SITE Santa Fe to Open Revamped Biennial

Agnes Denes, Wheatfield–A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill (1982), New York, commissioned by Public Art Fund. Photo courtesy of John McGrail.

This weekend, New Mexico’s SITE Santa Fe International Biennial is reborn as a new exhibition series, SITElines.2014: Unsettled Landscapes.

SITE Santa Fe first launched its signature biennial in 1995, but cancelled the 2012 edition, taking the time to rethink the institution. The first iteration of SITE Santa Fe’s reimagined biennial series focuses on contemporary art from the Americas, with a particular emphasis on new and under-recognized art.

The event’s themes are threefold: landscape, territory, and trade, explored through the larger lens of political issues and the historical narrative. The exhibition will explore artists’ representations of the land, of movement across it, and of economies and resources derived from it, and how such issues are interconnected. It will feature 45 artists from 16 countries, including 12 newly commissioned works.

“It now looks to geography as a structural framework, to the history of New Mexico as an inspiration, and to the Americas as a vast territory for exploration,” SITE Santa Fe’s director and chief curator, Irene Hofmann, said of the revamped event in a press release.

The organization hopes to establish continuity across editions of the event, which will now be conceived of as part of a larger SITElines series, titled “New Perspectives on Art of the Americas.”

SITElines.2014: Unsettled Landscapes opens to the public July 20, and remains on view through January 15, 2015. 


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