María Benítez

New Mexico native, flamenco legend and Institute of Spanish Arts founder María Benítez may have "retired" a few years ago, but her participation and influence in the local arts community dances on. After moving to Santa Fe in the early 1970s, Benítez established her dance company, María Benítez Teatro Flamenco, and presented 12-week summer performance seasons until 2008. She also developed Flamenco's Next Generation, the local youth company (ages 10-18), in 2001 and has been a dancer and choreographer for the Santa Fe Opera. Her first collaboration with SFO was a 1975 production of Manuel de Falla's La Vida Breve, and she choreographed 2006's production of Carmen. Also in 2006, Benítez was honored with Spain's most prestigious award for artistic achievement, La Cruz de la Orden de Isabel la Catolica. Among regional accolades, she has been awarded the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts and the city of Santa Fe Mayor's Arts Award.


John Crosby

Musician/composer John Crosby (1926-2002) founded the Santa Fe Opera in 1957 with $20,000 in seed money borrowed from his father. He served as the opera's general director for 44 seasons. During SFO's first season, Crosby impressed audiences with the staging of Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. Stravinsky oversaw the production personally, solidifying SFO's place as a young but ambitious player on the international operatic stage. (Crosby went on to mount all of Stravinsky's stage works, although Strauss became a more indelible SFO trademark.) During Crosby's tenure, he introduced and fostered the singer and technician apprentice programs, commissioned or presented U.S. debuts of works by Britten, Henze, Menotti and many others, and established Santa Fe as one of the world's top destinations for enjoying and mounting opera.


The Rubber Lady

After arriving in Santa Fe in the late 1970s, the Rubber Lady appeared at local galleries, museums and public spaces for more than a decade. The performance artist's identity was once a closely guarded secret (no, we're not telling you who she is), and today she continues to passionately participate in Santa Fe's arts community, as do a few people who stood in for her on occasion. Her presence often stirred up as much controversy as it did lively conversation: Her rubber suit was stolen in 1981 but was eventually recovered in a bus-station locker, and in 1983 The New Mexican printed a letter from a reader complaining that she was "downright weird." Still, the Rubber Lady typified the open-mindedness, creativity and optimism — and provided the requisite absurdism during absurd times — that allowed Santa Fe's arts community to weather the era's Wall Street excesses and an economic recession. What's old is new again.


Paula Castillo

Paula Castillo creates some of the heaviest art around: Her rather visceral sculptures are made from recycled steel, and she thinks about complexity science while she's making them. The Belen native, now a longtime resident of the village of Cordova, earned her bachelor's degree at The University of New Mexico and her master's at the College of Santa Fe. The wonderful shapes and surfaces she has coaxed from industrial refuse range up to the monumental. Two of these, Dos Arboles, Dos Hermanas and Rio Grande Colcha, frame the entrance of the New Mexico History Museum.


T.C. Cannon

Kiowa painter T.C. Cannon was born in Oklahoma and attended the Institute of American Indian Arts as a teenager in the mid-1960s. Also a poet and musician, he went on to develop a distinctive style that sometimes incorporated social commentary. "His large, bold paintings often stirred controversy for their humorous or bitter portrayal of their Indian subjects," said a story in The New Mexican the day after Cannon was killed in a car crash in the spring of 1978. Two years earlier, he appeared in the book Song From the Earth: American Indian Painting. "I have something to say about the experience that comes out of being an Indian, but it is also a lot bigger than just my race," he told author Jamake Highwater. "It's got to do with my own mythology, the one I make up myself. That's what I want to express in my paintings."


Laura Gilpin

Photographer Laura Gilpin began taking pictures of New Mexico's landscape and Pueblo Indians in the 1920s and went on to document Navajo people beginning in 1930. The Colorado native moved to Santa Fe in 1946 and died here 33 years later. Her books include The Rio Grande: River of Destiny (1949) and The Enduring Navajo (1968). Our state has been home to many inspired photographers. Among the most famous photographic images of New Mexico are Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941) and Saint Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico (c. 1929). Other noteworthy resident or visiting photographers or teachers of photography included William Henry Jackson, Edward S. Curtis, Dorothea Lange, Beaumont Newhall, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Van Deren Coke and Paul Caponigro.


Rose B. Simpson

Rose B. Simpson, daughter of Santa Clara ceramic sculptor Roxanne Swentzell and Anglo contemporary artist Patrick Simpson, has practiced sculpture, printmaking, creative writing, dance and music. Simpson was the lead singer in the local bands Chocolate Helicopter and The Wake Singers. Her art portfolio includes autobiographical, figure-based pieces such as Punk Rock Doll, 2007 and a joint project with her aunt, Nora Naranjo-Morse, and cousin, Eliza Naranjo-Morse, for SITE Santa Fe's 2008 biennial. Other works are difficult to describe. She is working toward her master of fine arts degree in ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design.


Arthur Lopez

Arthur Lopez has been doing solo exhibitions at Parks Gallery in Taos since 2003, not long after he began carving santos full time. The Santa Fe native began his career as a santero in his late 20s, making bultos and retablos, after a career working as a graphic artist. Although Lopez is comfortable working with traditional images of saints in the New Mexico santero tradition, his innovations and his social commentaries on contemporary issues are his claim to fame in the contemporary art world. Lopez steps away from traditional imagery, while maintaining the santero's traditions of gathering wood to carve and paint by hand with natural pigments. His sculptures often present scathing commentary on themes of social justice, politics and religion. What emerges is a highly stylized and expressive art form that resembles the statuesque carvings of earlier forms but speaks to the world of today, rendered with extraordinary attention to detail.