Santa Fe, Art Magnet

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Today, I plunged into the culture of Santa Fe.

Most travelers view the city as a zone of ancient, somewhat exotic, cultures existing in a modern world; but one where all the nasty parts have somehow been eliminated.

This romantic image attracts wealthy travelers in particular, who can’t get enough of the place.

After all, how many cities can one experience something truly different while still having all the creature comforts of home, without needing a passport?

In reality, this image is mostly manufactured, but it’s a thoroughly done manufactured, which makes this city fun to visit.

International Museum of Folk Art

Santa Fe’s reputation attracts many artists, art lovers, and gallery owners.

The city has one of the highest densities of art professionals in the United States.

Many of them specialize in art inspired by the area’s Native American and Hispanic heritage.

The incredible art scene means the city has a number of good museums too.





I started at the Santa Fe International Museum of Folk Art.

Commercial artist Alexander Girard amassed an incredible collection of folk art over his career, which he used to inspire his own designs.

He eventually donated it all to the city of Santa Fe for a museum.

He designed the exhibit layout too.





Most of the art is shown in one huge room, divided by display cases into a huge maze.

Items from different cultures are shown together seemingly at random; Girard arranged them that way deliberately to highlight similarities and differences between different cultures.

None of the cases have captions either; they are supplied in a booklet.

I found the arrangement incredibly confusing.





What I enjoyed about this museum, even with the layout, was the chance to see the incredible breath of human creativity in a single place.

The variety of work on display overwhelms the senses, particularly packed together as much as here.

Clay figurines appear from around the world: India, China, pueblo tribes, Russia, and every culture in between.

Cabinets have textiles from around the world.

Two cases contain dozens of masks.

Paintings and elaborate carved sculptures cover the walls and hang from the ceiling.

Some of these resemble the folk art on display at the High Art Museum back in Atlanta (see Atlanta Glamour and Surrealism).

The items go on and on.





Dolls and figurines clothed in period accurate garments populate models of celebrations from around the world.

One tableau shows a pueblo feast day, including rude tourists taking pictures.

Another shows a Day of the Dead ceremony from Mexico.

A third shows a Chinese village, and so forth.





My favorite works here were the elaborate Tree of Life sculptures from Mexico.

These large elaborately carved works contain hundreds of overlapping figures.

They symbolize the continuity of family, culture, and humanity across many generations.

Santa Fe Architecture

After the museum, I drove downtown.

A very curious thing happened.

The outer parts of Santa Fe look like other sprawling southwestern cities with some great scenery in the background.

I then started seeing buildings with obviously fake brown stucco walls, with equally fake logs sticking out of them.

As I drove inward I saw more and more of them, until the entire scenery looked like a modern copy of an ancient pueblo like Acoma (see Pueblo Life).





These buildings are pueblo revival architecture, a modern facsimile of what Santa Fe looked like under Spanish rule.

It first appeared in the early 1920s, and has since taken over the central city core.

City zoning codes now require the style for all downtown buildings.

Done well, it makes Santa Fe look like a city from the ancient past.

Done less well, it makes buildings look like a cheesy fake copy of that past.

Santa Fe is likely the only city with a parking garage that tries to appear like a five hundred year old adobe.

For better and worse, it plays a big role in creating the city’s atmosphere.





Like all Spanish settlements of the time, Santa Fe has a central plaza by royal decree (see Everything old is new again).

It is still the center of the city, now surrounded by historic buildings, great museums, really pricy art galleries, and some atmospheric hotels.

Rare for the southwest, this part of the city is fully walkable.

Since rooms near the plaza are highly desirable, hotels tend to be atrociously expensive and sell out quickly.





I handled the issue by staying at Casa Del Toro.

They rent out apartments for short term stays, located on a residential street about eight blocks from the central plaza.

The price would be high in many places, but is downright affordable in Santa Fe.

For my money I got a one bedroom apartment located in a mock-adobe building with tile floors and concrete walls, plus a parking spot.

Since it has a kitchen, I can keep my costs down by cooking my own food too.

The apartment is not as spotless or luxurious as most hotels here, but it met my needs.





Living quarters and parking in place, I walked toward the plaza.

Nearly every building has the same mock-adobe look as my temporary apartment.

I saw a pueblo revival office tower, and the First Presbyterian Church, designed to look like an ancient pueblo church even though it was built much later.

Several buildings held expensive art galleries.

I finally arrived at a large structure with a combination of pueblo-revival and Spanish colonial architecture.

It has large balconies made of carved wood between mock adobe towers.

Unlike many buildings with a similar look, this one is truly historic.

It’s the New Mexico Museum of Art, built in 1917, one of the first pueblo revival buildings in Santa Fe.

New Mexico Museum of Art

Unlike many art museums, which are either modernist white cubes (see Atlanta Glamour and Surrealism) or Beaux Arts palaces (see Arch Madness), the pueblo look continues inside.

The rooms feature elaborately carved wooden ceilings and wooden doorways.

They surround a courtyard lined with log beams.

The courtyard walls feature American Scene murals of pueblo life, painted by William Shuster as part of a WPA project.





The museum has a permanent exhibit on the art of New Mexico called ‘How The West Is One’.

Its stated aim is to show how multiple cultures within the state melded into one.

I found the description odd, since the art is actually displayed chronologically.





The show starts with a mixture of pueblo and Spanish colonial art.

The Spanish art is mostly religious paintings, including a selection of santos, folk art paintings of saints created as icons (see New Mexico history is US history).

The pueblo work is mostly pottery, including black on black jars from Maria Martinez, a famous pueblo potter from San Ildefonso Pueblo.





Next are paintings from when the Americans arrived.

Many of these are highly romanticized pictures of Native Americans and southwestern landscapes, which present the area as undiscovered wilderness.

Some were sponsored by the Santa Fe Railroad as advertisements.

Frank Sauerwein painted desert landscape with glowing Hudson River School light, such as Enchanted Mesa.

Joseph Henry Sharp created The Stoic, an iconic image of a Native American, head lowered, walking into the sunset.





In 1898, Ernest Blumenschein first travelled to Taos northeast of Santa Fe.

He was enraptured by the scenery he saw, and decided to paint it.

Other artists soon joined him, forming the Taos Colony.

The style is the southwestern version of American Scene Regionalism (see Having an Art Attack), with highly realistic scenes done in bright colors.

This colony has the first mention of “desert light”, which artists often use to describe New Mexico.

It refers to the area’s bright sunshine due to high elevation and lack of moisture, which brings out colors.





Mixed in with the Taos School are odd paintings that show New Mexico artists grappling with European art trends.

The captions indicate these artists were drawn to Santa Fe due in part due to the museum’s “open door policy”; it would show any local artist at the time.

While this policy resulted in groundbreaking paintings that nobody else would touch, it also resulted in many derivative works.

For example, Antelope Dance by B.J.O. Nordfeldt is a near exact replica of one of Paul Cezanne’s bather paintings, except that it features pueblo dancers instead.

On the other hand, the section also has Pueblo Dancer (Matachina) by Jan Matulka, a Cubist portrait of a pueblo dancer in bright colors.

It shows the artist’s reaction of the energy of the dance.





After World War II, New Mexico artists followed the major trends of the time.

Many worked in abstraction, from Georgia O’Keefe’s biomorphic abstraction based on plants to geometric work by Allan Graham.

A number of artists, including O’Keefe, painted New Mexico’s distinctive landscapes with highly simplified forms and colors.

That led to a room of modernist takes on traditional Hispanic and pueblo crafts.

Teri Greeves covered sneakers with traditional Hispanic beadwork to create Yee Tah-lee.

James Luna created High Tech Peace Pipe #1, a plumbing pipe wrapped in beadwork sitting on a rotary telephone.





The museum had one temporary show.

Gustave Baumann, a German art teacher, moved to New Mexico in 1918 and spent the rest of his life here.

He became famous for his graphic work, incredibly realistic and detailed full color prints.

The exhibit shows his working process, meticulously building up a scene one layer of color at a time.

It shows a stack of transparencies, one per color, and then the final product.

I can appreciate the skill on display but don’t care for the art style.





On the whole, I found the museum a little disappointing.

It has a surprisingly small amount of work on display for a city as filled with art as Santa Fe.

The permanent collection was smaller than the other New Mexico museum I saw, the Albuquerque Art and History Museum.

Many paintings were by people I’ve never heard of.

One thing I did appreciate was the reception.

Art museums usually have parties for members and donors featuring snacks and (non-alcoholic) drinks.

This museum had one tonight, and opened it to all patrons.

It’s a nice gesture in an art soaked city.





Beyond art, Santa Fe also has a large reputation for gourmet food.

In the early 1980s, area chefs created a blend of California and Hispanic influenced cooking now called ‘southwestern cuisine’.

The very best meals are highly creative treats, with wallet destroying prices to match.

Thankfully, not every city restaurant falls in that category.

I ate at a highly recommended spot called the Atomic Grill, whose quirky take on Santa Fe cooking is as affordable as most places are expensive.

The place has a hipster vibe, with airbrush paintings by local artists on the walls.

Service was pretty slow, though.

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Photos

Native American Statue in Santa Fe
Statue of a pueblo indian in traditional regalia outside the International Folk Art Museum, Santa Fe

Pueblo Revival Parking Garage
Something like this could only exist in Santa Fe

Pueblo Revival office buildings
Its not a hundreds years old pueblo, although it wants to look that way

Santa Fe Presbyterian Church
A modern church copied after a five century old pueblo original, only in Santa Fe

Santa Fe housing
Building very similiar to my temporary apartment.

New Mexico Museum of Art
A pueblo mission turned into an art museum; one of the oldest pueblo revival buildings in Santa Fe

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