100 Years of Collecting, 100 Years of Connecting
What does it mean to collect the only signed retablo by José Rafael Aragón? In most museums, such a label signals rarity and authentication. But at Santa Fe's Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum, it hints at something more subversive: reverence for the anonymous. Most makers in this tradition didn’t sign their work. Their names dissolved into community memory like indigo into water.
Luis Tapia (Santa Fe, New Mexico), The Folk Art Collectors, 1992. Wood, paint. Gift of Lynne Steuer in honor of Jan and Chuck Rosenak.
Open now, 100 Years of Collecting | 100 Years of Connecting is both a celebration and an act of resistance. For a century, the Society has preserved objects showcasing the radical idea that ordinary people making extraordinary things with their hands deserve recognition. In an art world obsessed with individual genius, this collection honours collective creativity.
Vicente Telles (Albuquerque, New Mexico), Nuestra Señora de Tsa’majo/Chimayo. Photograph by Eric Cousineau.
Nearly 4,000 objects have been collected, 200 are on display, representing more than 120 artists across five centuries. But the real story pulses in the unnamed: the weavers whose geometric visions animate Rio Grande blankets; the santeros whose carved saints guided villages through hardship; the contemporary artists continuing these practices as living craft. Vicente Telles’s 2024 retablo, Nuestra Señora de Tsa'majo / Chimayó, exemplifies this continuity. He acknowledges the site as both indigenous pilgrimage and Hispanic sanctuary, layering meaning in a tradition that has always defied simple categories.
Rio Grande blanket with Vallero stars and diminutive Saltillo diamond, New Mexico, 1865–70, hand-spun undyed wood, commercial yarns. Formerly in the collection of Dr. Harry P. Merra; gift of Mr. and Mrs. John Gaw Meem. Photograph courtesy of SCAS.
New Mexican craft traditions differ from their European roots because the land reshaped the techniques. Altitude changed how clay fired. Desert light altered colour relationships. Scarcity drove invention. The resulting aesthetic - bold geometry, saturated tones, sculptural clarity - emerged through adaptation, not replication, and curator Jana Gottshalk mirrors this complexity. Archival voices speak across time - Society founder Frank Applegate’s 1928 musings on an altar screen’s maker now sit beside contemporary scholarship identifying Aragón. These conversations show how craft knowledge accrues through shared attention, not singular discovery.
Bultos (wooden sculptures) by early Spanish Market artists, collected in the late 1920s. Photograph by Tira Howard.
The domestic objects on display feel intimate. A tobacco pouch reveals social ritual. Kitchen tools speak of adaptation. Ranch implements show ingenuity shaped by climate. These artefacts dissolve the line between function and beauty - where aesthetic sensibility infused daily life. International works - Spanish retablos, Mexican silver, global textiles - underscore this point. They reveal how New Mexican artisans absorbed and reimagined shared influences into something uniquely their own.
To walk through this exhibition is to witness a century-long testament to the democracy of making. Anonymous craftspeople and recognised masters share space. Sacred and secular works coexist without hierarchy.
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Further Information:
100 Years of Collecting | 100 Years of Connecting is on now until 13 December 2025 at Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum, Spanish Colonial Arts Society, 750 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, NM 87505
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Image Credits:
Lead Image: Textiles on display at 100 Years of Collecting | 100 Years of Connecting. Photo Credit: Tira Howard Photography
All other images as credited in captions.