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Axle Contemporary is pleased to present Rick Phelps’ Post Fiesta Wares, an installation inside Axle’s mobile artspace. The exhibition is in conjunction with The Museum of International Folk Arts’ exhibition Cartoneria: The Mexican Art of Paper and Paste, and is supported by the Museum of New Mexico Foundation. From April 7th through May 28th, Axle will be traveling to schools and community events around Santa Fe and beyond with MoIFA bi-lingual educator Kemely Gomez, engaging people with art-making and learning opportunities.

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Phelps approach to art making is unpretentious, and both practical and wildly imaginative. As quoted in The New York Times: ''Farm people were resourceful, but we didn't call making things 'art' '' 

He has exhibited and sold his artwork in art galleries, museums, and the World Financial Center, as well as in churches, bars, hair salons, nightclubs, restaurants, candy stores, and bathrooms.

He has a lifelong commitment to making work from materials-at-hand and the cast-off detritus of our out-of-balance society of consumption. He recycles paper, artistic conventions, and his self-proclaimed neuroses in an effort to order and reassemble his world.

All of Phelps' work is made of recycled papers, from hymnals, encyclopedias, menus, beer cartons, magazines, food labels, security envelope liners or junk mail, ephemera re-pulped and repurposed into dynamic sculptures. 

His papier-maché and papier-collé sculptures draw on the traditional Mexican arts of Cartoneria and Piñata, but incorporate an ever-changing array of materials, references, and characters, drawing on Pop, Punk, Folk, Funk and other vernacular traditions.

His work is represented in Santa Fe by Pasqual’s Gallery, in Truchas by Eight Million Gods, and in Madrid by Calliope.

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