Santa Fe: The Southwest City That Turned Itself Into an Essential Art Outpost

Via The New York Times

July 28, 2025

At Site Santa Fe, 71 artists were inspired by Southwestern figures, from healers and novelists to Navajo code talkers. Here’s a guide to the highlights.

Santa Fe is a place that can literally leave you breathless.

Reeling from a long flight and unacclimated to the altitude, I thought about this as I staggered up the 9,125-foot summit of Atalaya Mountain, with skittering lizards, wildflowers and 360-degree views of the city and its majestic environs.

I was steeling myself for the marathon of Site Santa Fe’s “Once Within a Time,” a citywide exhibition of work by 71 regional, national and international artists that turned out to be revelatory even for those of us with red chile in our veins, who have visited this city for decades.

Site Santa Fe opened in 1995 in a former warehouse turned nonprofit gallery in the city’s art-filled Railyard District, but it stretches to museums and unconventional venues nearby, including a much-beloved novelty store and a boutique-y cannabis dispensary. The cast and locales were chosen by the veteran curator Cecilia Alemani, artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale and director and curator of public art for the High Line in New York.

Storytelling is at its core, with an only-in-New-Mexico cast of characters inspiring artists’ creations. They included boldface literary names like Willa Cather and D.H. Lawrence, who spent quality time in Taos, to more obscure historical “figures of interest” like Francis Schlatter, an Alsatian cobbler turned mystical healer, and Doña Tules, the “Queen of Sin” who ran a notorious gambling den off the city’s Plaza. (Fictional narratives are also thrown in for good measure.)  Full article here