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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).
Valerie K. Verzuh is an anthropology graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, has studied and cared for Native American artifacts for the last twenty years, first at the Oakland Museum of California and later at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. As curator of the Individually Cataloged Collections, she has worked to increase understanding of Southwest American Indian material culture and accessibly to the museum’s holdings for artists, scholars, and community members.
![A rectangular box labeled Land Bucks Unsalted Sweet Butter with an illustration of a woman kneeling and holding a package of butter; text indicates Recipes Inside. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Into-the-Future_4-400x225.jpg)
BY VALERIE K. VERZUH In contemporary art, Native American cultural power is located in the use of traditional forms, materials, and visual language, as well as in the traditional knowledge embedded in even the most modern of artistic expressions. Into the Future explores the ways in which indigenous artists have always employed and continue to employ visual imagery in the formation, perpetuation, and expression of their unique cultures.
![A group of people, including a man in a white cowboy hat, share a meal at a long table; others stand behind them, with mountains, houses, a dog, and a parrot in the background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Postmodern-Trickster_3-400x225.jpg)
BY VALERIE K. VERZUH In fine art, postmodernism embraces diversity and contradiction, destabilization, and multiple perspectives, as does Coyote — a trickster archetype of indigenous narrative. [wonderplugin_slider id="113"] (more…)
![A stylized painting of a Native American woman wearing a crown and Miss Indian sash, with a Southwest landscape and buildings in the background. Text reads Indian Country: The Art of David Bradley. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Indian-Country-The-Art-of-David-Bradley_1-400x225.jpg)
BY VALERIE K. VERZUH Through his career, artist David Paul Bradley, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, has become a recognized voice from Indian Country. (more…)
The Diné baskets generally known as “wedding baskets” are actually woven for use in many different ceremonies, including those for weddings and healing. The overall design is always broken at one point, allowing a pathway from the center of the basket to the rim; the rim finish (always finished with a plaited herringbone pattern) ends at the pathway. In Diné ceremonies the pathway is pointed towards the east.
North American Indian baskets are cultural histories—documents of the aesthetics, beliefs, lifestyles, natural environment, and technologies of the people who made and used them. These unique baskets are producible and fully comprehensible only within the social context of the weavers. Just as words take on unique meanings within sentences, baskets take on unique meanings within their social contexts. When anthropologist Deborah Neff collaborated with Tohono O’odham basket weaver Frances Manuel on her life history, Neff recognized that in order to understand something from another world we have to try and step outside our taken-for-granted realities and work on understanding difference.
