Santa Fe has spawned a bumper crop of memorable characters over the decades, and one of the most legendary — Linda Durham, “girl art dealer,” as the 83-year-old styles herself — wants to spend some quality time with you.
She’ll reminisce about her career path, from New York City Playboy Club Bunny to pioneering Santa Fe art gallery owner with very few intermediate stops, show slides of pieces that spoke so strongly to her she acquired them instead of selling them, and tell personal stories about their creators.
Durham’s A Life in Conversation with Art is a presentation organized by Renesan, Santa Fe’s lifelong learning organization, in partnership with the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe, where it takes place on Tuesday, December 9.
“The talk I’ll be giving is around the concept of collecting,” she tells Pasatiempo in a recent interview at Eldorado’s Café Fina. “I collect adventures and experiences as well as art. It’s finding something meaningful, whether it’s an experience or a rock or a painting and then raising it and keeping it near you in some way.”
details
A Life in Conversation with Art with Linda Durham, presented by Renesan
10 a.m. Tuesday, December 9
CCA Santa Fe
1050 Old Pecos Trail
$22
505-982-1338; sfnm.co/linda
In conversation Durham is animated, passionate, and razor sharp on details from decades ago — she’s not planning on scripting her presentation. “I’m going to organize the images and recall and tell stories,” she says. “I want them for the memories.”
Those memories go back to the mid-1960s. “When I moved here, it was so early that there wasn’t a contemporary art exhibition scene in town,” she says. “There were great artists, but there were no galleries that represented them.”
She was intrigued by the gallery business and agreed to work for a year for the late Forrest Fenn, who dealt in late 19th- and early 20th-century works, to understand how it operated. As she later wrote in a memoir, “I learned that the world of artists, paintings, exhibitions, dealers, and consultants had a profound and intoxicating effect on me.”
On her 365th day of employment, Durham asked Fenn’s gallery manager for a raise. “He laughed at me,” she says, “so I resigned on the spot.”
Her year in Santa Fe’s nascent gallery world gave her many contacts in the world of living artists. “I knew them as friends first,” she says of John Fincher, Paul Pletka, Larry Bell, Dick Mason, Ken Price, and others.
Durham organized a traveling exhibition of their work and took it to a major art fair in Toronto, mostly because it was much cheaper than going to Europe. She lost money on the venture, but it gave her instant credibility in the art world, locally and nationally.
“After I got back, someone suggested I open my gallery here. I didn’t know it was impossible, so I did it,” Durham says. “I just thought, I’ll act as if I were a gallery owner, and pretty soon it turned into a career.”
When asked what made her decide to buy a particular work for herself, rather than selling it, she replies, “That’s not easy to answer.”
After pausing for a bit, she continues, “The work of the artists I represented didn’t look alike, but there were three essential things I found in all of them. They had a deep commitment to their art, they each tapped into a very particular creative well, and they were all brilliant. [The ones I purchased] demand attention and say, ‘Slow down, I’m here, look at me.’”
For her Renesan presentation, Durham will focus entirely on New Mexico artists, and thanks in part to a recent move to a smaller home, on works that have special resonance for her.
One is a large-format painting by nonagenarian painter Jerry West, who grew up near La Cienega and whose father was both a rancher and a visual artist. “I’ve known him since I moved here because he lived out in Cerrillos and he lived on the same highway,” Durham says. “We have a long history, and I showed his work several times during my gallery years.”
The painting depicts West’s memory of going into the old Palace Restaurant and Saloon on Palace Avenue to watch the television in the bar because he’d heard Georgia O’Keeffe was going to be on a TV show. “Jerry didn’t own a television,” says Durham, “so it’s a painting of him standing in the bar looking at the television. It’s a great painting, and it only belongs in my collection and then the museum.”
Linda Durham, one of the original leading contemporary art gallerists in New Mexico, will speak at CCA Santa Fe about her adventures in the Santa Fe art scene and the particular pieces she chose for her own collection, including a painting of the old Palace Restaurant and Saloon by notable artist Jerry West.
ALEX TRAUBE
(The New Mexico Museum of Art has in its collection several of West’s paintings, including one titled Japanese Internment Camp. West’s father and uncle both worked at the camp above Santa Fe, and his father sketched it several times, documenting the irony of guarding prisoners who included educators, Buddhist priests, Presbyterian ministers, gardeners, and poets. West’s 2009 painting is based on his father’s sketches.)
Another painting Durham will discuss is by Eugene Newman, whom she describes as the artist she secretly respects more than any other. “Across from my desk where I write I have a wonderful painting of his that sold to Robert Tobin,” she says. “Robert was a magical friend in my life, and I loved him so much.”
Tobin was a major supporter of the Santa Fe Opera, as well as the Metropolitan Opera and arts groups in his hometown of San Antonio, Texas.
“When he died much of his collection was supposed to come to Santa Fe,” Durham relates, “but a lot of it went to auction instead. I went online and for $400 got this painting that Robert might have paid $10,000 for. It’s not an ‘easy’ piece, but it’s one I can’t dismiss.”
A “great piece” by Santa Fe installation artist Erika Wanenmacher is also on Durham’s discussion list (see “Meeting a Maker” in the October 24 issue) as well as a small piece by Robert Kelly, a native Santa Fean now active in New York.
“On the 25th anniversary of the gallery, he made a stylized painting of my logo, LDCA25, and it’s a treasure,” says Durham. When she was downsizing recently, someone asked Durham if she was letting go of it. “I couldn’t possibly do that, but I’ve thought about writing on the back, give this painting its history.”
If Durham’s initial career choice had worked out, you’d might’ve seen her on Broadway instead of in a Canyon Road gallery. She grew up near Camden, New Jersey, and started working as an actor at age 13 in a summer stock company, doing one- and two-line roles.
After two years as a theater major at Ithaca College, she married a graduating senior and moved to New York City. “I was voted most talented in high school,” she told Pasatiempo in 2021. “I thought in New York they would certainly notice this.”
They didn’t, so she applied for a job at the about-to-open New York outpost of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Clubs.
“It was like one of those cattle calls for Broadway shows,” she recalls. “We all showed up in our bathing suits and leotards, and I got hired.” On her first night on the job, working as “Bunny Jill,” she waited on television personality Ed Sullivan.
Durham kept the job for four years, then married her second husband, Bart Durham, at age 22. (“Lots of my life, it’s not that its unsavory, but what is that space right between savory and unsavory?” she muses.) Durham was a University of New Mexico graduate, and the couple moved here in 1966, building their own home outside Cerrillos.
It was a major gear shift for someone coming out of New York’s fabled 1960s nightlife, but an ability to think on her feet and improvise has always been one of Durham’s hallmarks. Her seemingly natural theatricality prompted the question of whether she’d ever thought about going back to her first love.
“I did a one-person show several years ago, and the four performances sold out,” she enthuses. “I would love to do something else like it, but I need to find a partner to help put it together.”
Meanwhile, her Renesan presentation promises to be the best possible substitute.