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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).
Kate Nelson (opens in a new tab) is a longtime New Mexico journalist who retired as managing editor of New Mexico Magazine where she earned numerous awards from the International Regional Magazine Association.
So much that could have gone wrong in 1865 at Fort Selden Military Reserve somehow didn’t. Soldiers outfitted with inferior tools and a lackadaisical spirit, occasionally enlivened by one officer’s proffer of whiskey, nevertheless managed to stack adobe bricks into walls and hoist vigas to the ceilings. Once constructed, the fort withstood the vagaries of life on the southern frontier of New Mexico Territory.
By Kate Nelson MY INTRODUCTION to New Mexico Magazine’s archive in 2013 elicited my inner Bette Davis. Led past a warren of offices in the basement of the Lew Wallace Building, a onetime dormitory for St. Michael’s School, I was deposited into a small, windowless room. Where heavy books encasing twelve issues from each year should have lined up on military-tight shelves, they were instead scattered around the room, some stacked on chairs, some fallen to the floor, none organized by year, much less decade.
By Kate Nelson Late-afternoon light tinged with autumnal gold spills into the sala grande of J. Paul Taylor’s home. The muted melodies of a mariachi band performing on the Mesilla Plaza seep through the adobe walls and wind down the zaguán, a hallway connecting the home’s living areas to this southern New Mexico town’s historic square. Seated in one of his favorite chairs for holding an informal sort of court, Taylor greets me with the warmth of a treasured guest—a hallmark of his renowned hospitality.
![A group of people stand in front of dark mountains at night, with smoke rising from the peak and strong light casting long shadows on the ground. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/featured2018.16.11-400x225.jpg)
BY KATE NELSON Back in 1917, John Pickard had a problem. A renowned art historian and archaeologist at the University of Missouri, he was leading the charge to commission murals, statues, tapestries, stained-glass windows, and bas-reliefs for the new state capitol in Jefferson City. (more…)
![Three people view abstract art pieces displayed on the walls and a sculptural installation in a modern, well-lit gallery space. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Upper-Gallery5-400x225.jpg)
For Mary Kershaw, all it took was one sight of brick walls soaring up to an industrial-style ceiling. For Mike Halpin, it was the old-time freight elevator with a pull-down gate and three buttons: up, down, and stop. For Stuart Ashman, it was empty space. Ashman’s Halpin Building remembrance starts in 2005, with a cabinet meeting in then-Governor Bill Richardson’s office.
![Two women stand in front of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting displayed on a wall, smiling for a photo. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/1984Newspaper-1-400x225.png)
BY KATE NELSON I don’t think the Museum of Art could have asked for or received a better birthday present,” director Mary Kershaw said after black curtains parted to reveal a Georgia O’Keeffe painting on the stage of Saint Francis Auditorium. The 400 people packed into the pews applauded enthusiastically, but given that they were all at least Museum of Art members and, at best, some of its most trusted advisers and donors, the unveiling of Desert Abstraction (Bear Lake) hardly came as a surprise.
![Four figures in robes, two women in the center embracing, with two men standing on either side, depicted in a classical painting style. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Fig.-26-The-Visitation_ElPal-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
BY KATE NELSON In 1995, during his first Christmas break as a student at Saint Mary's Seminary in Houston, Stephen Schultz chose to spend a few days on a retreat, staying in the priests’ quarters at Our Lady of Belén, south of Albuquerque. There, he noticed a series of paintings hanging in the hallway, so old and in such bad condition that they barely revealed their religious content.
![Beaded artwork of two faceless figures, one with long brown hair and one with black braids, both wearing detailed blue and purple clothing, on a plain light background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Greeves_CheyenneMonaLisa-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
BY KATE NELSON Once upon a time, in a trading post on Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation, a bored eight-year-old asked a local beadworker for a lesson. The woman gave the child baby moccasins, and only when the girl had finished with the first one’s seemingly simple triangles and lines did her teacher tell her to turn it around and look at it as though it were on her own foot.
![Three people interact on a covered sidewalk near a barber shop; two women stand close together while a man leans nearby, watching them. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Finding-Their-Niche_5-400x225.jpg)
BY KATE NELSON The New Mexico Museum of Art’s early alcove shows drew waves of artists to Santa Fe and defined it as a top US art city. [wonderplugin_slider id="40"] (more…)
![A close-up of a library card catalog drawer labeled Navaho, containing typed index cards about natural history in Spanish America. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/O-Catalog_1-400x225.jpg)
BY KATE NELSON Chances are you didn’t notice the seismic shift on September 30, 2015. I did, but only because I happened to be standing in the New Mexico History Museum’s Fray Angélico Chávez History Library. Its full force nearly buckled my knees. “See these?” Librarian Patricia Hewitt asked, waving a narrow stack of cards at me. “These are the last cards we’ll ever get for the card catalog.
