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BY CANDACE WALSH One of my least favorite jobs was working as a ghostwriter for a website’s figurehead. The part about being anonymous wasn’t so bad because I was churning out personally fulfilling writing on my own time. What bothered me was that my client had such a hard time letting go of the articles that much of the work we toiled over never saw the light of day.
Categories: Editor's Letter
BY AMY GROLEAU AND MARLA REDCORN-MILLER As artists, Aymar Ccopacatty (Aymara) and Nora Naranjo Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo) each explore the question of non-biodegradable waste in Native communities through their art. Independently and on separate continents, Ccopacatty and Naranjo Morse both noted the overshadowing presence of landfills on their respective ancestral lands, and saw the trash as a kind of natural resource—similar to the way that artists have harvested natural fibers from sheep to make weavings, or pulled clay from the earth to make pottery.
Categories: International folk art, Interviews
BY ESTHER G. BELIN This poem accompanies Hampton Sides's story, "Straight Back to Our Own Country." How can the spine of a synapse misalign, or be removed? And what of the gorge-forming groans Dinétah has spoken? And who is tending the fields that hold the tádídíín of peace? And where is the sacred horizon from the morning star of strength? If I were to be the last testimony of memory, I would tether to the prayers and songs still lingering in the land.
Categories: Poetry
BY JOSEPH TRAUGOTT I met Frederick Hammersley in the early 1980s. We bonded quickly around our shared penchant for making bad puns in public, and never apologizing to those who suffered from them. After making a particularly obnoxious pun, Hammersley would respond after a long pause, “Yes . . . okay.” Our friendship lasted until his death in 2009. Puns dominate the titles he chose for many of his works, such as his computer drawing DO YOU Z (a play on the words “Do you see.”).
Categories: Essays and memoir, Featured, Visual art
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.
Categories: Featured, Visual art
BY JAMES GLISSON After nearly twenty years in Los Angeles, Frederick Hammersley (1919–2009) moved to Albuquerque in 1968 after accepting a teaching position at the University of New Mexico. By his own account, the move to New Mexico was the best decision he ever made. The change of location did him good, and he soon embarked on what would be his most productive decade, the 1970s.
Categories: Featured, Visual art
BY MELANIE LABORWIT The Santa Fe Opera’s sense of place is extraordinary; operagoers watch world-class productions ensconced in the great outdoors, surrounded by Santa Fe’s gorgeous sunsets, stunning vistas, and starry skies. With this summer’s production of Doctor Atomic, the sense of place factor expands dramatically to include not just the scenic, but the historic and the geographic. John Adams’ opera focuses on the scientists who developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos—just thirty miles from the Santa Fe Opera—during World War II’s Manhattan Project.
Categories: Featured, New Mexican history
BY ROSS ALTSHULER How do skill, talent, and creativity run through New Mexico’s Native families of artists? When you visit What’s New in New: A Selection from the Carol Warren Collection, you won’t just experience a survey of the best in contemporary pottery rarely seen in one place at one time. You’ll also be able to notice the way family connections express themselves in the assembled works.
Categories: Indigenous arts and cultures
![Four beige-painted concrete stairs leading up to a small landing, with white walls on both sides. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Light_Stairs-P1040856-400x225.png)
![A large, colorful piñata sculpture displayed in a museum gallery with blue walls, next to an information plaque and a digital screen showing exhibit details. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Chullu-installed-400x225.png)
![Black-and-white photo of a large, jagged rock formation rising from a flat, sparsely vegetated plain under a partly cloudy sky. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/HP.2007.20.491_greyscale.cx_-400x225.jpg)
![Framed abstract artwork featuring a geometric pattern of interlocking rectangles and squares in shades of black, white, and gray. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/EP_Open-up-3-400x225.png)
![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)
![Abstract painting with a vertical black stripe dividing a large blue section on the left and a large red section on the right, with white bands at the top and bottom edges. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/EP_Adam-Eve-397x225.png)
![Two men stand next to a large, spherical device covered with wires inside a partially constructed building with exposed beams. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Trinity_Gadget_1945_elPal-400x225.png)
![Round ceramic vessel with a central opening, featuring intricate geometric patterns in red, black, and tan tones, photographed on a white background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/M180314006-400x225.png)