'Architecture of Beauty': Seventeen NM artists showcased at Gallery with a Cause

Aug. 28—When Navajo artist Michael Billie was growing up, he swore he would never become a silversmith like his two older brothers.

"I vowed never to do that craft," he said in a telephone interview from Farmington. "They never looked like they were having fun. There was no vacation; nothing. I thought, 'That's no way to live.' "

But his passion for creativity drove him to art school at the University of New Mexico and an evolving cycle of deep pours of resin and mixed-media.

Billie is one of 17 artists showing his work in "The Architecture of Beauty: Works by Prominent New Mexico Artists" through Nov. 17, at Gallery with a Cause in the New Mexico Cancer Center. Purchases of the 360 works help fund patients' nonmedical needs during their illness. Forty percent of each sale is tax-deductible.

When most of Billie's exhibitions were COVID-cancelled, he drew deeply into his artwork and began experimenting.

"I had just started working with resin," he said. "I love images you can see beyond the surface."

He had been working with encaustic and teaching the technique in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Durango, Colorado. Normally, encaustic and resin are incompatible, he said.

He solved the problem by making a dam to pour the encaustic inside the resin.

"It's embedded inside the resin," he said. "That's why the resin is so thick."

The exhibition features his piece "Blessing in a Bowl," a swirl of blues and greens shaped like the sun with a pouch at the center.

"That sun shape is part of the Navajo wedding basket design," Billie explained. "The bowl is made of encaustic. The pouch is a medicine bag filled with cedar for blessings. The medicine bag is eco-printed silk. That's silk adding eucalyptus leaves, onion skin and rose petals, formed into a bundle and steamed."

He never sketches out his ideas beforehand. For him, the process is deeply spiritual.

"All I do is breathe," Billie said. "That's the way it works for me. If I'm in a bad mood or thinking too much, the pieces turn to crap. Most of the time I feel like I'm not even there. I always say I'm getting help from the other side."

Donna Loraine Contractor switched from pottery to weaving when she became a mother. Initially a production weaver for designers, she began weaving rugs when the assembly line job grew too fast-paced.

"Then I started putting pictures in rugs, which is what tapestry is," she said.

"I was a student at St. John's College," Contractor continued, "so I put a lot of math into my work."

Her mathematical weavings incorporate fractals, the Pythagorean theorem and the Golden mean. She also cites artistic influences; you can see Gustav Klimt's geometric backgrounds in her "Fractured Squares" series.

She uses mostly hand-dyed wool, often from the Churro sheep.

Her piece "Red Stairs" reveals a set of crimson steps leading to a window of a New Mexico sunset.

"Every piece has a window in it," Contractor said. "My father was from the Midwest and when he went back, he wanted to take back the sky, so I started making him windows."

The act of weaving has become a metaphor — the web of life or weaving a tale, with a window set within a frame to another place, another reality.

"The Architecture of Beauty" also includes the artists Brandon Allebach, Karen Benelli, Kevin Black, Tom Blazier, John DeSpain, David Douglas, Jaci Fischer, Tom Gavitt, Colleen Z. Gregoire, Dara Mark, Catalina Salinas, Nicholas Tesluk, Sondra Wampler, Alice Webb and Seoung Youn.