About four years ago, Ralph Bolton, a professor of anthropology at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and co-owner of the Inn of the Turquoise Bear, a Santa Fe bed and breakfast, received an e-mail with an intriguing address.

The message was from Ciriaco Quispe
(chijnaya@hotmail.com), who was just 5 years old when Bolton, a Peace Corps volunteer (1963-1965) was in charge of field operations for a project relocating the Quechua-speaking people from flooded villages around Lake Titicaca in the Peruvian altiplano.

While living in a tin-roofed mud hut in the new village of Chijnaya, Bolton helped implement an embroidery project. To help raise funds, children embroidered narrative scenes of village life for sale to tourists.

A few pieces even made it into some of the most important museums in the United States. Income from the project helped Quispe to attend college. But the market collapsed when Shining Path, a Maoist organization, started a guerrilla war in the region.

Quispe asked Bolton to help again. On a trip to Chijnaya, Bolton was treated to the "biggest party you have ever seen," given by many who remembered him from 40 years earlier. Subsequently, he established a foundation that is sponsoring a range of agricultural, tourism and educational projects in the area. It is also providing microloans to villagers to build shelters for their animals in an attempt to increase milk production.

Foundation volunteers, many of them Bolton's students from Pomona College, also helped launch a revival of the village's embroidery tradition. Villagers, working in 11 groups, made panoramic embroideries on rough cloth called bayeta that is woven from local sheep's wool.

"We were astounded at the quality," Bolton said. "They really recaptured the original spirit" of the earlier project.

Among the board members of the Chijnaya Foundation are fans of the annual Santa Fe International Folk Art Market, one of the city's newest and most popular cultural events. They showed samples of the embroidery to the market's artist-selection committee, and the application was accepted this year.

Zenobia Paricela, head of the local artists committee, will be representing Chijnaya at the fifth annual folk art market, an international gathering on Museum Hill on July 12 and 13 that will present folk art made by more than 100 juried artists from more than 40 countries.

Sustainability

Besides providing visitors with a stellar shopping experience, the mission of the annual market is to foster economic and cultural sustainability for folk artists worldwide. In keeping with that mission, artists keep 93 percent of their sales revenues, enabling them to buy supplies, replenish their inventories over the following year, become self-supporting — and keep native traditions alive. Many are able to pay their own way back to market the following year.

The market itself is also becoming a more sustainable organization under the leadership of executive director Charlene Cerney and creative director and market co-founder Judith Espinar, two highly dynamic, hardworking Type A women who wake up at night with nightmares of events beyond their control (terrorism, weather) that could cripple the outdoor event.

The organization now has a $1.3 million operating budget, a paid staff of seven (not all full time), a 24-member board of directors, numerous committees and more than 700 community volunteers. This year, it received applications from about 430 artists or artist collectives (each one with an e-mail address), compared to 360 for the 2007 market.

In December, the market became a tax-exempt nonprofit. The Museum of New Mexico Foundation, whose primary purpose is to raise funds for four state museums and six state monuments, is no longer the market's fiscal agent.

The market has also renegotiated its original memorandum of understanding with the Department of Cultural Affairs, the two state museums on Museum Hill and the foundation. The four-year agreement covers the lease of office space in the state's Center for Museum Resources building and the market sales handled by the Museum of New Mexico Foundation Shops.

Under the agreement, the Museum of International Folk Art will receive $100,000 over the next four years from the market's receipts, starting with $15,000 in the first year and increasing to $35,000 in the fourth year. The market will also pay the folk art museum and the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture $5,000 each to cover free admission during the market and other costs.

In addition to Cerney, the founding chairwoman of the inaugural market and longtime director of the folk art museum, the paid staff includes an artist coordinator, financial manager, market coordinator, development director, intern program director and market office administrator — all with benefits and an employee manual.

The market has started a quasi endowment fund with a $100,000 gift from artists Ramón José and Nance López.

Suzanne Seriff, a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas in Austin and co-director of the award-winning "Recycled, Re-seen" exhibit at the folk art museum in the 1990s, headed a committee that selected artists for inclusion in the 2008 market. The committee used a new scoring matrix that ranks applications on qualities such as traditionality of form and marketability. At the same time, the committee strives to ensure that the market will represent a range of countries and crafts.

Close to 40 applications, for example, came from Uzbekistan.

The emphasis is on high quality, said Espinar, the market's volunteer creative director, and that, she quipped, is "what makes us not the flea market."

Not only are applications up, but the art is better, Cerney added.

Espinar, who has been traveling and buying traditional ceramics and textiles since she was 21, said, "When I see the work that comes in, tears roll down my face. I've never experienced this quality — not because I didn't look, and not because I'm not a digger. This process has made these things available."

For the first time this year, the market is giving feedback to unsuccessful candidates in the hope that they will be able to improve their applications.

And for the lucky ones, the range of free business development workshops offered during the two days of training prior to the market is being expanded. Offerings will include Internet marketing as well as modeling successful cooperatives and advice on whether artist should sell their work to wholesalers. There will be more opportunities as well for jewelers and weavers and potters to meet with their Northern New Mexico counterparts.

Alice Loy, who works with the Global Center for Cultural Entrepreneurship, is creating a questionaire to help measure the effect of the market on the lives and communities of the participating artists.

Market founders have pondered the idea of duplicating the idea elsewhere. But at least for now, the emphasis is on an ambitious internship program funded in part by a three-year, $990,000 grant the market received last year from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Four entrepreneurs from southern Africa are in Santa Fe learning how to make their own markets at home.

"Our mission is not to make (the Santa Fe market) bigger, but to make more markets," Cerney said.

Cerney and Espinar are influenced by the self-employment model developed by economics professor Muhammad Yunus, who won a Nobel Prize for developing a banking system — Grameen Bank — estimated to have extended credit to more than 7 million of the world's poor, most of them in Bangladesh.

Espinar's dream for the future? "Twenty-five markets before I die."