History
We have been making a space for art in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico for fourteen years. The name on the door is newer than that. It has had four names and been in two buildings, and while it changed, the town changed around it. Nearly every quote below comes from our own letters, wall texts and announcements, written while it was happening.
Arrival
The first time we came to Truth or Consequences we came on foot. We were walking the Grand Enchantment Trail from the Superstition wilderness outside Phoenix, around twenty miles a day, across Sonoran desert valleys and over one mountain range after another, and we ended up in this small town on the Rio Grande. “This is a land of harsh plenty and mystery,” we wrote at the time.
Before that there was Bozeman, Montana, where we met in 2006, a sailboat down Baja, and years based in Dharamshala, India, where Kyle lived at Namgyal Monastery teaching monks to film and edit the teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
On December 7th, 2011, in Jeannie’s words, “our wheels stopped rolling in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. After 6 years of ‘living on the road’ it was time to send down a tap root and look for some water.” We arrived late in the evening and slept on the floor of the house we would sign papers to buy the next morning.
It was not an illustrious place to move, especially coming from Bozeman, Montana, but it allowed us to focus our energy solely on the creation of art. As Kyle wrote a few months later: “What do nomads do when they stop moving? It is not the cessation of movement, but its redirection. So we build and create.”
Mud Mountain Studio, 2012
In June of 2012, Olin West asked us to join him at Mud Mountain Studio, his gallery and studio at 324 Broadway. It was supposed to be for the summer. Our first announcement says “we are now, until mid-July, setting up shop in Mud Mountain Studio and Gallery.” We stayed eleven years. Jeannie later wrote:
Over the following eleven years our time in that space evolved constantly, friends would join in and move on, our own engagement with it would wax and wane, it was a gallery, studio, classroom and party space at many different times and in many different ways.
By late 2012 the gallery was open and running, with a mini farmer’s market on Saturday mornings, weaving on the roller warp, and the monthly Art Hop nights we have kept ever since.
Olin West
Everything here goes back to Olin’s Mud Mountain Studio and Hundredth Monkey Gallery, and to how he handed a space to two artists who had just arrived in town. As Kyle wrote when thanking him publicly:
I must first thank Olin B. West for his kindness, generosity and amazing light for passing on Mud Mountain Studio to us to run and experiment with. He set the tone for how we would embark on this endeavor with a level of generosity and dedication to art that informed every decision we made going forward.
Olin West was born in Paris, Texas and raised on the plains of Wyoming. He spent time in Oklahoma City, Oakland and Denver before settling in Santa Fe in 1976, where he became a renowned silversmith and beadworker. In 1997 he moved his studio to Truth or Consequences and devoted his full attention to painting. His Tabbed Series, painted from 2005 to 2015, marked his departure from plein air painting into the metaphysical world of the abstract — “a study of duality,” in the words of the gallery’s 2018 exhibition of the work, where “one loses oneself into the paintings; doorways open, perceptions shift.”
Twelve years after he gave us our start, Olin showed work in Home, the first exhibition at Truth or Consequences Contemporary.
Seba
By the middle of the decade the space had become Seba, an artists’ collective and cooperative at 324 Broadway, with monthly exhibitions and installations at the Seba open house and members keeping permanent installations in the space. We ran it on almost nothing. A grant application from those years says it plainly: “We survive off of hard work, self resilience, and a supporting community of friends that help each other and barter as a way to survive. Money is always tight but creativity and a can do attitude take us a long ways, as does a rabid scavenger mentality.”
In 2017 a $1,500 DIY grant from Meow Wolf went a very long way. We built a stage, found a pile of used chairs for a concert series of nationally touring musicians, put in a swamp cooler so the building was usable all summer, and bought a working letterpress at a local auction. The next winter we were teaching letterpress printing workshops, which the following year’s application called “open to the public and trials for much bigger ambitions,” with a long-run goal of “the foundation of a printmaking studio.” That became the community etching press, and that letterpress is still printing.
Desert Archaic, 2017–2021
In December 2017 we announced: “It is with the utmost pleasure that I announce a new phase of the SEBA Gallery story: Desert Archaic.” We kept the 2012 birthday and changed the name, and we chose the name carefully:
Desert Archaic is an homage both to the environment in which we exist and an appreciation for the past and how that informs our future. The Desert Archaic people of antiquity lived between 8000 and 1600 years ago; these peoples populated a wide swath of the Southwest, and many of their sites can be found in the immediate vicinity of Truth or Consequences. They experienced and adapted to profound changes during the millennia they inhabited these regions — dramatic climate changes combined with advances in technology kept these people nimble, adaptable and ever ready for the next phase of existence. They left us a rich history scribed in rock. The diversification and adaptability of the Desert Archaic people is a beacon of hope in this confused strange world, and we should all remember that together we can bring culture and progress when we work with one another.
Desert Archaic was a lot of things depending on who walked in, “art studio, science laboratory, gallery, listening concert hall, community gathering point,” or as the same application put it: “To one it’s a studio. Another a gallery. A concert hall. A refuge. A place to go to see new ideas. An experience. Roadside attraction. Curios shop. But we are all united in our love and derived happiness from this little building in the desert.”
Most of what we still do started in those years. There were bimonthly rotating exhibitions. There was the Listening Concert series, “focused listening experiences” with nationally touring acoustic acts, where we chased acoustical perfection. There was the Second Saturday Art Hop, when “the historic hot water district transmuted into a dreamland of art, music, performance and dancing.” There were letterpress and natural history workshops. And Kyle showed new work every month for over a decade straight.
In the poorest county in the poorest state, the gallery introduced art to thousands of people who did not even know they liked art, and it has been a catalyst for more than a few people deciding to uproot their lives and move to Truth or Consequences. We watched Broadway go from a ghost town at almost any hour to a street where some nights there are no parking spaces left. “A gallery inspires a brewery. The brewery inspires a state. Culture slowly blossoms.”
None of it was done alone. Desert Archaic would not exist without the work, life and energy of everyone involved over those years, among them Josh Candelaria, Reed Rische, Katie Renault, Andrew Potter, Becca Ezzra, Naomi Hooley, Rob Stroup, Hieronymus Bogs, Wendy Tremayne, Larry and Donna Pogreba, Ashe Cravenock, and Chantal Elena.
Intentionally Confusing, 2021
COVID nearly ended it. In January 2021 the doors were closed and the rent was lingering “like that one guest who won’t leave a party even though it’s 1 am.” Kyle wrote to the mailing list that Desert Archaic needed support right away if it was going to exist past the end of the month, and announced the project that would carry the work forward:
Our special projects will reside under the moniker of Intentionally Confusing. We’ve chosen this concept because life, it seems, is intentionally confusing — you must work hard to find the inner truths; but the quest for inner truth is the most rewarding project of them all.
Its purpose was “to fund artistic endeavors which are not commercially viable, but are necessarily imperative in their creation.” A worldwide network of micro-patrons, our sustaining members, kept the spirit of the space alive through the pandemic years, and they are where membership at torc.art comes from. The same month Desert Archaic grew a publishing wing, Desert Archaic Press. Its first book was our Modern Ancient, “an art exhibition in the form of a book,” and that wing became Agile Meteor Press.
312 Main, 2023
In the early spring of 2023 we found a building on Main Street that we had somehow never noticed. Jeannie told the story in the wall text for our first show here:
For the previous 11 years it had been boarded up, the facade of the building crumbling wooden boards of a false “old-west” veneer. The place was still under construction when we noticed it; whoever had been working there that day had left the lights on, and we were drawn into the bright white and novel view as we walked home from the theater. How we were able to live in this town for so many years and never notice such a large building is a bit unclear. We’ve also discovered MANY people who have lived here for years, and even who grew up here, never noticed the building until just now. It feels a bit as if it appeared just when it was meant to.
It is the Luchini Electric Building, standing since 1916, the year the Elephant Butte Dam was finished, at the end of the boom that built the dam and made the town. Truth or Consequences, then called Hot Springs, “emerged from the warm mud” downstream of the dry construction camp “to fill the perennial need for bars, brothels and gambling,” as Jeannie wrote. “Thus the foundations of our (still pretty wild) town were laid.”
We bought the building in March 2023 and spent nine long months renovating it. Why buy at all?
With the purchase of 312 Main St. we saw the possibilities of being able to bring something to life in a larger and richer way than we were able to do in a rented space that could never be truly our own. We have always had an underlying vision of creating a space for Art and humans (by default) to flourish. We want to create a world to fulfill our own creative desires by having ample space and access to all of the requisite tools, be able to share this with local artists and also draw in artists from afar.
On December 7th, 2023, twelve years to the day since our wheels stopped rolling in TorC, we opened the space with the first pARTluck. Then on February 24th, 2024, the Saturday night of the MeTeORiC festival, we held the Grand Opening Ceremony of Truth or Consequences Contemporary with our first show, Home, work exploring the idea of home through dance, music, stone, paint, fiber, drawing, installation, photography, metal, ceramic and glass. We picked that theme on purpose. Opening this space made Truth or Consequences our home for good.
Truth or Consequences Contemporary
TorC, for short, and torc.art on the web. We said what all of this adds up to best in the words we wrote for the opening:
We are building a space dedicated to fostering radical free-thinking, community, connections, creation, learning, sharing and expression.
To find a community that can be equally as excited about the fascinating beauty of ferns, the perfection of Rembrandt’s paintings and a nuanced red chile sauce is a rare and special thing. This is one facet of what we hope to build and cultivate; a space of boundless curiosity, sharing and a ravenous hunger to create.
Each winter season, October through May, the gallery has a theme that comes to life in crescendos of installations, events and performances. The summers we spend on Fieldwork. The gallery is a refuge for the arts and a laboratory for answering what feels relevant as we move into this new world, and the laboratory has outgrown the building. There is a press, a community etching press, a membership, and a growing constellation of projects taking rural art to an international audience.
The gallery is our art project, foremost.