Art from Inside Prison Walls
WITHIN THE CONFINEMENT OF A PRISON CELL, creativity is a survival mechanism. Artists wrest images from the deepest centers of their hearts and souls during the stifling sameness of days—or years—spent…
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Category: Museum
Why We Love NM: Our Art Tells Sacred Stories
THE ART OF THE SANTERO, or maker of saintly images, is believed to have begun around 1760 in colonial New Mexico. Franciscan priests, charged with the task of establishing Christianity on the…
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Dig into This Fossil Collection
IT’S NOT SO FEARSOME NOW, save for the teeth. But imagine adding reptilian flesh, then inserting a cold, inquisitive eye into the flat, three-foot-long fossilized skull of the Bisti Beast, New…
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Why We Love NM: We Are Full of Mysteries
D ENNIS BALTHASER MOVED TO ROSWELL in 1996 with one goal: to continue his research on UFOs. As a trained civil engineer, his curiosity about extraterrestrial life drew him to what may be the world…
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Painting the Beyond
WE KNOW THE SOUTHWEST’S MOST FAMOUS PAINTER for the objects she made more beautiful on canvas: flowers and bones, mesas and adobe. But the early years of New Mexico–based painter Georgia O’Keeffe were…
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Standing at the Crossroads
ONE WINTER DAY IN SANTA FE, I WALKED along Rodeo Road, camera in hand, seeking inspiration. I was also on the verge of tears. I was depressed—haunted by a future that seemed to be slipping from my…
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These Baskets Carry Native History
MADE OF BIRCHBARK, THE CANOE STRETCHES 21 feet from stern to bow. A Dene (Northern Athabaskan) maker, likely from the Upper Yukon in British Columbia, Canada, crafted it around 1900—but not for…
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Discover a Santo Wonderland
SEPARATED FROM THEIR NEAREST SUPPLY points in Mexico, Spanish colonial–era artists in New Mexico made do with the materials they found here. Cottonwood branches and roots became bultos, or statues…
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Piecing Together Mimbres History
THE COW PASTURE’S RAIN-DAMPENED soil bucks and falls in irregular patterns, evidence of past archaeological digs on the NAN Ranch, near Silver City. Chest-high sacaton grass, interspersed with native…
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Mineral Museum Displays Rock-Solid Collection
THE GEODES AND TURQUOISE draw most visitors, Kelsey McNamara tells me. The curator of the Mineral Museum on the New Mexico Tech University campus, in Socorro, interrupts my reverie at a vitrine…
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