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Since opening its doors to the public on December 5, 1985, Adair Margo Gallery has exhibited almost 400 individual artists from a dozen countries. Through the hard work of Gallery Director Isaac Lopez, it has mounted more than 180 exhibitions of drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and installation, and hosted over 100 receptions for the public.
The El Paso community has provided encouragement and support. By working with not-for-profits and educational institutions, the Gallery has drawn well known collectors to the border. An early collaboration brought Frederick Weisman from Los Angeles to El Paso, where he visited the Gallery and bought Luis Jiménez’s sculpture, End of the Trail with Electric Sunset, generously giving it to the University of Texas at El Paso. Other partnerships resulted in regional celebrations of artists as diverse as José Cisneros, James Drake, Donald Judd and Tom Lea, with simultaneous exhibitions of their work at locations all over town.
Artists from countries like China, Columbia, Japan, Mexico and Germany have felt warmly welcomed here, but the primary focus has been on artists of the border who are nourished by the desert and its people. Their paintings, photographs and drawings have beckoned viewers to pause and pay attention, deepening an awareness of the remarkable El Paso environment. The Gallery has placed some of these works in public collections like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Dallas Museum of Art, as well as U.S. Embassies worldwide. These works of art are silent ambassadors of human experience, connecting individuals of this region to a larger world.
In 1993 Tom Lea asked if I might represent his work, a pivotal point in my life. He had never had a representative, nor sought the approbation of a gallery or museum. His paintings were primarily in the homes of friends, as a “personal conversation” between him and his friends. It has been a privilege to enlarge that conversation, working with Charles Leavell to create the Tom Lea Gallery at the El Paso Museum of Art and placing his painting “Rio Grande” in the Oval Office. In the coming years, we hope to increase that conversation even more.
Slightly more than a year before he died, Tom Lea told me that “there are so very few artists with enough reverence for the vastness of the world . . . the definition of the two things: infinity and eternity. You know, that’s the majesty and mystery of what’s all around us.” His desire was to use the tools of an artist to reach out, sharing the wonder of being alive. When he died at 93 in 2001, he had not lost that wonder.
As we embark on our next twenty years, we hope that we won’t either.
Adair Margo
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