The last time I was in Santa Fe, I found myself standing in front of a long digital screen that switched every few minutes to a different still image from Google Street View. I saw a man sitting on the side of the road on a white plastic chair in Serbia; A woman walks her dog on a leafy Los Angeles street; The bare ass of someone who must have spotted the tech company’s can’t-miss camera car and decided to make a show of their own. The piece rotated through the images for over an hour. Nine Eyes Google Street View By Canadian artist Jon Rafman, it was one of the centerpieces in the Thoma Art Vault, a 3,500-square-foot digital art gallery, the only one of its kind in the American Southwest. Two of the biggest attractions are the Art Vault and SITE Santa Fe (one of America’s largest and most famous contemporary art museums) in the city’s Railyard District, a former train depot that has become a thriving arts district and is home to more than half a dozen art galleries, all focused on modern and contemporary art.
One of the world’s most powerful artistic centers, this small city with a population of just over 150,000 has more artists and creative institutions per capita than any other place on Earth. However, it has a well-deserved reputation as a center for more traditional, often Southwestern, art. It’s a place where a large oil painting of a Native American warrior can reach the five-figure range—and where many of Santa Fe’s traditional galleries display art directly inspired by New Mexico’s most famous cultural resident, Georgia O’Keeffe.
Except that O’Keefe was not a traditionalist, and in a roundabout way, a line can arguably be drawn from Rafman to O’Keefe. If the Railyard Arts District had existed in her day, O’Keefe might have found her home gallery there. Maybe not. I am neither an O’Keefe scholar nor an expert on the Santa Fe art scene. But what stuck with me was the idea that, like any art scene worth its weight, there are, alongside traditional galleries in Santa Fe, contemporary art spaces where locals are creating the future of art.
According to SITE Santa Fe curator Brandi Kauba, this push/pull between the traditional and pushing boundaries is not new—contemporary art has been around for a long time in Santa Fe. “For centuries, it served as a meeting point between indigenous communities, trade routes and, later, waves of artists, writers and travelers who were drawn to the area,” she said. “This multi-layered history of encounter and dialogue has shaped the artistic life of the city. In this context, artists working in contemporary forms, such as installation, conceptual practices, performance, and interdisciplinary work, are often discussed as a more recent development. But in many ways, these practices have long been present in Santa Fe.”
In addition to the biennial and year-round SITE fairs, which keep the city’s name and reputation in the global arts consciousness, she said Santa Fe’s collection of “artist-run initiatives, small galleries, alternative art spaces, and independent curators have helped cultivate a scene that is less tied to the expectations of the tourism market and more tied to experimentation, dialogue, and community.” She pointed to venues and art groups like Axle Contemporary Art, Vital Spaces, Santa Fe Community Gallery, Relay, Ghost, Cocoon, Santa Fe Noise Ordinance, The Downlow, High Mayhem and new galleries like The Valley, H&H, and Smoke the Moon as places and people “that are essential to maintaining this ecosystem.”
However, as in many other once-vibrant grassroots arts scenes around the world, rising rents in Santa Fe are forcing those communities to the margins, “putting increasing pressure on artists and threatening the sustainability of the contemporary art ecosystem.” One of the city’s emerging artistic outposts is Keep it contemporarya locally owned gallery that spent years in Santa Fe Plaza, around which many of the city’s traditional galleries can be found, before moving to the fringes of Santa Fe’s Central Arts District.
Jared Antonio-Justo Trujillo opened the gallery in 2016, hoping to build a platform space for contemporary and indigenous artists while maintaining a connection to the city, where his direct ancestors came from Spain to settle in Santa Fe in 1690. The gallery was his attempt to give those artists living outside the city’s more traditional boundaries a place to show and sell their work. However, rising rents forced him to close his original location and open a new version of the Keep in a neighborhood adjacent to the Railyard Arts District. “There aren’t a lot of Chicano guys with locally owned art galleries in this city,” he said with a laugh. “So, it made sense to move the gallery to a suitable neighborhood.”
In addition to providing a venue for local, contemporary and often indigenous artists to display their work, Trujillo represents many artists, both local and international, including Dennis Larkins, Dirk Kutz, Nico Salazar, Orlando Allison, Ross Pino, and Pearl Whitecrow. According to Trujillo, one of Keep’s driving missions will be to keep art as always accessible as possible. “Nothing in my gallery will cost more than twenty grand,” he said. “This is on purpose. I want art to be accessible to everyone.”
He also sees the Keep as an entry point for people visiting Santa Fe who may not be familiar with the city’s strong contemporary scene. “A lot of people come to Santa Fe to buy indigenous art: pottery, painting, weaving. I opened this gallery to educate travelers and art collectors, and to let people know that there is a movement here. And to me, as contemporary indigenous artists, this is the most important movement of all. The whole premise of this place is to help give people a voice.”
Santa Fe-based artist Ian Qualley echoed Trujillo’s sentiments, highlighting the value that a gallery like the Keep provides, not only as a place for platform artists, but also to showcase the variety of art being made in a city like Santa Fe. “At times, people would walk through the door of Cape’s store and say, ‘Oh my God, this is a breath of fresh air, because every other place I walked into was just bronze statues of Navajo warriors or fake war hats hanging on the wall.’ This is not the place they come to buy a cowhide rug,” he said.
Kuali’i is native Hawaiian but has lived in Santa Fe since 2016, when he moved there from his old home in Jersey City. In this East Coast city’s bustling art scene, Kwale began to make a name for himself as a wheat artist and graffiti artist. He moved to New Mexico to become the first artist-in-residence at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he cultivated Very complex paper cuts Which is now widely known.
No matter how modern or contemporary things are in Santa Fe, Qualey still sees a through-line in the work being done in the city, work that stretches back centuries. “There are artistic practices that have been here since time immemorial,” he said. “And these practices reproduce with some of the outside arts that find their way into this city.” He pointed to artists like Rose P. Simpson and her mother, Roxanne Swintzell, whose sculptures are perfect examples of the marriage of traditional and contemporary, the kind of art that pushes ancient cultural practices forward.
While there will always be artists who isolate themselves away from the scene — which Qualley points out is particularly easy in a place like Santa Fe, given the amount of open space found on the outskirts of the city — there is a close-knit group of people across the city whose goal is to foster a more collaborative, community-based environment. “Being very individualistic is a white settler mentality,” added Qualley, who is currently hosting an exhibition with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum focusing on the artist’s time in Hawaii. “But here, there is a small community of people who, when they achieve success, lift people up with them.”
Santa Fe will likely always be known for its traditional arts scene. And for good reason. The city has spent the better part of the last century creating an arts ecosystem rooted in Southwest art, both local and otherwise. But for collectors willing to look beyond the traditional, Santa Fe rewards them with a contemporary scene as vibrant and surprising as any in the country.
More technical travel guides
