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.

A man with short gray hair and glasses, wearing a collared shirt, looks at the camera against a black background.

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.

A woman with long dark hair wearing a coral shirt sits outdoors, resting her chin on her hand, with greenery and flowers in the background.

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.

A woman with straight brown hair wearing a dark turtleneck and long, beaded earrings poses against a plain white background.

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).

Katherine Ware

Katherine Ware is a writer and longtime curator of photographs, most recently at the New Mexico Museum of Art. She has held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, The Oakland Museum, and other institutions. Her work is focused on darkroom photography and the photographic print, along with work that interrogates the boundaries of the medium. She has organized more than seventy-five museum exhibitions–including Transgressions + Amplifications: Mixed-media Photography of the 1960s and 1970s; Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery; and Vision in Motion: The Photographs of László Moholy-Nagy–served as juror for more than thirty-five shows, and has written numerous books and essays on historic and contemporary photographs. She earned an MA in art history at the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in English and American literature at Pitzer College.

A person stands in a rocky canyon with high, curving walls and a narrow stream, illuminated by sunlight streaming through an opening above. [gen-ai]

The Canyon Under the Lake

BY KATHERINE WARE Some places are so special that we can’t wait to visit them again and again. For many artists, the area known as Glen Canyon on the Colorado River was one such exceptional place. Photographer Eliot Porter first visited in 1960 and immediately made plans to return. Georgia O’Keeffe joined him on several trips down the Colorado, twice at age seventy-four and again a few years later.

A close-up of a white iris flower with ruffled petals against a deep blue background. [gen-ai]

Petal Pusher

It’s spring, and our fancy turns to flowers. For those who are not the gardening sort, or for anyone impatiently awaiting a hint of new growth, we present this frilly, exuberant iris by artist Betty Hahn.The mythology of the iris dates to ancient Greece, where the personification of the goddess Iris was a rainbow, symbolizing her role as a link between heaven and earth.

Surreal scene of people sitting at a table as fast food items float around them in a vivid, red-toned environment with a building in the background. [gen-ai]

Building a Photograph

Photographer Patrick Nagatani (1945–2017) didn’t just take pictures, he made pictures. While most art photographs are the result of careful choices about subject, framing, lighting, and other factors, Nagatani went to even greater lengths to get the image he wanted. With experience working in Hollywood special-effects and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, Nagatani created models and constructed scenes specifically for his camera beginning in the mid-1980s.

An older man with a white beard, glasses, and a cowboy hat stands outdoors in front of a rural landscape, smiling and holding a camera. [gen-ai]

Pictures of an Evolution

BY KATHERINE WARE Like many significant anniversaries, the New Mexico Museum of Art’s one-hundredth birthday provides the opportunity to both share memories and look to the future. The exhibition Shifting Light: Photographic Perspectives (see sidebar), which spans the museum’s second-floor galleries, brings together classic images from the museum’s international collection of nearly 9,000 photographs, which spans the entire history of photography, with new acquisitions and promised gifts that will help define the museum’s future engagement with photographic art.

A man sitting in a car. [gen-ai]

Chasing the Lowrider Muse

BY KATHERINE WARE It takes a special vision and a lot of hard work to transform an abandoned car into a one-of-a-kind sculpture on wheels, but that’s exactly what makes New Mexico’s lowriders so extraordinary. [wonderplugin_slider id="66"]   (more…)

Two elderly women in sun hats and sunglasses stand arm in arm on a beach with straw umbrellas visible in the background. [gen-ai]

To Feel Less Alone: Gay Block, A Portrait

Is a portrait a picture of the person in front of the camera or the person behind the camera? Talking about the many portraits made of her by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe said, “He was always photographing himself.” As part of its Focus on Photography series, the New Mexico Museum of Art presents a survey of portraits by longtime Santa Fe resident Gay Block, showcasing work from across her career in which she uses the camera as a research tool for learning about being human.

A framed black-and-white family photo hangs below a smaller square frame with an image of a tree, both connected by two black ribbons against a gray brick wall. [gen-ai]

Photography and Identity

In an initiative titled Focus on Photography, the New Mexico Museum of Art is devoting its three upstairs galleries to a variety of changing photography exhibitions for a full year, from March 7, 2014, through March 15, 2015, presenting numerous opportunities for visitors to look at, learn about, and discuss this ubiquitous and evolving form of picture making.  The second installment of exhibitions will be on view from August 30 through December 7, 2014.