Snow. Blowing snow. Bitter cold. Is this Iowa? No it’s New Mexico. At least it’s very pretty and the low temperature in Albuquerque today was the high temp in Des Moines. We shelved any hiking and looked for indoor activities. The Albuquerque Museum fit the bill, an airy contemporary building with an appealingly eclectic collection of New Mexican contemporary art and a new show on Indigo Textiles from around the world, something I fell for hard when we visited Kyoto, Japan awhile back. And during Covid 2021 I took a Zoom class in Shibori Indigo tie dying from the Des Moines art center. The Albuquerque show features textiles from Asia, South America, the U.S., vintage and contemporary, utilitarian and artwork. I loved a collection of giant-sized indigo-dyed costumes on display, accompanied by a video of the costumes worn by men on stilts, who danced and pranced in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. The locals’ expressions: priceless.
Back in the Sawmill District, we wandered around Spur Line Supply Co., a cavernous high-design space with cool furniture, home goods, clothing, paper products, some local, by New Mexicans, but others by small batch makers elsewhere, including Des Moines’ Moglea, a letterpress studio that makes irresistible handmade notebooks, stationary and cards. (The ABQ museum gift shop also sold Moglea notebooks. Who knew?)
Lunch was at Vinaigrette (which has a mean vegan mushroom stew/soup…fyi, my dear reader Charlotte) to celebrate Dirck’s 65th birthday. We were supposed to have dinner with dirck’s sibs at Farm and Table but we got snowed out. There’s not much snow by midwestern standards. A few inches. But the roads are slick with ice and the cold wind is harsh.
TakeBetsywithyou 