Contributors

For over a century, El Palacio has been a forum for voices exploring New Mexico’s art, archaeology, history, and landscape. Explore the writers, photographers, historians, and scientists whose perspectives have defined the magazine’s pages—past and present.

Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of twelve books, including Into the Hush, Sight Lines, and others. Sze’s poems have been translated into fifteen languages, and he is the recipient of the National Book Award among many other honors. He lives in Santa Fe.

Deborah Jackson Taffa

Deborah Jackson Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo. Her memoir Whiskey Tender was a 2024 National Book Award Finalist and was longlisted for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Taffa serves as the director of the MFA in creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Cara Romero

Cara Romero is an award-winning contemporary fine art photographer. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero’s expansive oeuvre has been informed by formal training in film, digital, fine art, and commercial photography. She maintains a studio in Santa Fe, regularly participates in Native American art fairs, and was featured in PBS’ Craft in America (2019).

Laura Addison

Laura Addison is curator of North American and European folk art at the Museum of International Folk Art. She was previously curator of contemporary art at the New Mexico Museum of Art (2002–13), and is a frequent contributor to El Palacio.

Four clay figurines in traditional attire, with one playing a flute and the others covering their ears, eyes, and mouth, set against a plain background. [gen-ai]

The Art of Remembrance

In 2003, Amy Groleau was doing archaeological field work as a graduate student in Ayacucho, Peru—a highlands city that many people associate with two very different national narratives. This region lies at the heart of Peruvian folk art, rich with roots in the pre-Columbian Wari culture and complex with the hybridity that resulted from colonial-era negotiations and violence. From 1980 to 2000, Ayacucho was also the epicenter of the country’s harrowing internal armed conflict, when the Maoist revolutionary movement, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), conducted guerrilla warfare against the Peruvian government, and the state retorted with an equally violent counterinsurgency.

Intricately beaded chair with ornate designs, including figures, patterns, and elaborate backrest details, displayed against a plain gray background. [gen-ai]

Notching It Up

BY LAURA ADDISON When Napa-based artist Freeland Tanner speaks about his work, he often uses the word beyond—beyond boundaries, beyond the box, beyond the original forms that inspired him to begin with. Indeed, upon seeing his elaborately notched and layered boxes and frames done in the spirit of tramp art, visitors to the exhibition No Idle Hands: The Myths & Meanings of Tramp Art are awestruck and say that they’ve never seen anything quite like Tanner’s work before.

Kamleika (gut parka)

A Tribute to a Titan

BY LAURA ADDISON Lloyd Cotsen, the charismatic, longtime executive of Neutrogena Corporation from 1967 to 1994, passed away on May 8, 2017. One of his many legacies is the gift of the Neutrogena Collection to the Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA). “Cotsen’s gift of more than 3,000 objects to the museum in 1995 has had a profound effect on the lives of New Mexicans and visitors alike,” wrote Khristaan Villela, MOIFA’s director, in an obituary for the Santa Fe New Mexican.

A close-up of a painted figurine in a red jacket, black boots, and hat holding a stick, with other colorful figurines and a white horse in the blurred background. [gen-ai]

The Morris Miniature Circus

BY LAURA ADDISON The golden age of the American circus (1870s–1930s) coincided with an era of modernization and mobility, most notably the expansion of the railroad. Although the circus in this country long predated the railroad—first making its appearance in 1792, when the Scottish equestrian acrobat John Bill Ricketts opened a riding school in Philadelphia—it was the railroad that allowed the American circus to grow in geographic reach, scale, and elaborateness.

A colorful patchwork quilt featuring irregular geometric shapes and varied fabric pieces in a range of bright and muted colors. [gen-ai]

“Quilts Is in Everything”

BY LAURA M. ADDISON "The most miraculous works of modern art America has produced” is how Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times described the quilts by African American women from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, that were exhibited in 2002 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. [wonderplugin_slider id="136"] (more…)

A man in a gray suit and purple tie stands in an art gallery next to a colorful abstract painting with red, green, and blue shapes. [gen-ai]

Cody Hartley

On a bright day in January, Museum of International Folk Art curator Laura Addison sat down with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s new director of curatorial affairs, Cody Hartley, for a conversation about Hartley’s long engagement with the long history of art in New Mexico and his vision for its future. Addison: I just have to ask, was the artist Marsden Hartley your great, great, great uncle?

Joe Traugott, Always on Display

Curator Laura Addison’s many contributions to El Palacio include “That Was Then, This Is It,” a history of the magazine, which is online at elpalacio.org. We asked her to interview another of our regular contributors, Joseph Traugott, to mark the occasion of El Palacio’s birthday and Traugott’s retirement from the New Mexico Museum of Art. Addison: Joe, I just wanted to start with the fact you retired in July.

The Decay of Nature, Suspended

Great artworks have staying power — intellectually, if not always physically. Many contemporary artists use fragile or ephemeral materials that pose a challenge to collections care in museums. When it happens that a remarkable yet vulnerable work is offered to us for the New Mexico Museum of Art’s collection, we turn to the museum system’s conservators to advise us about the challenges that will face us if we acquire it.

Peter Sarkisian

Artist Peter Sarkisian has said that he is more interested in questions than answers. The questions he poses through his work constellate around the tensions of paradox. Is it real, or is it illusion? Is it image, or is it object? Is it surface, or is it interior? In posing these questions, he seeks to redefine spectatorship as an active and critical, rather than a passive, endeavor.