The Standard: Exemplary

The Long HorizonExhibitionsStudio LifeArtists on GalleriesNew Mexico ArtistsNew Mexico
Written By Robbi Firestone

My father served thirty years in the United States Marine Corps.

Honor was a requirement in our home. A practice: integrity, service, the expectation that the people around you would rise to meet it.

I learned to always deliver my best. I could not always demand it of others. Yet when someone failed that standard, I gave pause.

My studio and art practice stands by that code to this day.

Flashback: my one-woman show. 2013.

I walked to the back room. Found another artist's work covered in a spilled bag of potting soil.

I made a decision. From clarity. From conviction.

No artist deserves that.

I chose direct communication. Integrity and honesty. I learned my worth and asked for it. I took the hard yet chosen road of my own making.

I demanded the best. I delivered it.

Independence has a cost. You are wrong about yourself sometimes. Inexperience cuts on hard edges. You lose sales. You get it wrong.

And you are never tested by anyone you fully respect.

July 18 is my first gallery show in over twenty years.

The Long Horizon. 203 Fine Art, Gallery 215, 215 Ranchitos Road, Taos, New Mexico. A restored 1850 Spanish Colonial adobe hacienda. The legacy of Agnes Martin lives in those walls. Put it in your calendar.

What made the difference?

Maureen Sarro, Executive Director of 203 Fine Art.

She is brilliant. Quality. Strategic. Precise. She has boundaries and integrity. She thought with me.

In thirty years of professional life I have learned that quality is rare enough to say yes to.

Also: she's a blast.

So I said yes.

I am a woman trained by a Warrior Marine to hold her position. Placing certain decisions in someone else's hands is a considered act. It is the most honest thing I have done in my studio practice in years.

I am fully present. I am all in.

Exposed, yes. Exposure is different from anxious. Anxiety is about outcome. Exposure is about the self.

My father would recognize that. You hold a position fully or you find another one.

The paintings in The Long Horizon ask one thing of the people who stand before them.

Be in the room. Let the sky do what skies do when you stop managing them.

I am still learning that myself.

That is what integrity looks like when it is not a concept but a practice.

The Long Horizon opens July 18 at 203 Fine Art, Gallery 215, 215 Ranchitos Road, Taos, New Mexico. Appointment-only. Inquiries: maureen@203fineart.com, 917-518-0430.

Robbi Firestone

Robbi Firestone is a contemporary American painter and conceptual artist working between New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her practice spans three decades of sustained inquiry into how beauty, urgency, and ethical responsibility coexist in a fragile world.

Her paintings, in oil, acrylic, pastel, and graphite, emerge from sustained observation of landscape and sky, rooted in the high desert of New Mexico. These are not depictions of place but states of being: the land as inner weather, the horizon as meditation on presence and the radical act of sustained attention.

Her conceptual practice, most notably the 2026 series Existential Snacks: Food for Thought, deploys mass-produced consumer materials as a Trojan horse, seductive in their familiarity and disturbing in their implications, addressing ecological collapse, cultural numbness, and the human tendency to consume without thinking.

These are not two separate bodies of work. They are one philosophical position expressed in two registers: feeling as the ground from which thought becomes possible; thought as the ground from which action becomes necessary.

Firestone's work has received formal recognition from leading figures in the contemporary art world.

Louis Grachos, Executive Director of SITE Santa Fe, writes: "Robbi Firestone's Existential Snacks project is a brilliant contemporary extension of the longstanding tradition of Satirical Artworks. Innovative in her use of materials, Firestone's paintings/sculptures reveal a sense of humor, are clever and reveal a substantial insight into her subject matter which makes this series so successful."

Merry Scully, Head of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Contemporary Art at the New Mexico Museum of Art, wrote of The Infertility Project: "You are telling a powerful story...this project may take on a life of its own and take years to unfold," drawing comparison to Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. The National Museum of Women in the Arts described her work as "a testament to the power of transforming personal pain into a benefit for the greater good."

The Infertility Project premiered at the United Nations in parallel with the Commission on the Status of Women. The project became the subject of a documentary film by Betsy Chasse, director of What the Bleep Do We Know, available on Amazon Prime.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Worth Magazine, the Boston Herald, the Huffington Post, and the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Firestone's work is held in distinguished private collections across the United States. She is currently represented by 203 Fine Art, Taos, New Mexico.

Studio visits are by appointment in New York City and Santa Fe.

https://www.FirestoneArt.com
Next

Into That Light: Agnes Martin & NMWA Artist Talk