New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs welcomes you to subscribe and support our state’s cultural treasures.
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 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 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 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).
Cynthia Baughman served as the editor of El Palacio magazine from 2010 to 2015. Cynthia and her husband moved permanently from the Philadelphia area to Tesuque Village in 2010. Born in Tennessee, Cynthia grew up in Washington DC, earned a BA in English from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell, and taught writing at Ithaca College and Temple University before working with the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
![Black and white sketch of a man with a receding hairline, mustache, and goatee, wearing a collared shirt with a decorative tie or cravat. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Shakespeares-First-Folio_2-400x225.jpg)
When William Shakespeare died in 1616, eighteen of his plays, including Macbeth, The Tempest, and As You Like It, had not been published. Seven years later, in 1623, two members of his troupe collected his plays into Mr. William Shakespeares [sic] Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, a book now referred to as the First Folio, and one of the most important in the history of print.
![A traditional red Japanese kimono with gold embroidered waves and crests, displayed against a black background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Red_5-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
The spectacular exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art, The Red That Colored the World, has been years in the planning and is only here for the summer. You should not miss it. Curators Barbara Anderson, Nicolasa Chávez, and Carmella Padilla have assembled from around the world diverse works of art, fashion, and material culture which have at least one thing in common: their color derives from a little bug.
![Surreal scene with two winged men flying over a vibrant, chaotic town filled with skeletons, animals, and people amid vivid colors and unusual details. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Jerry-West_2-400x225.jpg)
This spring we mark the seventieth anniversary of the first detonation of the atomic bomb with an essay by distinguished cultural critic Lois Rudnick on a group of “Atomic Artists,” as she calls them, who span several generations in New Mexico. Rudnick begins with Cady Wells, the subject of her fall 2012 El Palacio article and her book Cady Wells and Southwestern Modernism (published by the Museum of New Mexico Press) and continues through the 1960s to artists working today.
