Interacting with Light

The unique light and expansive vistas attracted droves of representational painters during the first decades of the twentieth century. Artists associated with Taos and Santa Fe materialized their emotional responses to the light, landscapes, and vistas of New Mexico as commercially-successful landscape paintings. Beginning in the 1930s, modernists began to abandon representational imagery and investigate light and color as reflections of spirituality. Contemporary works by Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Bill Metcalf, Florence Miller Pierce, and Charles Ross investigate light as both subject and media. They seek to produce spiritual responses through simple abstract images, non-objective forms, and materials that react visually with light.