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Music to Drive To: A Lifelong Inquiry into Painting

Music to drive to

Born and raised in Santa Fe, Willy Bo Richardson left New Mexico to study painting at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Texas at Austin before earning his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Returning to Santa Fe in 2007, he continued a body of work that had begun in the late 1990s—one that has remained committed to a sustained investigation of color, perception, and the act of painting itself.

The book, Music to Drive To, presents this more than twenty-seven-year studio practice through more than seventy paintings, personal essays, and conversations with writers, colleagues, and mentor Max Protetch. Rather than documenting a series of stylistic reinventions, the book follows a single inquiry, asking what becomes visible when an artist remains with one visual language long enough for it to evolve from within.

The publication includes a foreword by Stephanie Buhmann, an essay by Katy Crocker, Richardson’s autobiographical essay “Dad, Why Do You Paint Stripes?,” and an extended conversation with renowned art dealer Max Protetch. Together, these texts consider painting not simply as image-making, but as a sustained philosophical practice grounded in repetition, perception, doubt, and attention.

Rather than functioning as a conventional retrospective, Music to Drive To unfolds as a continuous visual sequence. Designed by Joseph Gilbert, the book encourages readers to move fluidly between paintings and text, allowing the images to lead while the essays provide context and reflection. The result is a book intended not to be consumed all at once, but returned to over time.

At the center of the publication is a simple question: what can emerge when an artist chooses to deepen a lifelong inquiry rather than continually reinvent it? Richardson’s paintings suggest that continuity is not the opposite of discovery, but one of its conditions.

Designed by Joseph Gilbert, edited by Will Palmer, and published by Eastern Gate Publishing, Music to Drive To will be celebrated with a launch and signing on September 1, 2026, from 5:00–7:00 p.m., at CLAMP Gallery, 247 West 29th Street, Ground Floor, New York City.

Preview pages and ordering information are available at willyborichardson.com/book

 

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Harwood Museum Comes to Santa Fe

harwood museum

The famed Harwood Art Museum is planning to expand beyond Taos, with plans to acquire the historic Spiegelberg House in Santa Fe.

Harwood Museum of Art of the University of New Mexico will acquire the historic Spiegelberg House at 237 East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe through a remarkable donor-supported gift.
The future Harwood–Santa Fe will expand the museum’s presence beyond Taos, create new opportunities to share Harwood’s collections, and strengthen connections across Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and UNM’s fine arts programs.
Peyton Wright Gallery will continue to operate in the building during a planned two-year transition period, honoring John Wright Schaefer’s stewardship of this historic space and arts destination.
More details to come as this exciting new chapter unfolds.
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Cara Romero, Virgil Ortiz, and Willy Bo Richardson

Cara Romero, Virgil Ortiz, and Willy Bo Richardson are celebrated contemporary artists tied to the rich artistic landscape of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Beyond living and working in Santa Fe, these three artists share specific, deeper connective tissue in their career milestones, creative philosophies, and local institutional networks.

A Mastery of “Time Distortion” As a Tool

Though their end products look wildly different, all three artists share a core conceptual obsession with manipulating time and space:
  • Virgil Ortiz distorts time by blending a historical 17th-century event (the 1680 Pueblo Revolt) with a sci-fi world set in the year 2180.
  • Cara Romero uses “Indigenous Futurism” in her staged photography to bend time, merging ancient ancestral stories with surrealist modern realities.
  • Willy Bo Richardson utilizes purely abstract color theory to capture what he calls “emotional geometry” and states that his rhythmic vertical strokes are explicitly designed to create a space where “Time Dissolves Here“.

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Hannah: Buddhism’s Untold Journey screening at St John’s College

Sunday, May 17th at 11am

St. John’s College
1160 Camino De Cruz Blanca, Santa Fe

Junior Common Room

Parking instructions: Park in the Visitor’s Parking Lot and walk to Pritzker Building (main building) – Junior Common Room is on the Second Floor, to which there is both stair and elevator access.

Free and open to the public!

More information: Hannah the Film

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CALL FOR ARTIST PARTICIPATION: NATIONAL CRAFT OPEN STUDIOS WEEKEND 2026

National Craft Open Studios Weekend_FB

Artist sign-up is open now through April 30 for the American Craft Council’s National Craft Open Studios Weekend, taking place nationwide July 18-19, 2026. 

National Craft Open Studios Weekend is a first-of-its-kind, nationwide celebration that invites the public into the creative spaces of craft artists across the country. This two-day event will offer guests a rare glimpse into the processes, tools and inspiration that shape how handmade works are made, and provide artists critical support in their sales season. 

National Craft Open Studios Weekend is presented by the American Craft Council and launches as part of Craft in America’s Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026. Similar to what Record Store Day or Independent Bookstore Day do for their creative ecosystems, National Craft Open Studios Weekend will provide support for artists and makers, and strengthen the national craft community through shared storytelling.  Continue reading “CALL FOR ARTIST PARTICIPATION: NATIONAL CRAFT OPEN STUDIOS WEEKEND 2026”

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Santa Fe Just Named the Most Creative City in America

You may have heard the buzz. It has already been mentioned several times over town this past weekend. Yes, we are up to something and, yes, Santa Fe was recently named the most creative city in the United States.

But now we have the study to prove it.

Peter Zandan, is a Santa Fe resident and the founder of IQ2 Analytics and Insights. His new report concludes that Santa Fe is the most creative city in the United States when measured by per-capita creative concentration — a distinction grounded not in branding or tourism slogans, but in independent data, institutional depth, and centuries of continuous creative practice. Peter’s is the first analysis to synthesize multiple national data sets into a single, comprehensive argument for Santa Fe’s creative primacy.

The impetus for all of this was a simple question posed by Owen Lipstein, founder of Santa Fe Magazine. Lipstein believed that pound for pound, by every per-capita measure, Santa Fe is the most creative city in America. He brought the question to Zandan — a friend, but also a researcher whose reputation rests on not telling clients what they want to hear.

“I fully expected Peter would come back and tell us we were wrong,” says Lipstein. “That’s what he does.”

“The goal was an honest answer, grounded in evidence, written for the people who actually live here,” Zandan writes. “Not as a slogan, not as tourism marketing. If the data had pointed elsewhere, that’s what I would have reported.”

We are fortunate to be a part of every single day, and that is the creative community of Santa Fe at its finest. Actors, poets, iconoclasts, directors, chefs, scientists, poets, writers, thinkers, sculptors, painters, rule breakers, risk takers, decision makers and every single one of you combine to make Santa Fe the Creative Capital of America.

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Geometry The Shape of Things Juried by Hannah Sage Kay

Curatorial Statement

Geometry’s mathematical foundation provides a false sense of certainty in its ability to measure the world we know and recreate with precision three dimensional objects and spaces on a two dimensional plane. As there is much that we can’t see, understand, or know, and even more to be intuited and imagined, artists have long approached geometry less as a set of rules than a lens to be explored.

From the tiled constellations of 6th century Islamic architecture, where repeating forms are thought conjure spiritual connection and provide a greater understanding of reality, to the Renaissance conviction that the world could be ordered through mathematical logics—articulated by Leon Battista Alberti’s treatises on art, architecture, and perspective and embodied in works such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—geometry has served as a bridge between vision and structure in an attempt at understanding the physical world. Modernism initiated a more intuitive and investigative use of geometry. The bold graphic designs of Russian Constructivism aimed to reflect industrial society and the built environment; the meditative compositions of Joseph Albers and Agnes Martin employed grids, planes, and color to express not only an external environment but an internal, emotional experience; and the seriality of Minimalism’s art objects sought to make viewers more attuned to their phenomenological relationships with space. These varied approaches suggest that shape is not a fixed system but a tool and a language that can articulate mathematical principles as much as it can convey ideas, emotions, and experiences.

Geometry: The Shape of Things gathers artists who engage this lineage not as prescriptive but as generative—a method by which to comment on art history, better understand the world, and imagine new relationships to space and perception.

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