Transforming Belen
Judy Chicago opens new art space in Belen historic building
Judy Chicago opens new art space in historic building
BELEN — Through the Flower Art Space sits across Becker Avenue from weathered signs declaring “Eva’s Chile Products” and “E. Garcia Grocery.” It lies just east of the shuttered Sugar Bowl Lanes bowling alley.
The 1907 brick Belen Hotel rises on the corner like the National Historic Landmark it is. Artist Judy Chicago and her photographer husband, Donald Woodman, renovated the structure after moving here in the early 1990s. Their studios are on the first floor; they live on the second.
The grand opening of Through the Flower happens Saturday, July 20 and Sunday, July 21, and includes tours, a film screening, fireworks and the dedication of a Judy Chicago wine.
Critics have considered Chicago an icon in feminist art for 40 years. Her 1979 work “The Dinner Party”
— a banquet arrayed on a triangular table, each place setting honoring women ranging from Georgia O’Keeffe to Margaret Sanger — is considered one of the most important symbols of that movement and has been seen by more than a million people. Chicago turns 80 on Saturday.
The nonprofit art space is her way of giving back to the New Mexico community she calls home. It also springs from the hope that the draw of an internationally renowned artist will transform the dusty street into a Belen Arts & Cultural District.
The renovated adobe building dates to 1953, when it opened as a New Mexico restaurant. Chicago and Woodman bought it in 2004.
“Can you believe somebody
stole a lightbulb?” Chicago asked incredulously, peering upward as Woodman balanced on a ladder to correct the vanished luminescence.
Chicago is tiny, resplendent in curly purple hair, nails and Puma trainers. A former mayor is her hairdresser. Through the Flower will house both her and Woodman’s work, as well as an arts library and gift shop. Panels lined with the histories of both Chicago’s and Woodman’s careers beckon north from the front door.
Community members raised $80,000 for the project and Mayor Jerah Cordova donated his part-time salary. Chicago hopes to include other New Mexico artists in the space at some point.
“It also offers an antidote to the market-driven art world,” she said.
In a sense, Chicago is creating lemonade from the lemons that exploded when conservative city residents objected to Belen’s funding a $13,000 part-time job to helm the space. Evangelical Christian leaders objected to her sometime depictions of female genitalia. Those reactions stunned friends of this art world rock star who knew of her prestige. In 2018, Time magazine listed her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
“To me, this is a dream of what art can do — bring people together,” Chicago said. “We are completely buoyed by the community response.”
She says she chose to live in Belen partly because of the town’s location near Albuquerque and the Sunport. She also likes that the townspeople respect her privacy. She’s lived here for 23 years.
“We moved here because we fell in love with the Belen Hotel,” she said. “We were living in Santa Fe and we had no money.”
Belen has always been a railroad town. Before the train arrived in 1880, Belen was just a stop, collections of people waiting for something to happen. Prostitutes once greeted railroad customers at the hotel.
Chicago’s painting-and-fiber creations lean against the space’s walls, awaiting hanging. The artist is known for hiring needleworkers to embellish her work with embroidery, quilting and appliqué, as she did so famously in “The Dinner
Party.” She is always careful to give them credit.
“I can’t stitch or sew,” she said. “I have this unaccountable ability to design needlework.”
“It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn” features the black-andwhite darkness of the world — an ozone hole, pollution and violence on one side of the work, with a green paradise on its opposite. Figures dance and embrace, fish swim and birds fly beneath a rainbow.
“It’s a vision of the world as it could be,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t see the world as it is. I try to offer new, radical visions and suggest we have choices as human beings. I choose hope.”