The statement “It’s Your Art” is meant to emphasize that the Roswell Museum’s collection is your collection. Despite the museum’s closure due to the October 2024 flood, staff continue to work behind the scenes on care for and conservation of collection objects. Last month, this column focused on the painting As We Move Through the Day by Oliver Enjady.

This time I will focus on artist Dana Newmann who told me in a recent interview “Collage is so wonderful, because you can dip into it for 15 minutes or you can spend three hours. You can do it in the corner of a kitchen… or in your bedroom.” Newmann was born in 1937 in Prairie City, Illinois. In the artist’s statement on the website of Pie Projects, the Santa Fe contemporary art gallery that represents Newmann, she wrote “I’ve been making collages since I was sixteen.” In our recent conversation she told me that in 1953 “I lived in Mexico City for that summer and while I was there I began shredding the old posters on kiosks and walls and using them as the basis for collage.”

After her summer abroad Newmann moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where she studied at what is now California College of the Arts for a semester before enrolling at Mills College from which she received a BFA in fine arts and elementary education. “Mills was a wonderful school for fine arts,” the artist told me. “They believed that you should have experience in every type of art from sculpture to monoprints.” After graduating Newmann taught for many years before moving to New Mexico in 1972 with her husband, painter Eugene Newmann. “We came over La Bajada that looks down into Santa Fe at twilight and I said to Gene, ‘This is weird, but I feel like I’m coming home.’ And then we never left.”

“Primarily I should say my works depend on the materials,” Newmann told me. “I do not have a mental image of a composition that I want or a piece that is final in my mind. The materials dictate to me what to do with them. And they are the way I make my work.” She further elaborates in the Pie Projects statement: “I understand that intuition is informed – even trained – by years of experience. By looking deeply. Every day. By judging. Many times the process is total struggle; I’m forced to give up, retreat momentarily, the piece unrealized. I can’t ever predict the outcome up front and that’s part of the deep pleasure of the effort.”

Newmann sourced her collage materials primarily from flea markets in Santa Fe in the 1970s and 1980s as well as from discovery walks in the arroyos of New Mexico. A recent source for her has been Resourceful Santa Fe, a nonprofit to which artists and others give materials they no longer need. Newmann has been going there religiously every Tuesday for the past five years. The artist told me that as she collects her collage materials, she organizes them in her studio in “a dozen Bankers Boxes very neatly shelved, three boxes high and probably four boxes wide. And each box has in it materials of a certain sort and when I feel like using old handwriting from friends or old penmanship, I can go to one box and it is filled with all kinds of handwriting… And when I feel like doing something only black and white, there’s a box filled with black and white imagery.”

In 2005, Newmann co-authored, with photographer Jack Parsons, the book New Mexico Artists at Work, a profile of the practices of more than 50 artists around the state. “I really tried hard to get the actual voice of each person I interviewed and somehow put it on the page,” Newmann told me. “It was a wonderful year going to each of these studios, hearing what they had to say about their lives, their thoughts on art, and what they thought was important in life and then seeing their work.”

The artwork by Newmann depicted here from the Roswell Museum’s collection, Deco III, was on display at the time of the October 2024 flood in the exhibition Here & Near: Surrounding Brilliance. Thankfully, the piece was not directly impacted by the flood waters.

As the name suggests, this piece was at least partially inspired by the Art Deco movement, a style popular in the US and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. For the occasion of Newmann’s 2014 retrospective exhibition, critic and art historian William Peterson wrote in an article for the New Mexico Mercury “She revisits art movements of the past… because she finds continued vitality in their discoveries. Everything is old; and everything is open for renewal.” In our interview, Newmann described the work as a “little riff of music” and you can see the influence of Art Deco in the simplified geometric shapes, the combination of straight and curved lines, and the artist’s use of ivory.

Newmann has been working with ivory as a key material in her collages for the past several years and told me, “My source provides me with a certificate that guarantees that the keys I purchase from them come from old pianos that were built in the late 19th century and early 20th century, entering the United States well before 1970, the date of the embargo on the sale in the US of elephant ivory.”

While ivory has a hardness greater than bone, Newmann’s pairing of it with lead is quite poetic. Lead is so soft it can be scratched with a fingernail and yet it is used to make bullets. In our interview, Newmann told me that “lead, in a sheet form provides such a wonderful contrast to ivory that has yellowed or ivory that is striated or is just a lovely cream color.” She sources lead from a maker of stained-glass windows.

Deco III was given to the Roswell Museum by David and Susan Hill. About the piece, Susan told me via email recently that it “is rich with texture in the smoothness of the lead as the background for the richness and variations in the ivory. I love the contrast of dark and light, and hard and soft. The metal (lead) would seem to be harder than the ivory, but in this case is more malleable than the ivory, a rigid piece of elephant tusk. I also appreciate that the ivory, which came from old piano keys, is being repurposed/recycled as a beautiful piece of art rather than disposed of. To me, this honors the endangered status of elephants which have been hunted nearly to extinction by humans’ desire for their tusks, as well as habitat destruction.”

In our interview, Newmann asked me if I thought of myself as a lucky person. When I turned the question back around to her, she said, “Absolutely. That’s part of why I find myself at 88 years of age still making collage and loving it.”

Please stay tuned for more from the Roswell Museum. We appreciate the outpouring of support from the community during our closure. And remember, “It’s Your Art.”