New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs welcomes you to subscribe and support our state’s cultural treasures.
Roxanne Swentzell’s kitchen does not have a refrigerator. Instead, books and large glass jars line wooden shelves. The jars are filled with dried beans, many varieties of corn, dried wild spinach, currants, pumpkin seeds, and grasshopper flour. A bicycle flour grinder sits in the center of the large, open kitchen. Its chain connects to the mill’s flywheel that, once in motion, grinds corn or other grain.
Categories: Artist profiles, Food, Indigenous arts and cultures
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.
Categories: Featured, Staff favorites, Visual art
BY DEVORAH ROMANEK Only a few years before the United States joined the Great War as it was raging in Europe, New Mexico achieved statehood. (more…)
Categories: Visual art
When Juan de Oñate journeyed north up the Rio Grande valley in the summer of 1598, he found, to his dismay, nobody at home. As the spearhead of a colonial expedition into the heart of the Pueblo province, Oñate had hoped to march into each village, secure its allegiance to the Crown and Christ, and gain valuable allies and material support for his newfound kingdom.
Categories: New Mexican cultures
BY DENISE LASSAW In 1967, I turned twenty-two years old at New Buffalo in Arroyo Hondo. I loved living in tipis and working outside with other people. We shared a vision of a future on the land that was empowering and spiritual. (more…)
Categories: New Mexican history, Southwestern history
BY LES DALY Meet James Holmes, “Compulsive Artistic Humorist.” That wouldn’t all be on his business card, of course. But if he had a full-disclosure card, it could legitimately say, at least, “Sculptor, artist, woodworker, cabinet-maker.” Maybe “art on impulse.” Maybe “collector of the curious.” And on the other side, a view into his whimsical mind: a full-sized pie, the kind Mother used to make, except Holmes crafted his in detail from sheet-lead, patterned in the crust, scalloped at the edge, with a servable slice.
Categories: New Mexican cultures, Visual art
BY MEREDITH DAVIDSON AND JAMES M. KELLER Before radio and television, when making music at home was the evening’s entertainment and playing the piano was considered an essential talent among the middle class, sheet music was the music consumer’s gateway to the world. The New Mexico History Museum celebrates this era with sheet music of popular songs about the State of New Mexico, dating from the 1840s to 1960, in the new exhibition The Land that Enchants Me So: Picturing Popular Songs of New Mexico (opens March 2, 2018).
Categories: New Mexican cultures, Visual art
BY AMY GROLEAU | TRANSLATED, FROM THE SPANISH, BY STEPHANIE RIGGS AND AMY GROLEAU At the height of the violence of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict in the late 1980s, Edilberto Jiménez Quispe (Quechua) created a series of singular works giving testimony to the atrocities being experienced in his home region of Ayacucho. Using the art form passed down from his parents, Edilberto created scenes in miniature with potato flour and plaster, filling decorative boxes known as retablos with truths that were being suppressed in journalistic outlets.
Categories: New Mexican cultures, Visual art
BY HANNAH ABELBECK Carl Newland Werntz was a painter, fine arts photographer, advertiser, illustrator, cartoonist, world traveler, and educator from Illinois. Trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, he founded a rival school, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, in 1902. He likely took this photograph prior to that, while traveling in the Southwest. Unlike in more common, stiffly posed portraits of the era, Werntz’s subject steps forward with care and deliberate grace, her burden basket behind her as she moves across a vague space.
Categories: Framework, New Mexican cultures, Visual art
“The people in this part of the country have about as much use for an artist as their burros have for a fiddler’s midsummer night’s dream,” complained Carlos Vierra in a letter sent to his sister on August 15, 1904. Vierra, who had studied art at Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, came to New Mexico not to paint, but to heal from a deadly disease.
Categories: New Mexican history, Southwestern history, Visual art
![Seven glass jars filled with various dried seeds and beans are arranged outdoors on hay, with a woven basket in the background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/seeds-cover-400x225.jpeg)
![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)
![A rocky mountain range rises above dry grassland and scattered shrubs under a partly cloudy sky. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/featured_Tunyo_clouds-400x225.jpg)
![A white teepee stands in a desert landscape with green shrubs, set against distant mountains under a blue sky. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/teepee_publicdomain-400x225.jpg)
![A rustic dining room with exposed wooden ceiling beams, a metal table with four chairs, wooden cabinets, art on the walls, and concrete flooring. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/FeaturedHolmes_A2A5894-400x225.jpg)
![Sheet music titled O, Fair New Mexico by Elizabeth Garrett, featuring musical notes, lyrics, and notation for voice and piano. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/FeaturedJKellerscan_017-400x225.jpg)
![A painted wooden box with open doors displays a diorama of small, colorful figurines arranged in two rows, framed by floral designs on the doors. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/featured-Festival-Scene-400x225.jpg)
![Historic sepia photograph of a young Indigenous woman in a patterned dress, standing in profile, carrying a woven basket or cradleboard on her back. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/037416-400x225.jpg)
![Five men in suits sit and stand in an art gallery, conversing. Several framed paintings and sculptures are displayed on the walls and furniture. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Featured-400x225.jpg)