Dos Amigos: Jerry West and Luis Tapia

Pie Projects Contemporary Art is pleased to present a two-person exhibition bringing together the work of two longtime friends, Santa Fe artists Jerry West and Luis Tapia. Born into different cultural traditions, West and Tapia share an instinct for storytelling. Their work is rooted in the New Mexico they both know intimately, each drawing on lived experience and inherited traditions to tell its stories.

Raised on his family’s homestead southwest of Santa Fe, Jerry West has drawn throughout his career from old family tales, vivid dreams from childhood, and the landscape and characters he has encountered living in New Mexico. “Most often I call myself a storyteller/poet/artist,” West has said. “I am inspired by a myriad of cultural and family stories, personal experiences and dreams.” For West, remembering is an act of storytelling, in which his personal memories become part of the larger history of the place that shaped them.

Alongside paintings and works on paper, the exhibition includes a remarkable group of masks. West learned to make them as a teenager in the late 1940’s, using papier-mâché over clay forms, then shared the technique with his father, artist Hal West. Soon the whole family was making masks together for Halloween and costume parties, an early exchange in which making art became a shared family language. This has reverberated throughout West’s practice: stories, memories, and traditions passed between people and across generations.

For Luis Tapia, this exhibition offers a different kind of revelation. Born and raised outside Santa Fe, in Agua Fría Village, the self-taught artist began carving traditional saints more than fifty years ago before expanding the art to reflect contemporary New Mexican life through social and political commentary, while still maintaining a connection to traditional santero craftsmanship. For the first time, in addition to the wood sculptures for which he is so widely known, he will present a group of distinctive works: painting, ceramics, and a mobile.

A painting pays homage to vintage Mexican calendar art in a New Mexican landscape; ceramics take inspiration from the coming-of-age novel Bless Me, Ultima and other meditations on place and spirit; carved wooden sculptures show Norteño scenes, and a mobile, inspired by Tapia’s admiration for Alexander Calder, reveals painted scenes of New Mexico across its underside. The result is an expansion of Tapia’s fascination with the places, people, and stories of everyday New Mexican life. Reflecting on what his homeland means to him, Tapia responded, “there is a unity [to being from here]. We always stuck together because most of these places were ranchos, so you had to take care of your neighbor, and your neighbor took care of you, and if somebody needed help, we all came out to help.”

Together, West and Tapia offer distinct ways of telling stories about the place they know so well. Their New Mexico is real and robust and they share their affinity for the state through depictions of loved ones, saints, local hangouts and homesteads, memories and myths, and the enchanting landscape that we all know well.