We are so excited to be collaborating with our local ski basin, Ski Santa Fe this season! Here’s the deal:
1. Take a photo of your winter experience at Ski Santa Fe.
2. Post it to Instagram including hashtag #skibueno and tag @skisantafe (be sure to make your profile public so we can see it!)
3. We’ll choose one image per week to then culminate into a photo exhibition held at La Casa Lodge on the ski basin at the end of the season on April 4, 2025. We’ll then choose one ‘best-in-show’ to receive a 2025-2026 ski pass as the winner. Prints are sponsored by Rush Creek Editions in Santa Fe. Juried by Obscura Gallery.
It has been a great 2024 year for Rashod Taylor! We landed his work in three institutions this year including the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution. It was eight years ago that the museum opened its doors in Washington, D.C, where the public can learn about the richness and diversity of the African American experience, what it means to their lives, and how it helped us shape this nation.
In addition, we were also thrilled to place Rashod’s work with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri and the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division in Washington D.C., both whom acquired work from the My America and the Little Black Boy series, all of which we exhibited at our gallery and the AIPAD fair over the past several years. Congratulations to Rashod and his poignant and beautiful work on this major milestone!
Santa Fe New Mexican, Pasatiempo, By Ania Hull, Friday, August 23, 2024
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
“Two Artists from differing walks of life – multidisciplinary Native artist Douglas Miles and New York graffiti pioneer Al Díaz – come together to create works of cultural parallels.”
Curated by Rotem Rozental On view December 16 through February 24, 2024
We are so proud of OG artist Aline Smithson for her solo exhibition The Ephemeral Archive at the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Aline is one of the most important figures in contemporary photography today bringing attention to her contemporaries in photography for over two decades via Lenscratch, with also a career of creating poignant portraits and photographs for even longer, and she has brought the two together in this incredible solo show of her photograph installations, interactive performance pieces, and an experimental film, alongside a curated exhibition by Rotem Rozental, If Memory Serves, of Aline’s photographic contemporaries.
“Aline Smithson has long been considering how photographs move through time—as conveyors of memory, history, and being. The Ephemeral Archive, her new exhibition with Los Angeles Center of Photography at the Brand Library & Art Center, is an expansive and conceptual exploration of the power that family photographs hold and the alarming potential of losing our visual legacies to platforms that corrupt, potentially losing whole histories of being in the process.”
This Fall we were thrilled to facilitate the sale of Obscura Gallery artist Rania Matar’s portfolio of 50 prints from A Girl and Her Room to the Library of Congress for their permanent collection!
RANIA MATAR, Stephanie, Beirut, Lebanon, 2010
RANIA MATAR, Lubna, Lebanon, 2010
RANIA MATAR, Mariam, Bourj al Shamali Palestinian Refugee Camp, Tyre, Lebanon, 2009
Focusing on contemporary young women from vastly differing cultures in the United States and Lebanon, Rania Matar’s project and book, A Girl and Her Room, reveals the complex lives of her subjects in the unique setting of the girls’ own rooms. Besides the expected cultural and economic differences and similarities that inevitably are drawn out using such an approach, these portraits of the girls and their bedrooms—reveal a dizzying array of personalities, dreams, hopes, wishes and frustrations in settings that are clearly expressions of the girls’ individual identities. The nuances shown in each room, and in the portrait of each young woman, reveal an acute photographer’s eye for telling detail.
As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, Rania Matar’s cross-cultural experiences inform her art. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood—both in the United States where she lives, and in the Middle East where she is from. Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. She has received several grants and awards including a 2019 CENTER First Place Choice Award, 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. Most recently, in 2022 Rania was awarded the Leica Women Foto Project Award. She has had mid-career retrospectives at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the American University of Beirut Museum. Her work is in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Obscura Gallery is devoting the entire 2023 AIPAD booth to a survey of the late Kurt Markus’s storied photographic career. Kurt Markus was “celebrated as a fine artist and a chronicler of the American West” as Alex Williams wrote in The New York Times when Markus passed away last year. Kurt is perhaps best known for his portraits of cowboys in the American West and also enjoyed a distinguished career as one of the world’s preeminent fashion photographers. Over the course of a decade, Obscura Gallery owner Jennifer Schlesinger curated three solo exhibitions of Kurt Markus’s work including TheFashion Years retrospective, Monument Valley 2002-2017, and Dunes, Namibia 2002-2008, as well as a Cowboys in the West exhibition, all of which will be included in Obscura Gallery’s booth at The Photography Show presented by AIPAD. Kurt’s latest book published posthumously, Christy, chronicles the travels he and model Christy Turlington made over the course of a 25 year-long friendship, and the book and prints will be available for sale in the AIPAD booth as well.
We could not be more thrilled and honored to have placed four of Rania Matar’s pieces from the SHE series into the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. Thank you to all who made this possible and congratulations to Rania Matar!
By: T. D. Mobley-Martinez for the Pasatiempo, Santa Fe New Mexican
Lou Peralta has been a portrait photographer for most of her life, first in the Mexico City studio her great-grandfather founded in 1910, then, only five years ago, as a fine arts photographer investigating the form — all in service of her search for the true meaning of a portrait and the Mexican identity.
“I have seen many artists do various types of weaving of photographs, or deconstruct photographs,” says Jennifer Schlesinger, owner/director of Obscura Gallery, which hosts the photographer’s first Santa Fe show, “but Lou’s work stood out to me in that she was using her own cultural community as models and focusing on the person themselves to dig deeper into their cultural Mexican heritage.”
On the cover, Lou Peralta, Disassemble #48 (2020), 23 x 22″, archival pigment print with cinnamon and wood strips, edition of 8
Alae (with the mirror), Beirut Lebanon, 2020 
Alae, Khyiam, Lebanon 2019
