Vital Spaces Makes Room for Art

AS THE TWILIGHT WANES on a Friday night, a glow spills out from the former Joann Fabrics store onto the Cerrillos Road strip mall parking lot. A Shepard Fairey paste-up of OBEY Giant, discreetly installed one night during the activist-artist’s July visit to Santa Fe, delivers a bold callback to his street art roots—and a fitting welcome to Vital Spaces.  

Inside, the 12,000-square-foot space feels at once intimate and vast. Simple fabric walls separate 25 studios personalized by each artist in a variety of aesthetics and mediums. The entrance gallery coexists with a well-stocked lending library and a lounge. On this evening, it’s hosting the opening of Homework: Observations Amid Research & Daydreams, a new exhibition by Santa Fe mixed-media artist Erin Haldane (Tsimshian). The inviting setup brings the feeling of a DIY living room show to one of the more sizable community venues in the City Different.

“People talk about food deserts, but it’s kind of an art desert in Midtown,” says Vital Spaces executive director Raashan Ahmad. The nonprofit arts organization, founded in 2019 to repurpose unused buildings into art studios, galleries, and community spaces, is filling that void by signing a long-term lease at the former storefront. “There’s been a lot of different folks who just want to come by and see what the vibe is,” he adds.

Haldane’s show embodies that sensibility, bringing fine art chops to the comfortably informal gallery space. The centerpiece is a large work in oil and colored pencil that depicts the Alaska-born artist’s hand as it flips through a reference book of Tsimshian imagery. The work mixes photorealistic renderings of a desk, glass vase filled with flowers, pencils, and artist’s tools blended with more impressionistic colored pencil strokes that abstract the shadows on the objects. 

Haldane, who is pursuing an MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, began as a volunteer with Vital Spaces, trading her time for a studio in the nonprofit’s Annex Space on the Midtown Campus. She now works there part time, assisting with administrative tasks and organizing donations of art supplies. “Having a space where we can have 25-plus studio artists, including these spaces for them to gather together, has been really exciting to see,” Haldane says. 

The location is fundamental to Vital Spaces’ mission of fostering creative expression for all, especially those on the margins. “There’s not a whole lot of public spaces or third spaces anymore that you can hang out at and show up without having to pay,” Haldane says. 

Vital Spaces has gone one step further by activating the space with sewing and drawing workshops, writers’ groups, poetry readings, and youth activities. With more regular hours, the programming has a container in which to grow. “It’s really made us think even deeper and broader about what we’re doing, who we’re serving, how we outreach and talk to folks, all of it,” Ahmad says.