Cynthia Sanchez, Curator, Capitol Art Collection
Introduction: The Shape of a Story
Many people couldn’t care less what happened in Santa Fe’s art world thirty years ago. Their attention lies with the present or future, often overlooking how the past has shaped both. Yet the history of contemporary art in Santa Fe isn’t found in books—it lives in people. It’s not simply the story of art, but of individuals: artists and art professionals who have worked, struggled, and evolved here over decades. They’ve seen change, made change, and been changed themselves.
The art community has transformed—not better, not worse, just different.
As we approached the year 2000, it felt appropriate to reflect. To ask the questions Paul Gauguin once painted in 1898: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? What are the roots of contemporary art in Santa Fe? What is its shape now? And how did we arrive here?
If art is a mirror of what we are, then SITE Santa Fe’s most recent biennial—closing with the end of the millennium—offers a fitting reflection. It wouldn’t exist without the groundwork of the last thirty years. Nor would many of the contemporary shows in Santa Fe’s galleries and museums. SITE Santa Fe didn’t fall from the sky. It arrived because the cultural infrastructure was already in place.
That groundwork was laid by people—by the community itself.
Art in the Streets, Monuments in Dialogue
The role SITE Santa Fe plays in the community is as complex—and at times controversial—as the art it exhibits. But this isn’t new.
Back in 1983, long before international biennials arrived, the Santa Fe Council for the Arts—then directed by Suzanne Jamison—sponsored Santa Fe City Streets, a citywide event that transformed the entire community into an arts center. It was a direct response to a lack of exhibition and performance space for local artists. Artworks spilled into the environment—onto sidewalks and plazas, into parks and storefronts. The city itself became the gallery.
Today, in front of the State Capitol, stands a work born from that same impulse: Charlene Teters’s reimagining of the Plaza Obelisk. Once a 19th-century monument inscribed to honor “heroes who died in battles with savage Indians,” it has been reinterpreted through Teters’s vision—now made of adobe bricks embedded with objects contributed by the community. Her version isn’t just sculpture; it’s testimony. A monument to memory, history, and shared humanity. A protest. A prayer. A place.
Teters’s piece is part of SITE Santa Fe’s biennial Looking for a Place, curated by Rosa Martínez. But it follows a lineage. Back in Santa Fe City Streets, artist Richard Hooker and Anne Green proposed covering the original obelisk in sod—a soft, subversive gesture that foreshadowed Teters’s radical reconstruction.
That 1983 festival also featured John Connell’s bird sculptures installed across the Plaza and Cathedral Park; a performance by the enigmatic Rubber Lady; installations by Nargis; and theatrical works by Zona de Teatro. It was a time when the Greyhound bus station was still downtown, when Woolworth’s was a gathering place. And yet, even then, much of the public resisted this kind of work—art that broke expectations, that refused to behave, that didn’t “look like art.”
The same discomfort greets some of today’s contemporary shows. The resistance persists, but so does the art. And the questions it raises.
The Role of Art: Then, Now, Always
The debate about art—what it is, what it does, what it should be—has never been resolved. And it shouldn’t be. Its role has been at the center of dialogue for centuries, becoming especially charged in the 20th century with the Dadaists’ defiant manifestos in the 1920s. Since then, artists have continued to push, prod, and provoke—grappling with loss, disillusionment, displacement, and longing.
These are not just local concerns. They’re global patterns, mirrored in the titles of SITE Santa Fe’s international biennials:
- Longing and Belonging: From the Faraway Nearby
- Truce: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions
- Looking for a Place
Each speaks to the existential condition of our time: endless endings, perpetual longing, the search for grounding.
The feeling of dislocation—of being untethered from place and self—is not a passing trend. It defines our era. Cultural theorist James Clifford’s concept of “the predicament of culture” (1988) feels even more magnified today. We live in a time of dense global interconnection, where the very idea of distinct, separate cultural systems feels increasingly impossible.
What emerges in this cultural blur is not clarity, but consciousness—a heightened awareness of how identity is constructed, translated, and displayed. Cultural purity is no longer a goal, but a myth. In its place, we have something messier, more dynamic: hybrid identities, fragmented memories, invented traditions, and evolving homes.
We are all, in one way or another, looking for a place.
A home.
A way to belong in an age of impermanence and speed.
This is where art steps in—not to solve, but to witness. Not to resolve, but to reflect. Art becomes a map of longing, a mirror of culture, and sometimes a compass pointing home.
