The last time I was in Santa Fe, I found myself standing in front of a tall digital display that, every few minutes, scrolled to something different than Google Street View. I saw a man sitting on the side of the road on a white plastic chair in Serbia; a woman walking her dogs on a leafy Los Angeles street; a man’s ass who must have seen a tech company’s camera car and decided to make a show of his own. The piece rotated through the images for over an hour. Nine Eyes of Google Street View by Canadian artist Jon Rafman was one of the pieces in the room 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 best-known art museums) are two of the main attractions in the city’s Railyard District, a former train depot that has become a thriving art scene and is home to more than half a dozen galleries, all focusing on modern and contemporary art.
One of the strongest art hubs in the world, this small city of over 150,000 people is reported to have more artists and art institutions per capita than anywhere else on Earth. Yet it has a reputation, well-earned to be sure, as a place for traditional, and often mistaken, southwestern art. It’s a place where a giant oil painting of a Native American warrior might fit right in among the five figures—many Santa Fe galleries display art directly inspired by New Mexico’s most famous cultural scholar, Georgia O’Keeffe.
Except O’Keeffe was a cultist and, in a roundabout way, you could draw a line from Rafman to O’Keeffe. If the Railyard Arts District had existed back in his day, perhaps O’Keeffe would have found his gallery home there. Maybe not. I’m not an O’Keeffe scholar or 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 Santa Fe’s traditional galleries, contemporary art spaces where locals are shaping the future of art.
According to SITE Santa Fe curator Brandee Caoba, this push/pull between traditional and boundary-pushing is not new—contemporary art has been around in Santa Fe for a long time. “For centuries, it served as a meeting point between indigenous communities, trade routes, and later, waves of artists, writers, and travelers attracted to the region,” he said. “This combined history of encounter and dialogue has shaped the city’s artistic life. Within that context, artists working in contemporary ways, such as installation, conceptual practices, performance, and interdisciplinary work, are often discussed as recent developments. But in many ways, these practices have long existed in Santa Fe.”
In addition to SITE’s biannual and year-round exhibitions, which maintain the city’s name and reputation in the world of art knowledge, he said Santa Fe’s crop of “artist-run programs, small exhibitions, other art spaces, and independent curators have helped to cultivate an event that is less connected to the expectations of the tourist market, a dialogue that is more connected to the tourism market, and an open space that is more connected to conversations with visitors. He pointed to places and art collections such as with 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 “central to supporting this ecosystem.”
However, as is the case with many other low-profile art scenes around the world, Santa Fe’s rising rents are forcing those communities to the brink, “putting increasing pressure on artists and threatening the sustainability of the contemporary art system.” One of the city’s best emerging art spaces is Keep Contemporary, a locally owned gallery that spent years in Santa Fe Plaza, home to many of the city’s traditional art galleries, before moving to the outskirts of Santa Fe’s central art district.
Jared Antonio-Justo Trujillo opened the gallery in 2016, hoping to create a 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 who exist outside the traditional boundaries of the city a place to show and sell their work. However, rising rents forced him to close his original location and open a new iteration of the Keep in the nearby Railyard Arts District. “There aren’t many young Chicanos coming out of a local gallery in this city,” he said with a laugh. “So, it made sense to move the gallery to the right place.”
In addition to providing a space for local, contemporary and often indigenous artists to showcase their work, Trujillo represents many artists, both local and international, including Dennis Larkins, Dirk Kotz, Nico Salazar, Orlando Allison, Ross Pino and Pearl Whitecrow. According to Trujillo, one of Keep’s driving missions will be to keep art as accessible as possible. “Nothing in my gallery will cost more than twenty,” he said. “And that’s intentional. 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 know anything about the city’s strong scene. “Many 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 is a movement here. And to me, contemporary indigenous artists, that is the most important movement there is. The whole purpose 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 only as a venue for artists in the field, but also to showcase the diverse art being done in a city like Santa Fe. “There are times when people walk in the door at the Keep and say, ‘Wow, this is a breath of fresh air, because everywhere else I’ve been there are bronze statues of Navajo warriors or fake war bonnets hanging on the wall.’ This is not the place where they go to buy the cowhide tag,” he said.
Kuali’i is originally from Hawaii but has lived in Santa Fe since 2016, when he moved there from his longtime home in Jersey City. It was in the bustling art scene of the East Coast city that Kuali’i first made a name for himself as a wheatpaster painter and illustrator. He moved to New Mexico to become the first artist-in-residence at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where he crafted the intricate paper pieces for which he is now widely known.
No matter how modern or modern things are entering Santa Fe, however, Kuali’i still sees a line of work done in the city, going back hundreds of years. “There are works of art that have existed since ancient times,” he said. “And those practices are related to foreign art that enters this city.” 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 modern—an art form that pushes past cultural norms.
While there will always be artists who will move away from the scene—which, Kuali’i points out, is easy in a place like Santa Fe, given how much open space there is on the outskirts of the city—there is a cohesive group of people around the city whose goal is to foster a more collaborative and community-based environment. “Having a single personality is a white settler mentality,” added Kuali’i, who is visiting the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum exhibit focusing on the artist’s time in Hawaii. “But here, there is a small community of people who, once successful, attract people with them.”
Santa Fe will probably 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 focused on southwestern art, indigenous or otherwise. But for collectors willing to look beyond the traditional, Santa Fe rewards a contemporary scene as important and surprising as any in the country.
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