In Santa Fe, a Vibrant Contemporary Scene Has Been Taking Shape for Decades
The last time I was in Santa Fe, I found myself standing before a tall digital display that, every few minutes, shuffled to a different still from Google Street View. I saw a man sitting at the roadside in a white plastic chair in Serbia; a dog-walking woman on a leafy Los Angeles street; the bare ass of someone who must’ve spotted the tech company’s can’t-miss camera car and decided to put on a show of his own. The piece rotated through the images for more than an hour. Nine Eyes of Google Street View by Canadian artist Jon Rafman was one of the cornerstone pieces at the Thoma Art Vault, a 3,500-square-foot digital-art gallery, the only one of its kind in the American Southwest. The Art Vault and SITE Santa Fe (one of America’s largest and most well-known contemporary art museums) are two of the biggest attractions in the city’s Railyard District, the former train depot that has become a burgeoning arts area and is home to more than half a dozen galleries, all focused on modern and contemporary art.
One of the world’s most robust art hubs, this small city of just over 150,000 reportedly counts more artists and creative institutions per capita than anywhere else on Earth. Yet it has a reputation, well-earned to be sure, as a hub of more traditional and, often to a fault, southwestern art. It’s a place where a large oil painting of a Native American warrior might run well into the five-figure range—many of Santa Fe’s more traditional galleries showcase art directly inspired by New Mexico’s most famous cultural denizen, Georgia O’Keeffe.
Except O’Keeffe was anything but a traditionalist and, in a roundabout way, you could arguably draw a line from Rafman to O’Keeffe. If the Railyard Arts District had existed back in her day, maybe O’Keeffe would have found her gallery home there. Maybe not. I am neither an O’Keeffe scholar nor an expert on Santa Fe’s art scene. But what stuck with me was this idea that, like any arts scene worth its weight, there are, alongside Santa Fe’s more traditional galleries, contemporary art spaces where locals are creating the future of art.
According to SITE Santa Fe curator Brandee Caoba, this push/pull between the traditional and the boundary-pushing is hardly new—contemporary art has long existed in Santa Fe. “For centuries, it has functioned as a meeting point between Indigenous communities, trade routes, and later, waves of artists, writers, and travelers drawn to the region,” she said. “This layered history of encounter and dialogue has shaped the city’s artistic life. Within that 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 existed in Santa Fe.”
In addition to SITE’s biennial and year-round exhibitions, which keep the city’s name and reputation in the global arts consciousness, she said Santa Fe’s crop of “artist-run initiatives, smaller galleries, alternative art spaces, and independent curators have helped cultivate a scene that is less tied to the expectations of the tourist market and more connected to experimentation, dialogue, and community.” She pointed to venues and art collectives such as 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 “central to sustaining this ecosystem.”
However, as is the case in so many other once-vibrant grassroots arts scenes around the world, Santa Fe’s rising rents are forcing those communities to the fringes, “putting increasing pressure on artists and threatening the sustainability of the contemporary art ecosystem.” One of the city’s emergent art outposts is Keep Contemporary, a locally owned gallery that spent years at the Santa Fe Plaza, around which much of the city’s more traditional galleries can be found, before moving to the edges of Santa Fe’s central arts area.
Jared Antonio-Justo Trujillo opened the gallery in 2016, hoping to build a space to platform 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 who exist outside of the city’s more traditional bounds a place to show and sell their work. However, rising rents forced him to shutter his original location and open a new iteration of Keep in a neighborhood adjacent to the Railyard Arts District. “There aren’t a lot of Chicano dudes from the ‘hood with locally owned galleries in this city,” he said with a laugh. “So, it made sense to move the gallery to a proper neighborhood.”
In addition to providing a place for local, contemporary and often indigenous artists to showcase their work, Trujillo represents many artists, both local and global, including Dennis Larkins, Dirk Kotz, Nico Salazar, Orlando Allison, Ross Pino and Pearl Whitecrow. According to Trujillo, one of the driving missions of Keep will be to always keep art as accessible as possible. “Nothing in my gallery will ever cost more than twenty grand,” he said. “And that’s on purpose. I want art to be accessible to everyone.”
He also sees Keep as an entrée for people visiting Santa Fe who might not otherwise be aware of 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 collectors, to tell people that there’s a movement here. And to me, indigenous contemporary artists, that’s the most important movement there is. The whole premise of this place is to help give people a voice.”
Santa Fe-based artist Ian Kuali’i echoed Trujillo’s sentiment, highlighting the value a gallery like Keep provides, not just as a place to platform artists, but also one to exhibit the variety of art being made in a city like Santa Fe. “There are times when folks would walk in the door at Keep and say, ‘Oh wow, this is a breath of fresh air, because every other place I’ve walked into is just bronze statues of Navajo warriors or fake war bonnets hanging on the wall.’ This isn’t the place they’re coming to buy a cowhide rug,” he said.
Kuali’i is a native Hawaiian but has lived in Santa Fe since 2016, when he relocated there from his longtime home in Jersey City. It was in the gritty East Coast city’s once-bustling arts scene that Kuali’i began making a name for himself as a wheatpaster and graffiti artist. He decamped to New Mexico to become the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he honed the wildly intricate papercut pieces for which he is now widely known.
No matter how modern or contemporary things get in Santa Fe, however, Kuali’i still sees a throughline in the work being made in the city, one that stretches back for centuries. “There are art practices that have existed here for time immemorial,” he said. “And those practices breed with some of the outsider art that finds its way into this town.” He pointed to artists like Rose B. Simpson and her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, whose sculptures stand as perfect examples of the marriage of traditional and contemporary—the kind of art that pushes long-standing cultural practices forward.
While there will always be artists who cloister themselves away from a scene—which, Kuali’i points out, is especially easy in a place like Santa Fe, given how much open space exists at the city’s fringes—there is a tight-knit group of people around the city whose aim is to foster a more collaborative and community-based environment. “Being so individualistic is such a white settler mindset,” Kuali’i, who is currently guest curating an exhibition with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum that focuses on the time the artist spent in Hawai’i, added. “But here, there is a small community of people who, when they have success, pull 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 the art of the southwest, indigenous or otherwise. But for collectors willing to look beyond the traditional, Santa Fe rewards with a contemporary scene as vital and surprising as any in the country.
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