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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

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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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How to Discover and Grow Hobbies Through Santa Fe’s Vibrant Art Scene

Ricardo Legorreta

Santa Fe locals, working artists, and art-curious neighbors often want a creative outlet but feel stalled by one problem: it’s hard to tell what’s worth trying when opportunities are scattered and self-promotion can feel awkward. The Santa Fe arts community makes that choice easier by surrounding people with visible, everyday examples of making and sharing work. With a little arts culture engagement, hobby inspiration in Santa Fe stops being a vague idea and becomes a grounded direction that fits real schedules and real interests. Continue reading “How to Discover and Grow Hobbies Through Santa Fe’s Vibrant Art Scene”

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Ripple Effect: Cary Cluett – Lab for The Acoustic Window III

Lab for the Acoustic Window III is an immersive, multi-sensory installation using visual and acoustic space to study the effect of acoustic and visual isolation. His goal is to treat the space as a separate chamber, isolating the acoustic connection with the hall space while maintaining the visual ‘window’. This idea stemmed from a 1960’s television series Get Smart, wherein there was the “Cone of Silence”; a hilariously impractical gadget intended to insure private conversations but which comically makes it impossible for those inside to hear one another while outsiders can hear everything. Cluett takes this as a challenge to morph this gag into a functional idea. In previous iterations he’s been able to create acoustic isolation wherein those inside can hear the outside but those outside can see but not hear those inside. His goal in this iteration is to turn ripple effect into a space that hugs, or holds, the sound inside the space. Stay tuned for upcoming performances that play with this idea.

Installation on view Thursday March 5th – Thursday April 30th, 2026

Opening Reception Thursday March 5th, 4:00 – 6:00pm

https://www.carycluett.com/ripple-effect