, “but the reality was way beyond what I imagined.” At the time, Terry was in the final stretch of curating Lucy R. Lippard: Notes from the Radical Whirlwind, a show of the New Mexico–based writer, curator, and activist’s collection at Vladem Contemporary (@newmexicoartmuseum) in Santa Fe.

There’s an idea that you have to be everywhere at once to break through in the art world. Terry learned that for Lippard, who hit the art beat in the 1960s, the mandate felt literal. At the dawn of mass media, when artists were multiplying their faces with the flick of a silkscreen, Lippard did it by showing up. It was “endless openings for twenty-five years—I was steeped in this stuff, paid my dues,” she told @brooklynrail in 2017.

My Brooklyn Rail review of Lippard’s new show (link in bio) opens with some other 20th-century feminist marketing tactics. Lippard projected images by women artists onto the @whitneymuseum, while her friend @harmony_hammond inserted them into instructional slide decks at university libraries. But I think the mind-boggling range of these women—their sacrifice of shoe leather far beyond New York—was their real secret for affecting societal transformation.

The art and ephemera in Radical Whirlwind is far-flung in its origins, charting Lippard’s late-1960s political awakening and her creative turn toward transnational solidarities. She advanced an anti-imperialist cultural politics, foregrounding artists working across borders and outside U.S.-centric art-world circuits. And she broke that tight loop herself with projects like her “Numbers Shows,” which activated cities across the Americas from Vancouver to Buenos Aires.

At the Vladem opening, Lippard surveyed her collection and joked that it looked like she took bribes. But I think it all adds up to a brutal truth. As Hammond said at a recent talk at @tamarindinstitute, “[We realized] we don’t have to keep hitting our head against the wall. I mean, waiting to be recognized. We’ll just do it ourselves.” Easier said than done. taken in New Mexico Museum of Art by @obscuratorial

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