Gallery With A Cause • Located in the New Mexico Cancer Center • Benefitting the NMCC Foundation
Please call gallery director Regina Held to arrange a private gallery tour, make a purchase, or ask any questions.
I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, attended the University of Texas, and then moved to Taos, New Mexico where I became immersed in my art career in addition to teaching art. My teachers were not only the famous local landscape painters, Alyce Frank and Barbara Zaring that I painted with every week, or Fritz Scholder that I studied with, but also the early Taos Art Society Founders whose works I learned from. I read Robert Henri’s “The Art Spirit” and stood painting the same scenes that Joseph Sharp and Herbert Dunton had painted. I studied the French Impressionists and the Fauves, the Cubists and then finally the Abstract Expressionists.
In 1990 I moved to Albuquerque to attend the University of New Mexico. By that time, I had already been showing my work nationally and had exhibited with several of my professors. My main goal in getting a BFA was to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of Art History. I graduated with honors in 1993. I had planned on pursuing a master’s in fine art but instead received a Master of Education to care for my young autistic son while staying involved in art. I taught for Albuquerque Public Schools for sixteen years as well as teaching in the Art Ed Department at UNM. I retired from the public schools in December of 2018 but continue to teach at UNM as well as the New Mexico Art League. I am a two-time Golden Apple Distinguished Teacher, my landscapes have graced the New Mexico magazine’s yearly calendar, and I am a recipient of the ABQ Local Treasure Award. My abstracts have been bought by Albuquerque’s Urban Enhancement Program and by the New Mexico sates 1% for the Arts Program eleven times. These works are installed in public buildings all over the state and made it way to a Museum in Turkmenistan and to the United States Ambassador’s home in Brazil. My work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in numerous public, private and corporate collections.
I have painted the Southwest for over forty years. My work ranges from objective landscapes which capture the essence of the small valleys and grand vistas of the Southwest to non-objective abstracts which spring from my deep passion for color, shape and spirit.