Holy Dirt in the Hills of New Mexico

CNN
By William Walker

NEW MEXICO - El Santuario de Chimayo, the Roman Catholic adobe mission church set in these hills of northern New Mexico, dates from 1816. Here, on Good Friday night around 1810, a Chimayo friar reportedly found a miraculous crucifix glowing on the ground near the Santa Cruz River. The church is built on the site of the reported discovery. During Holy Week - culminating on Good Friday - thousands of pilgrims converge on Chimayo. Some pilgrims walk a few yards, others a hundred miles or more. Many pilgrims believe that sacred earth from the shrine possesses miraculous healing powers. Testimonies of healing powers at Chimayo date to 1813, when Father Sebastian Alvarez wrote of cures for ailments. Visitors to Chimayo often take "holy dirt" from a pit in the shrine where the crucifix was reportedly found. Some rub it on their skin, others eat it; many claim to have been cured of disease, illness and infirmity. [link]

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Minimalist-Spiritualist, John McCracken dies at 76

LOS ANGELES TIMES
April 10, 2011

Squidds & Nunns 1998

NEW YORK - John McCracken, an artist whose fusion of painting with geometric sculpture in the mid-1960s came to embody an aesthetic distinctive to postwar Los Angeles, died Friday in New York. He was 76. McCracken had lived in Santa Fe, N.M., since 1994. McCracken’s work further challenged the notions of Minimalism through his interest in spiritual phenomena. "My tendency," McCracken once said, "is to reduce or develop everything to 'single things' — things which refer to nothing outside [themselves] but which at the same time possibly refer, or relate, to everything." In 1971-72 he made a rarely seen series of paintings based on Hindu and Buddhist mandalas. [link]

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Art Tour: Mexico City's New Museum

WALL STREET JOURNAL
March 3, 2011

MEXICO--The Museo Soumaya is Mexico City's newest, shiniest art museum. Encased in glimmering aluminum, the building rises up 150 feet, before it canopies like an oversize mushroom thought up by Magritte. The facade is a honeycomb of shiny silver hexagons. The structure is top-heavy, almost threatening to tip itself over in this city of earthquakes. It will soon be a contemporary home to an eclectic private collection of some 66,000 pieces: Da Vincis and Toulouse-Lautrecs, Picassos and Dalís, Riveras and Renoirs, and religious relics. [link]

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Theology professor communicates through art in New Mexico

TRIB LOCAL
February 21, 2011

NEW MEXICO -- Lewis University at Albuquerque and the Archdiocese of Sante Fe recently presented two workshops about connecting theology and art in New Mexico. “God with Us: A Theology of New Mexican Folk Art” was presented on Jan. 14 by Dr. Dominic Colonna, chair of theology at Lewis University. The professor analyzed representations of the Trinity to illustrate how popular art helps communities to find meaning in the past and the present and to plan for the future. The second, “Utilizing Traditional religious Folk Art in the Classroom” was presented Jan. 15 by Colonna and Kerry Bergen, art teacher at San Felipe de Neri Parish School in Albuquerque. [link]

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