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).
Peter BG Shoemaker is a Tbilisi-based writer and frequent contributor to El Palacio on conservation matters.
![A large, suspended sculpture resembling a military vehicle is crocheted from beige yarn, displayed in an art gallery with white brick walls and vehicle sketches. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/LoveArmor_KLINGHOFFER_100108_002-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER Ten years ago, Shirley Klinghoffer launched her seminal Santa Fe-based Love Armor Project, an effort to demonstrate the power of art to heal and to comfort the country’s warriors. Now eighteen years into America’s second-longest war, she thinks it’s time to do it again. “People can’t forget what’s going on over there, and more importantly, who is going over there,” she says.
![A geometric abstract image featuring two overlapping black and white circles on a blue background, forming intersecting shapes. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Hammersley-Couplet-NewMexico_edit_fix-400x225.png)
BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER They are words—jaw-dropping, amazing, wondrous—one doesn’t usually hear from science-minded professionals. Particularly those who spend their days with Van Goghs and Pollocks and other apex denizens of the art world, for whom, let us be honest, such expressions are mostly passé. And Alan Phenix and Tatyana Thompson—the former a conservation scientist at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the latter a conservator at her eponymous firm in Santa Monica—aren’t even talking about a painting.
![Three pairs of Native American moccasins with detailed beadwork and leather fringe are displayed against a black background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/LastImp_03-306x225.png)
BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER Few things make a conservator swoon quite like a good adhesive. After all, in a business that often begins with lots of things falling apart, a good adhesive can be the difference between smiles and frowns around laboratory worktables in conservation labs the world over. So imagine fifty or so pairs of moccasins, almost all heavily beaded, in various states of disrepair—tears in the heels, thread unraveling, some folded into themselves like scared armadillos, and all the gashes and distresses of a lifetime of wear and—in some cases—six to twenty lifetimes of storage.
![Two older men; the first wears a gray shirt and holds a camera outdoors, the second wears a black shirt and holds a small bird sculpture against a gray background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/IMG_3158.cx_-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
MODERATED BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER & CONDENSED BY CANDACE WALSH Peter: The Be Here Now collaborations are using the counterculture movement in the United States as their centerpiece, their lodestone. Herb, your exhibition of photographs focuses on your experiences and your fellow soldiers in Vietnam. Michael, one of the many remarkable things about your art is your perspective as someone who lost his sight while a soldier in Vietnam.
![A person’s hands sew or repair a blue, white, and green beaded textile item on a padded white surface. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/init-400x225.jpg)
Becoming a conservator involves education, tradition...and channeling Macgyver.
![A person wearing gloves and a mask examines a painted ceramic pot with red, black, and white geometric and bird designs on a table. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/falling_apart-400x225.jpg)
Making pots whole doesn’t necessarily mean filling holes.
![Light blue Japanese kimono with painted figures, including women, children, and animals, in colorful traditional clothing, depicted on the lower half of the garment. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/unnamed-400x225.png)
BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER DESPITE SOME SIMILARITIES—like long tables, extendable lights, and various tubes hanging from the ceiling—the textile conservation lab, deep in the New Mexico History Museum, isn’t operating-room sterile. (more…)
![Faded, elongated mural with light blue and beige tones, depicting numerous figures and trees, bordered by a decorative floral pattern. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Hide-Seek_2-400x225.jpg)
BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER IN A PLEASANTLY CHAOTIC room near the Stewart L. Udall Center’s maintenance office, Mark MacKenzie, the Conservation Lab’s chief conservator, is figuring out how to photograph the Segesser Hides in near microscopic detail, in eighteen wavelengths and three spectra, only one of which we can see. While not an everyday task, it’s something that’s deep in MacKenzie’s bones and the culture of his tiny, albeit world-class, four-person lab.
