When nature is nurture

Unlike many childhood obsessions, Hosmer’s early fascination with nature has persisted throughout her life, manifesting itself in artworks the 76-year-old has created since she began her professional art career in 1990.

Santa Feans who don’t know Hosmer by name may be familiar with two of her works: the 27 granite Rio Grande cutthroat trout that comprise Santa Fe Current outside the Santa Fe Convention Center, and Cornerstone, a three-piece granite abstraction that sits in front of the Center for Contemporary Arts.

Now thousands more Santa Feans will get to know Hosmer’s work a little better. Three enormous granite fish that make up Fish Heads will spend the next 16 months on display on a hill at ART@MRC, the new sculpture park at the Municipal Recreation Sports Complex on Caja del Rio. Installed June 20 as part of the city’s Art on Loan program, Fish Heads overlooks the nearby soccer fields. Hosmer’s work joins other sculptures there and will be part of upcoming educational and entertainment programs exploring art, sports, and the environment, says Pauline Kanako Kamiyama, director of the city’s Arts and Culture Department.

Hosmer’s work was selected for the sculpture park after the Arts and Culture Department issued a call for female sculptors to apply for the loan program, Kamiyama says.

Assistant department director Rod Lambert says Hosmer was an obvious choice. As a female sculptor, “She’s been such a leader that it was impossible not to invite her,” Lambert says.

Hosmer didn’t always make monumental sculpture. During the first decade of her career, she made tabletop-sized works, using natural objects, including bones and whole animal skeletons and — of course — dried minnows. She says she never imagined there would be a market for her quirky creations exploring the human connection to the environment.

Nevertheless, she achieved a modicum of financial success, showing her art successively in three Santa Fe galleries and in museum exhibits here and elsewhere in the country. She created elaborate still-life installations including casts of real animals such as ducks, fish, and turtles. She placed a giant drainpipe high on a wall at the New Mexico Museum of Art and made “water” of tens of thousands of minnows that flowed from the pipe and appeared to splash and ripple on the floor. (Hosmer never killed animals for her artwork but sourced already-dead animals.)

Then, in 2000, her career unexpectedly changed direction when she participated as an artist-in-residency at a monumental sculpture symposium in Tianjin, China.

“I’d always been very interested in land art and large public art pieces, but I never pursued it until I was given the Chinese residency opportunity,” she says. “I remember thinking I was really afraid to say ‘yes’ but I couldn’t say ‘no.’”

In her application to the residency program, Hosmer submitted a design not unlike the museum drainpipe, but with a stream of full-sized fish flowing from a drainpipe several stories high. By the end of the symposium its elements had been fabricated, but the work wasn’t done. Hosmer never saw the finished product — nor has she been able to find out whether it was completed and if so, where it was installed.

But the door to the Chinese art world had opened. Over the next decade, Hosmer made nine more extended trips to China as an invited participant in various art events, including the first Beijing International Art Biennale. She gave lectures at Beijing Academy of Art and other universities, traveled to work with Chinese fabricators of steel, granite, and porcelain, and, in several cases, left behind massive, site-specific sculptures installed in public venues.

“After the first time I went to China, my career morphed into a here-and-there thing,” she recalls. “I still made smaller works and whole exhibitions here in my studio, but China encouraged the monumental art thing, and then I began to do it here.”

In between trips to China, Hosmer was commissioned to create Fish Globe, a giant sphere comprising hundreds of rusted steel fish, sited near a fishpond at the City of Albuquerque’s ABQ BioPark.

“I liked working on a large scale in the environment,” she says. “Not just putting a piece on a pedestal, but having the environment be part of the piece. Since my work has always been about the natural world and interacting with that, there is a delicious element of working with the sky, the land around it, materials that can handle any kind of weather. I’ve got pictures someone sent me of Santa Fe Current once when it snowed, and there was a foot of snow on top of the fish. I like to see the work adapt to the seasons.”

While her work had gotten bigger and her materials changed over the course of her career, the artist’s creative impulse homed in on fish, the genesis of her fascination with nature.

“In our modern culture, we’ve come to stand apart and see the natural world like it’s separate from us,” the artist says. “The more we do to separate ourselves from it, the bigger trouble we get into. My work keeps coming back to that issue: that we are a part of the environment, not separate from it. Fish came to be emblematic of that connection to the environment that I care about so much.”

It seemed her career had changed focus for good.

Then life intervened. Hosmer lost two years to a serious illness, then cared for her sister Jan for a year before her death. Afterward, she tended to her mother for the last 3 1/2 years of her life, dismantling the art studio in her small condo to make an extra bedroom. By the time her mother died in 2019, a decade had passed during which Hosmer had been unable to focus on art.

At 73, she might have given up on her career.

“I didn’t think of my art career as on hold during that time,” Hosmer says. “There was never a point at which I thought, ‘I’m never going to make art again,’ or, ‘I’m back in the game again.’ It just evolved.”

While she handled her mother’s final affairs, she rebuilt her art studio, not sure what she might be doing there — or when.

Fate decided for her. Chuck Swanson, a man who regularly visits Santa Fe, had seen and fallen in love with Santa Fe Current. Swanson was director of Hancher Auditorium, the performing arts center at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. He contacted Hosmer during the last months of her mother’s life about creating a site-specific work for the Hancher. Hosmer had to postpone connecting. But soon after her mother died, Swanson invited benefactors to see Santa Fe Current and meet Hosmer. Within a month, Hosmer was on a plane to Iowa to visit the site. The resulting commission, installed in 2020, is Wellspring, a “river” of 30 granite fish in front of the auditorium.

Wellspring sparked a regeneration of Hosmer’s career, which, over the years, has developed into something of a family affair: Her daughter Samantha Furgason of Santa Fe, an artists’ adviser, helps promote her mother’s work; son Scot Furgason, a metal sculptor who lives near Pecos, fabricates some of them. Both have had a part in Jordan River Flow, the working title of a piece commissioned by Salt Lake City that will be installed in late August. The work will include 25 upright, eight-foot-tall fish of rusted steel at four different boat ramps along approximately 10 miles of the Jordan River.

Though she is no longer making small-scale work for exhibitions, “I love making the models for large-scale pieces,” Hosmer says. When she does, she recaptures the immediacy of making smaller works, “so it’s morning-until-night, eating-over-the-sink, all that old stuff I used to love.”

As always, Hosmer feels compelled to make art and is somewhat unattached to whether people like it or not. When they don’t, she’s interested in finding out why. When they do, she thinks they are tuning in to her connection to the environment.

“The species that we are has only been around for about 100,000 years,” she muses. “We’re not just rational beings; right under the surface, we’re still animals. I think we are, in a very important way, really connected to the natural world.”