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BY CANDACE WALSH When I asked Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge to contribute a poem to our Museum of Art commemorative ode fest, she politely demurred because of other commitments, but encouraged me to write a poem for the section. Although I did not think it quite appropriate to shoehorn my pensées into such elevated company, as I sat down to mull-pry my editor’s letter into existence, I found that it wanted to take the form of a poem.
Categories: Editor's Letter
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.
Categories: Visual art
BY PATRICK MOORE New Mexico enjoys one of the most complex and culturally rich histories of any state in the union. From its geographical wonders, dinosaurs, and volcanos to its Native pueblos, Spanish missions, Western forts, and even rocket- and atomic bomb-testing sites, its past ranges from ancient to relatively recent. Within this treasured array, New Mexico’s Historic Sites shine.
Categories: New Mexican cultures
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.
Categories: Landscape and environment, Visual art
Of the hundreds of peoples that lived and flourished in native North America, few have been so consistently misrepresented as the Apacheans of Arizona and New Mexico,” anthropologist and Apache culturist Keith H. Basso wrote in his essay “Western Apache” in the Handbook of North American Indians published in 1978. “Glorified by novelists, sensationalized by historians, and distorted beyond credulity by commercial film makers, the popular image of ‘the Apache’…is almost entirely a product of irresponsible caricature and exaggeration.” This knowledge gap challenged Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Education Director Joyce Begay-Foss (Diné) to curate Lifeways of the Southern Athabaskans, opening at MIAC December 10.
Categories: Uncategorized
In 2003, Amy Groleau was doing archaeological field work as a graduate student in Ayacucho, Peru—a highlands city that many people associate with two very different national narratives. This region lies at the heart of Peruvian folk art, rich with roots in the pre-Columbian Wari culture and complex with the hybridity that resulted from colonial-era negotiations and violence. From 1980 to 2000, Ayacucho was also the epicenter of the country’s harrowing internal armed conflict, when the Maoist revolutionary movement, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), conducted guerrilla warfare against the Peruvian government, and the state retorted with an equally violent counterinsurgency.
Categories: New Mexican cultures, Visual art
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.
Categories: New Mexican cultures, New Mexican history, Southwestern history, Visual art
BY JOSEPH TRAUGOTT One hundred years ago, New Mexico’s famed light streamed through the new museum’s skylights at its very first exhibition. That same light emboldened the artists whose 172 paintings graced the museum’s pristine walls. More than a thousand people attended the museum’s opening festivities in November 1917. The thirty-eight European American artists depicted mostly Native American subjects, with varying levels of verisimilitude and sentiment.
Categories: New Mexican cultures, Visual art
BY MARLA REDCORN-MILLER, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTUREAND AMY GROLEAU, CURATOR OF LATIN AMERICAN COLLECTIONS, MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART Appropriation, cultural intellectual property rights, activist art that addresses war and violence, the criteria for what counts as Native art, issues of indigenous authorship and authenticity . . . the list is long and complex. These questions—central to indigenous arts and artists—are increasingly entering public discourse.
Categories: New Mexican cultures
WHAT'S NOT LOST Something happens when there is an absence of foundation there is a direction chosen where heart, intent, and desire, meet intuition—where preservation meets development meets community to set a precedent for instances in which the likes of MOMA follow suit. Architecture and ancient character conversing as if they’re of two different tongues but translation isn’t lost altogether— instead a romantic erosion set in motion a revival that was and remains inherently difficult.
Categories: New Mexican cultures, Poetry
![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)
![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]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Ansel-Adams_HP.2014.14.1774-400x225.jpg)
![Men in historical military uniforms fire a cannon, producing a large cloud of smoke, while onlookers watch in the background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Lincoln-and-Stanton-1-e1550800156392-400x225.jpg)
![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)
![A pair of large leather mittens with beaded trim and decorative designs, featuring tan and yellow coloring and a circular hole on one mitten. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/1705-Mescalero-moccasins-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
![Four clay figurines in traditional attire, with one playing a flute and the others covering their ears, eyes, and mouth, set against a plain background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Remembrance_FathersTortureP020-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
![Black-and-white photo of adobe-style buildings with wooden beams, a balcony, and a few people standing near the structures; mountains are visible in the distance. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/012967-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
![Close-up of light shining through layers of translucent mesh fabric, creating abstract shapes and shadows. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Naranjo-Morse-N-Screen-Bouquet-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
![A flat-topped hill rises above a gently sloping landscape with scattered trees under a clear blue sky. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Sloan_1986.137.22_EDIT-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)