To Make, Unmake, and Make Again brings the works of ceramicist Rick Dillingham back to the community that informed his art.

After prolific Santa Fe artist Rick Dillingham died in January 1994, many of his ceramic creations migrated into the hands of collectors many states away. When New Mexico Museum of Art assistant curator Katie Doyle began work on Rick Dillingham: To Make, Unmake, and Make Again, she identified a three-word goal: bringing Rick home. While the museum houses hundreds of Dillingham’s works, she had her sights set on a series of four pots he created shortly before his death, simply called the AIDS Series.

Dillingham famously broke and reassembled his pieces, then painted them. Doyle was able to track down three of the AIDS Series pots and secure two for the exhibition, which runs through June 16, 2024. It was a coup for Doyle, who says she was as much an “art detective” as a curator as she prepared her first exhibition at the museum.

It was a big job; Rick Dillingham: To Make, Unmake, and Make Again is billed as the largest-ever exhibition of the artist’s work. Doyle, who joined the museum in July 2022, chatted with Pasatiempo about the goals for the exhibition, Dillingham’s complexities, and what the artist might have done next had he not died from AIDS complications at age 41. (Her responses were edited for length and clarity.)

Some Santa Feans will remember interacting with Rick, while others arrived here well after his death. Did you face a challenge of appealing to multiple audiences?

I didn’t know Rick [personally]. It took me a long time to realize I was telling multiple stories. I realized there’s Dillingham the artist; there is Dillingham the queer cowboy man; and the queer potter. Then there’s Dillingham the scholar of Indigenous art and Dillingham in his private life. So it became my goal to find a way to communicate the complexity of his story. He was so many other things in addition to being an artist. He was an advocate. He was an activist. He was, you know, a weirdo. He was a trash talker.

So much progress has been made in the treatment of AIDS that some visitors might not realize the disease was a death sentence only a generation ago. Does the struggle show up in Rick’s work?

Toward the end of his life, Dillingham made the four pots called the AIDS Series. They were about his struggle being a man with AIDS in the early ’90s. He was making these things at a time when people were still on [AIDS drug] cocktails, and there wasn’t really a definitive treatment plan. Having AIDS meant you were going to die. He lived his life for as long as he possibly could. [His health struggle]

doesn’t really show up in his work until the last two years of his life.

Are there any elements you opted not to include, because of privacy or emotional impact?

One of the reels that we had was labeled Rick IV, and this is not something that we’re probably going to exhibit ever. It’s Dillingham in the morning, waking up and self-administering his cocktails, putting on a shirt, and going into the kitchen.

What’s so distinctive about the pots in the AIDS Series?

They’re black, and there’s this sort of uranium yellow that is leaching through the black in some places. There’s this silvery glow coming from the interior. Some of them show that silver more than others. Dillingham only made four of these, and he showed all four of them in 1993, a little under a year before he passed away. They all sold to private hands.

Where did you track them down?

One found its way to Arizona State University [in Tempe, Arizona]. Another one found its way to Scripps College’s art collection [in Claremont, California]. The other two are in private hands. This became kind of like my white whale. I was searching desperately for these works, and I was able to get two into this show.

Dillingham spent a lot of time around Indigenous people and was inspired by their work. He was a white man creating and collecting a type of art that Indigenous people had pioneered. Would this be considered problematic in 2023?

I did want to talk a bit about his relationship with Indigenous communities — he had a very close and loving relationship with many families and elders — and also speak about the visual aesthetic that can happen, especially in ceramics. Anytime you’re sharing a workspace, it requires teamwork. Oftentimes, you’ve got a lot of people sharing studio space, and people share their glaze recipes; people share their firing methods. There is no doubt that from a craftsmanship perspective, Indigenous communities and those aesthetics and methods rubbed off into his practice. Whether it was appropriative, I want to leave up to the viewers. I don’t want to villainize Dillingham, but I also want to interrogate how well some of what he chose aesthetically holds up in the 21st century.

”Villainize” is an interesting word. What are your own feelings toward Dillingham’s work, and have they changed?

Some of Rick’s aesthetics really rubbed me the wrong way. I started by looking at the work, and my first reaction was, “I hate this.” The next step was research. I hit the books hard. We are lucky at the New Mexico Museum of Art to have Rick’s archive, which he gifted to us, so we have his letters; we have his glaze recipes; we have photos and slides. We have his term papers from when he was at [the University of New Mexico]. I read through everything.

Did you uncover any surprises?

The first hook that grabbed me was his correspondence with Beatrice Wood. She was one of the original Dadaists. She’s a very significant person, and Dillingham first met her when he was 15. Their history goes way back, and in her letters to him, there was such a kindness, a tenderness, and a closeness. I was uncovering things about the art and realized, “Oh, this is bigger than the things that were making me upset. This deserves care and time and attention.” So I started doing deep dives into the people he knew whose letters kept showing up in my research. You’re piecing together a story based on one side, because I don’t have access to the letters that he sent to these people. I only have the information that was coming in. So to fill in some of those other pieces, I started conducting oral history interviews with people in Santa Fe who have living memories of Rick. I also found a 16-millimeter documentary film of Dillingham in 1993. It is the last film footage of him, and that is in this exhibition.

Many of the featured items obviously came from your museum’s collection. Where else had they been stored?

When Dillingham passed away, his bequest split his artwork up between the Albuquerque Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the [University of New Mexico] Art Museum. A lot of the work in the show has been loaned from the Albuquerque Museum and the UNM Art Museum. His personal collection of Indigenous pottery went to the School for Advanced Research and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and got split kind of in half.

If Dillingham hadn’t died, he’d be 71 now. As you delved into his work and life, did you get a sense of what he might have worked on next?

It just breaks my heart that he died so young. Especially in the later works, he was getting silly and goofy with some of his forms and really aggressive with his colors.

The 30th anniversary of Dillingham’s death is January 22, 2024. Was the exhibition timed to align with that or anything else?

I feel like it’s one of those moments of kismet; like, stuff just lines up. What I got really hung up on was Pride. Initially, we were going to close the show before Santa Fe Pride. I said, “Absolutely not.” I advocated, probably to the point of bugging some people, that we keep the show open through June.

How do you think Dillingham would view this exhibition?

I think he would have liked it. He would probably call some of my decisions into question, but I feel like I represented his work as well as I could. We’re not shying away from the complexity of him.

Rick Dillingham: To Make, Unmake, and Make Again Through June 16, 2024

New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Avenue $7-$12

505-476-5063; nmartmuseum.org