Altitude (æl·te·tüd)
October 16, 2026, 8:30–10:00 AM
Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) | Muñoz-Waxman Gallery
1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87505
Artist Willy Bo Richardson was the featured speaker at CreativeMornings Santa Fe, held at the Center for Contemporary Arts. The event followed the global monthly theme, ALTITUDE, presented by Adobe.
Richardson shared the journey that shaped his practice: growing up in Santa Fe, working in the late-1990s New York art scene when critics were once again declaring that “painting is dead,” and a pivotal moment in graduate school when he turned his canvases to the wall and started completely over. He also revealed a deeply personal source of inspiration with an unexpected connection to altitude.
Watch the Talk
Watch Richardson’s full presentation:
On the Radio
Before the event, Richardson and CreativeMornings Santa Fe host Tracy Sprinkle joined Honey Harris on 98.1 Radio Free Santa Fe to talk about ALTITUDE and preview the gallery talk.
Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) | Muñoz-Waxman Gallery
1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe, NM
Doors opened at the Center for Contemporary Arts to coffee and pastries, with live guitar and vocals from Jono Manson. Then came the main event: Richardson’s talk and Q&A. The morning closed with door prizes. Attendees folded their entries into paper airplanes and launched them, and winners were drawn from the planes. Two took home signed copies of Richardson’s monograph, Music to Drive To, and a third won a $200 gift certificate to Ten Thousand Waves.
Original Article found here: CULTURED got an exclusive first look at the Santa Fe Invitational, a new art fair and summit landing in the southwestern city next spring.
Michael and Reeve Stein, who co-own Tesuque Village Market, with Michael Phelan. Image courtesy of Phelan.
Tucked away between the foothill swells and desert plains of the American Southwest, Sante Fe has long served as an intimate and mystic refuge for artists. Georgia O’Keeffe, Bruce Nauman, and Agnes Martin have all called it home, inviting scores of emerging artists to follow them south. Now, a new initiative is fortifying the city’s status as not only a destination for working artists, but the collectors who champion them as well.
“Collectors are not born—they are cultivated through curiosity, knowledge, confidence, and meaningful relationships with artists, galleries, and institutions,” says Marfa Invitational founder Michael Phelan, who serves as the creative director and curator of the forthcoming Santa Fe Invitational. “If we are able to create the conditions for discovery and engagement, we are not simply building a market for today, but helping shape one for tomorrow—cultivating the collectors who will sustain art and culture for generations to come.”
Landing in the city next spring—from April 8-11—the Santa Fe Invitational is part fair, part summit, bringing together local institutions and creatives on a scale yet to be seen in the New Mexico city. The tentpole art fair will be held at the Santa Fe Convention Center, alongside a conversation series counting luminaries like critics Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith and designer Cynthia Rowley among its participants, while satellite exhibitions, site-specific installations, performances, and private collection and home tours radiate outward.
As Santa Fe’s gravitational pull grows stronger, the invitational, founded by Michael Stein, a veteran entrepreneur and owner of Tesuque Village Market, a roadhouse bar and general store that acts as a community hub, will provide a fixed center. Fittingly, it will devote significant attention to fostering new connections and collaborations for the next generation of local arts leaders. A Collectors Circle will bring together young patrons, artists, galleries, and institutions. A Cultural Council meanwhile, will leverage year-round ambassadors to promote the invitational’s mission.
“I’ve learned that culture happens when people have a reason to come together—and a place that makes them want to stay,” says Stein. “For two decades, Tesuque Village Market has been that kind of place for me and for so many people in SantaFe. The SantaFe Invitational grows from that same belief in the power of bringing people together—artists, collectors, galleries, cultural leaders, and communities—to share ideas, discover new perspectives, and create meaningful connections across cultures and disciplines. We want it to become part of the life of SantaFe while connecting the city to a broader international conversation about contemporary art and culture.”
The outreach to arts-focused and unexpected collaborators alike includes partnerships with SITE Santa Fe and the Institute of American Indian Arts, as well as an appearance from DART, a women-led platform blending art and motorsport, and members of the local lowrider community. “At a moment when the traditional art-fair model is being reconsidered across the global art market, I believe the contemporary art world has an extraordinary opportunity to imagine a different future,” says Phelan, “not simply another fair, but a cultural summit built around cultivating the relationships, knowledge, confidence, and curiosity that allow collecting and contemporary art to flourish. For me, that begins with creating a more human and relationship-driven model for how art is experienced and collected—beginning in SantaFe, connecting to the world, and evolving for generations to come.”
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.”
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
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.
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“.
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.
Sunday, May 17th at 11am