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2026 Recycle Santa Fe Art Festival

Recycle Santa Fe Art Festival

November 6-8, 2026, in Santa Fe, New Mexico
Santa Fe Community Convention Center

The Recycle Santa Fe Art Festival is truly a celebration of creativity and sustainability! This annual event showcases stunning artwork made from discarded materials—everything from upcycled apparel to vintage tin-can jewelry.

The weekend-long festival takes place at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center and features:

  • Art Market with over 100 artists from around the region and country selling original recycled-material pieces.
  • Juried Art Exhibits for both adults and students.
  • Trash Fashion & Costume Show—a dazzling display of wearable art made from repurposed materials.
  • Make-and-Take Art Activities for hands-on creativity.

This family-friendly event is a fantastic opportunity for art lovers, eco-conscious shoppers, and anyone who appreciates the ingenuity of turning trash into treasure.

The Recycle Santa Fe Art Festival, launched in collaboration with Keep Santa Fe Beautiful in 1999, is an artist-driven event that celebrates art made from recycled materials. This family-friendly festival includes a diverse art market, adult and student art exhibits, the dazzling Trash Fashion and Costume Contest, and engaging make-and-take art activities. All artworks feature at least 75% recycled, reused, or repurposed materials.

Supporting artists who incorporate recycled materials not only fosters economic growth within the arts community but also encourages sustainable practices and creative ways to rethink waste. As the Santa Fe Reporter notes, this event is “… a shockingly good time… the weekend’s biggest can’t miss event… a highlight of the fall season.”

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Music to Drive To: A Lifelong Inquiry into Painting

Music to drive to

Willy Bo Richardson has been making paintings from a visual language he began developing in the late 1990s. What does it mean to stay with a language for nearly three decades—

The surprise is not that Richardson has remained faithful to his vocabulary. The surprise is that the vocabulary has remained unexpectedly elastic. This places Richardson in a lineage that includes Josef Albers, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, and, in a different register, Robert Irwin— because each artist accepted formal limitations in exchange for heightened perceptual freedom.

Music to Drive To gathers more than seventy paintings alongside essays, conversations and reflections on the practice. There is a foreword by Stephanie Buhmann, an essay by Katy Crocker, and a conversation with the gallerist and mentor Max Protetch. Richardson’s autobiographical essay, “Dad, Why Do You Paint Stripes?,” takes up a question that is both more elementary and more difficult than it first appears.

The book resists the familiar retrospective’s temptation to turn an artist’s career into a succession of breakthroughs. Instead, it makes a case for continuity as a form of inquiry. One comes away with the impression that Richardson paints this way because, after decades of testing alternatives, he discovered he could not honestly paint otherwise.

Designed by Joseph Gilbert, the paintings are allowed to establish their own rhythm before the essays intervene. Full-bleed reproductions, details, installation photographs, and carefully paced transitions create a visual tempo that encourages browsing as much as reading. One can enter the book almost anywhere and still sense its underlying cadence. 

Edited by Will Palmer, and published by Eastern Gate Publishing, Music to Drive To will celebrated its launch and signing on September 1, 2026, from 5:00–7:00 p.m., at CLAMP, 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“.

Continue reading “Cara Romero, Virgil Ortiz, and Willy Bo Richardson”

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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

Continue reading “Hannah: Buddhism’s Untold Journey screening at St John’s College”

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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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