Upcoming Exhibition

In Good Company: Eli Levin and the New Mexico Realists

Eli Levin, The Blue Dance Hall, 1980, oil on canvas, 36 × 48 in. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Robert M. Bell and Stirling M. Puck, 1995 (1995.49.2). © Eli Levin. Photo by Addison Doty.

The New Mexico Museum of Art is pleased to announce In Good Company: Eli Levin and the New Mexico Realists, an exhibition celebrating the work and enduring influence of Dixon-based artist and 2026 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts honoree Eli Levin. With a practice spanning more than 70 years, Levin’s work as a maker, writer, teacher, and organizer has earned him a notable place in northern New Mexico’s artistic community. His subjects inhabit barrooms, studios, bedrooms, streets, and solitary landscapes. They include working-class people, mythical figures, and human stories depicted through etching, watercolor, and egg tempera.

Levin arrived in Taos in 1964 by motorbike. after studying in Madison, Wisconsin, and at several East Coast art schools. A month later he settled in Santa Fe and began working as a bartender at the former Claude’s Bar on Canyon Road. There, Levin was introduced to members of the Santa Fe and Taos art colonies. Artists including Louie Ewing, Arthur Haddock, and Whitman Johnson became close friends as Levin grew deeply embedded in the painting, drawing, and printmaking communities along Santa Fe’s Canyon Road.

By the 1970s, Levin was at the epicenter of a profound transformation in northern New Mexico’s artistic culture. During this period, a flood of artists moved to the region, drawn by New Mexico’s distinctive high desert climate and landscape, its cultural diversity and its growing reputation as a center for the visual arts. Amid this dramatic expansion, Levin managed and opened multiple DIY galleries, wrote art criticism for The New Mexican, and continued to paint in a social-realist style. Through grassroots organizing, Levin created opportunities beyond established galleries and dealers. He founded the Santa Fe Etching and Drawing Clubs, providing artists with spaces, materials, and time to make and share their work. These clubs helped launch the careers of artists including Carol Mothner, Zara Kriegstein, and Donald Fabricant while preserving the hands-on traditions of drawing and printmaking.

In Good Company: Eli Levin and the New Mexico Realists is ultimately both an exhibition of an individual artist and a portrait of an artistic community. At its heart is Levin’s mastery of material and narrative, marked by an acute sensitivity to gesture, atmosphere, and the human condition. Bringing together his artwork with materials from his personal archive, the exhibition highlights Levin’s concern for social struggle and his belief in the importance of creative community, participation, generosity, and shared practice.

 

Featured Art

A color painting depicting a hazy, soft light falling on a row of adobe homes. In the foreground, a tree shows off a laden bounty of orange stone fruits.
A darkened still life of rich earth tones shows off a small collection arranged on a shelf, recessed into the picture plane. The objects on the shelf are (from left to right) an ancient clay figure of a woman, a blue and white vase with dried flowers, a taxidermy horned toad, and a woodcarving depicting a seated figure. Above these objects, a black and white photo of a man and woman is painted as though attached to the top edge of the recess.
A black and white etching of a horse skull and greenery set against a large glass window. Beyond, a vast desert landscape stretches toward the horizon.
A watercolor painting depicting an adobe home and set of fence posts at a transitional season. Leaf-less tree branches stretch into the blue sky as shadows fall across the landscape of rugged earth.
A full-color silkscreen of an almost-empty bar evokes the lonesome emptiness of the wee hours before last call. Empty green and red booths rim the exterior of the image, while a long, empty barhop just into space with a singular bartender clasping his hands. In the back of the barroom, a lonely barfly nurses his drink.
A black and white etching of the dualities of the arts industry in Santa Fe, woth the image divided almost nearly in half by a vertical line separating outside from inside. On the right side of the image, a floor to ceiling glass window allows us to peer into a busy art gallery as an artist entertains gallerygoers and buyers in front of his work. To the left on the building’s exterior, an alley is packed with art and artists trying to sell their work on the sidewalk. In the foreground, a man and woman appear to be engaged in a seedy conversation.
A black and white etching of a nude woman standing at the edge of a pool of water, gazing down at her reflection as she takes a trepidatious step toward the edge of the pool. She pulls a towel against her pelvis in a neoclassical pose, as water pours from a spout and casts ripples along the pool’s surface. Behind her, doric columns and an amphora suggest the setting of a Greek temple or palace.
A cartoonish, loose line drawing depicting an urban street bustling with activity. Theater marquees advertise skin flicks as women and men loiter along the sidewalk. A break in traffic allows a young boy to cross the busy street, headed toward one of the seedy venues.
A black and white etching shows what appears to be two men destroying artwork – one holding a canvas up while another stamps a hole in the middle of a painting. On the right-hand side of the image, the presumed artist is restrained at the wrists by two other men, forced to watch as his life’s work is ruined.
A heavenly light shines on a tumbling mass of bargoers as a singular figure appears to receive some kind of message from beyond. The body of this man twists as if in ecstasy (or agony), calling back to old master paintings from the Renaissance. Chairs and tables tilt and rock as Levin’s subjects pile atop the bar counter, silhouetted in a dramatic contrast between light and shadow.