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).

Penelope Hunter-Stiebel

Penelope Hunter-Stiebel was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, and recently curated Mirror, Mirror: Photographs of Frida Kahlo for the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum.

An antique cast iron book press with ornate detailing sits on a table, with stacks of wrapped items in the background. [gen-ai]

Before Photocopiers

BY PENELOPE HUNTER-STIEBEL I went to visit Tom Leech, curator and director of the Palace Press, in hopes of learning more about the huge, historic printing presses and cases with different typefaces that fill the rooms beyond the Palace of the Governors courtyard. Instead, Tom directed my attention to a tabletop object he identified as a “copy press.” But for its heft, this iron device could have passed for a Victorian gewgaw, something along the lines of door knockers adapted from Renaissance bronzes.

Three rectangular panels feature intricate, symmetrical black cutout designs with abstract and possibly mythological figures against a light background. [gen-ai]

Trunk Show

I have watched as visitors to the Museum of International Folk Art stop in their tracks before a wall of cut-paper silhouettes, intrigued and perplexed. Perhaps they are recalling the snowflakes they made in grade school by folding and snipping paper in simple patterns. They recognize that this is something else, not only in the complexity of design, but also in the content of the imagery.

A group of decorated pottery figurines arranged on a cloth, labeled as Pottery figures, By Pueblos of New Mex. with a painted backdrop behind them. [gen-ai]

Man of Clay

BY PENELOPE HUNTER-STIEBEL He thrust his huge head forward, his mouth open. He held out his left hand, fingers spread wide with energy while he clutched his right hand to his chest. Despite his urgency, I would turn away. I was not coming to the Buchsbaum Gallery at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture to study this emotive anomaly.

Two people work closely on a textured, sculpted surface attached to a wall; one is focused on shaping the material while the other observes. [gen-ai]

The Tiny House Movement

BY PENELOPE HUNTER-STIEBEL Nowhere can the unique beauty of the Santa Fe style be better appreciated than in the courtyard of the New Mexico Museum of Art, where you can take in its sculpted silhouette against the intensely blue sky. But few have discovered the hidden treasure tucked away in a blind window in the southwest corner of the portal.

A painted wooden altarpiece featuring nine religious figures in separate panels, each with distinct clothing and poses, set against a colorful, patterned background. [gen-ai]

Painted Power

BY PENELOPE HUNTER-STIBEL If you are as disoriented as I first was by the profusion of saints and crucifixes displayed in the Palace of the Governors, take a moment to stop at the wooden barrier and look into the world to which they belonged. [wonderplugin_slider id="68"] (more…)

Large wooden doors feature a traditional Indigenous Pacific Northwest Coast design in red, black, and tan, depicting stylized animal and human figures in symmetrical patterns. [gen-ai]

More Than Doors

BY PENELOPE HUNTER-STIEBEL How many times had I passed through the doorway into the Neutrogena galleries at the Museum of International Folk Art barely noting what registered only as a handsome architectural decoration on either side? Then suddenly, emerging from the exhibition The Red That Colored the World, with my eye attuned to seeking out the color, I focused on the red elements of the 7-foot-tall carved and painted doors that flanked the entrance.

A mural depicts a person lying on the ground in a rural landscape on the left and a group of people with animals in front of pastel buildings on the right. [gen-ai]

The Enchanted Staircase

BY PENELOPE HUNTER-STIEBEL At first I thought it was a private stairway connecting two of Santa Fe’s hubs of historic research, the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, above, and the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, below, whose respective heads, Tomas Jaehn and Daniel Kosharek, are in frequent, direct communication. [wonderplugin_slider id="92"]   (more…)

Two old wooden stagecoaches with large wheels are parked on grass; trees and a building with arched windows appear in the background. [gen-ai]

Trail Dust

BY PENELOPE HUNTER-STIEBEL Upset about that 17-inch-wide seat on the airplane? The door is open to the “roomy and convenient” transport of yesteryear. Of course the seating allowance is 15 inches per person, and that includes the ladies’ long skirts and bustles. (more…)

Wrought iron gate in an adobe wall opens to a courtyard, with a person in colorful clothing walking past in the background. [gen-ai]

True Colors

It has stopped me in my tracks every time I have encountered Luis Jiménez’s ten-and-a half-foot sculpture Border Crossing at the New Mexico Museum of Art. His toes clawing the mud, the towering figure of a man forges forward as the weight of his wife and child bears down on his shoulders, and the caterwauling infant struggles in his mother’s determined grasp.