Art Dealer Diaries Podcast

I had Susan Tarman on today and it was just a joyful conversation. I've known Susan professionally for 30 years, going into her galleries and getting appraisals from her. She's very, very smart and her story is all about what Santa Fe was like in the early 80s all the way through today.

She talks about a guy named Vic Hansen who was this very interesting character that I never had the chance to meet, but keep hearing stories about him even today. So she goes into detail about how instrumental that man was in her life and ultimately how she bought his gallery and made it her own.

Fast forward to today and, though her gallery closed, Susan is still one of the best appraisers in the business. So if you want to get a great sense of what the Santa Fe art world was like in the 80s, who the players were, and what her role was and is in our field, than this is an excellent podcast to listen to.

This podcast is a recording of a special presentation given by contemporary fine art photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) at the Tucson Museum of Art on April 16, 2025.

A big thank you to Cara Romero and to our host, Senior Curator of TMA, Christine Brindza for letting us record and publish this talk for our listeners (and viewers). If you are interested in learning more about Christine, be sure to listen to Art Dealer Diaries Podcast #81.

I hope you enjoy. I'm a collector and a big fan of Cara's photography. If you are unfamiliar with her work, you can find it on her website: cararomero.com

Once in a while you come across somebody and you realize in that moment they're an important figure in art history, and maybe their story hasn't been told yet. In this case, I don't think it really has.

You see, my guest today is Shahrokh Rezvani and he's a very interesting man to say the least. What makes him so interesting is this journey that he's had with people like Fritz Scholder and Dale Chihuly and working with them to create monotypes, cyanotypes, and all sorts of different kinds of prints.

He came to my booth at Scottsdale Ferrari Art Week and I could see him looking at the work by Fritz Scholder that I was showing. I could tell there was a connection, and not a connection in the way you might see with a collector or an acolyte even... but a different kind of connection.

I approached him and asked if he knew Scholder personally. He said back to me: ”oh, yeah, he was a great person. I knew Fritz and I knew him well." 

I said “okay, well, tell me about it.” After that he spoke to me all about Fritz and their working relationship from 1977 to 1993. 

Fast forward to today and Shahrokh is at that age where health can be a problem. I said, well, I want to come up to your house and I want to hear the rest of the story, hence this podcast. Now you'll get to hear the story of this wonderful journey of this man's life as an artist and as a master printmaker.

He makes wonderful art himself and I hope that this podcast is as intriguing for you as it was for me. I think this is the type of interview that's going to be used when people tell the story of Fritz Scholder and that connection and collaboration, that he had with Shahrokh. 

So I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Shahrokh Rezvani on Art Dealer Diaries Podcast episode 344.

I had Ray Dewey on my podcast today. I had him on a couple of years ago (episode 259) and we went through his life story, from his childhood up until he closed his gallery in Santa Fe, which was one of the best Southwest art galleries of all time.

Well, he happened to be in Tucson today so I asked him if he'd do another podcast and he obliged. Ray loves Maynard Dixon just like I do so we always have plenty to talk about. In fact, he had a Maynard Dixon and Ed Mell show in 1985. Really the first Dixon/Mell show that was ever done like that. He was a great friend of Ed's and had represented Ed for years. 

So in this podcast we talked about the people that have come in and out of Ray's life. There's a variety of interesting people and artists from R.C. Gorman to Allan Houser to Louise Nevelson to Charles Loloma.  We also spoke about his relationship with Nat Owings, who was one of these great art dealers of Santa Fe and someone that we hope to have on the podcast sometime soon.

I can't not mention Ray's wife, Judy, who worked in the gallery for 20+ years running the backend of the business (just like my lovely wife Kathleen does for Medicine Man Gallery) which is so immensely important. We don't succeed without the Judys and Kathleens in our lives. 

So, you know, if you really want to know the backstory of the Santa Fe art scene and the players that made it happen, then you have to listen to Ray Dewey on episode 343 of the Art Dealer Diaries Podcast.

When people that I'm interested in talking to come into my gallery, I want to grab them and take them to my studio and talk to them. Well, lucky for me, Robert Sommers walked into my store today. He's a long time friend, a very knowledgeable art dealer, and the owner of Blue Heron Gallery.

I had recorded a podcast with him seven years or so ago, but we'd always talked about doing another one, and this one was a completely different podcast than our first one. Robert's background is covered in that one, and sure we touch on his origin story a little in this one too, but I just kind of wanted to find out the path that he's been on since the first podcast  and how he's seeing and interpreting the art world in 2025. 

He's been doing this for 50 years so it was a good conversation - definitely less of an interview when compared to a typical episode of the podcast. We talked like two old friends do, rehashing our lives, what we've done professionally and how we've intersected through the years. 

Robert is just such a unique, brilliant individual. He's a very talented writer, an awesome photographer, and a storied art dealer. He's just one of those people that you want to talk to and spend time with. I don't even know how long we talked, I just had an enjoyable conversation with somebody who's knowledgeable, loves what he does, and hopefully you'll enjoy this conversation as much as I did.