Judging by the rock art of its earliest inhabitants, New Mexico has inspired creative expression for as long as people have lived here.

Beginning at least 4,000 years ago, indigenous peoples have communicated through rock art and continue to reveal masterful skills in pottery and textiles. Four hundred years ago, Spanish explorers introduced an art based on religion that depicted both salvation and damnation, not to mention artful metalwork of arms and armor. Other newcomers followed as Santa Fe found itself in the path of America's westward expansion.

The consequent blend of cultures and dramatic landscapes drew hundreds of artists to take up residence in and near Santa Fe until a community congealed and gave birth to an economy based on the creative arts and arts-based tourism.

Santa Fe's 400th birthday is an occasion to celebrate the creative impulse that attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year to the state's capital. "New Mexico, and Santa Fe in particular, are places where creativity abounds," said Stuart Ashman, secretary of the state Department of Cultural Affairs. "Perhaps as a result of the pioneering spirit of the American West, which required individuals to constantly be resourceful, or as many have said before, the quality of light, the diversity of complex cultures, or perhaps it is the convergence of these over centuries in Santa Fe that has led to the 'City Different' being a place that fosters creative activity and thought."

Imagine Santa Fe without its 200-plus galleries, its museums, the opera, Indian Market, Spanish Market, film festivals, the Lensic Performing Arts Center, the lowriders, descansos and Zozobra — plus all of the support industries that accommodate them. The city's raison d'être would be utterly diminished, its pulse on life support.

Earliest artists

Prehistoric rock art — petroglyphs, pictographs and rock carvings — dating back to 2000 B.C. is found throughout New Mexico. Such markings and configurations conceived by the earliest Native peoples referenced the natural world in creative and cryptic ways. In a style known for its delineated simplicity, both figurative and abstract symbols inform contemporary concepts in fine art, jewelry, interior design, furniture, tableware and fashion motifs. Indian dances colorfully convey gratitude, hope and renewal, and Pueblo architecture still inspires Southwest building.

Museums and private collectors worldwide covet ancient pottery and vintage textiles adorned with indigenous designs, including clay vessels once used exclusively for utilitarian purposes. Current production of Indian pots, beadwork, jewelry and rugs is integral to the survival of Native artists, as well as Santa Fe's tourist trade. Indian Market — initially called the "Indian Fair" in 1922 as part of Santa Fe Fiesta — is considered the world's pre-eminent sales event for Native art collectors. According to the Santa Fe-based Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, which sponsors the weekend event each August, Indian Market draws nearly 80,000 visitors and about $100 million in revenue to the state.

Indigenous craftwork entered the art market with the coming of the railroad in the late 19th century. Indians toted handmade wares to the train station stops in the frontier towns of Lamy, Las Vegas and Albuquerque. In addition, cross-country excursions to Indian reservations exposed Easterners to Pueblo life and culture. As curator Joseph Traugott writes in the catalog to the New Mexico Museum of Art exhibition The Art of New Mexico: How the West Is One, "As commercial ventures and cultural change followed the railroads through New Mexico during the 1880s, traders bought obsolete utilitarian items and religious paraphernalia. The early traders transformed them into commodities and energetically responded to requests for souvenirs of Native life. ... (And) Native makers often responded to contact with Victorian America by incorporating new forms, designs and materials." New Mexico's tourism industry was born.

By the 1920s, tourists were visiting Native enclaves. "In 1926, Fred Harvey and R. Hunter Clarkson developed auto side trips called the Indian Detours (which linked Las Vegas and Santa Fe hotels with) sightseeing trips to living pueblos, archaeological sites and geographical wonders, then (dropped) the 'Detourists' at their next train connection," historian Deborah Slaney writes in Jewel of the Railroad Era: Albuquerque's Alvarado Hotel. Native artists continue to sell their wares under the portal at the Palace of the Governors, as well as on the plaza in Albuquerque's Old Town district.

The Spanish influence, both in religion and sacred art, is likewise essential to Santa Fe. Cathedrals and Catholic-based missions are graced with devotional iconography, and handcrafted santos (painted icons on wood panels), bultos (saints carved from wood) and altarpieces are found in museum shops and galleries.

El Día de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead — is a solemn and joyous Mexican tradition also celebrated in New Mexico. From Oct. 31 to Nov. 2, families honor deceased relatives by decorating their grave sites and creating elaborate memorials in their homes. Of particular note are the myriad ways in which artisans depict skeletal figures in various media in festive, communal postures, from singing and dancing to eating and drinking.

Such tradition and artistry by Hispanic artisans is found during Spanish Market the last full weekend in July. The colorful event — originally sponsored by the Spanish Colonial Arts Society in 1926 through the mid-1930s, then reintroduced in 1965 — is now produced by the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art. Contemporary Hispanic Market, now in its 24th year, runs concurrent with Spanish Market and showcases the best in nontraditional Hispanic art in various media.

Clusters of creativity

To the north of Santa Fe, Taos is an oasis of respite and rejuvenation for artists who find it far removed — down-to-earth, exotic and less stressful — from their workaday lives elsewhere. In 1915, The Santa Fe New Mexican described Taos as a "mecca for tourists and artists (with) spectacular red men ... right at our door."

The serendipitous event that led to the founding of the Taos Society of Artists occurred in 1898, when New York artists Bert Geer Phillips and Ernest L. Blumenschein found their way into Taos while traveling to Mexico through New Mexico. When their wagon wheel broke, the men found Taos the closest settlement where the wheel could be fixed.

Phillips decided to stay in Taos, and Blumenschein moved there permanently in 1920. In 1915, the pair established the Taos Society of Artists, an exclusive group of painters visually taken by the vernacular subjects of Indians, adobe structures, provincial living conditions and spectacular landscapes, all under crystal-clear skies. The original group included Phillips, Blumenschein, E. Irving Couse, W. Herbert "Buck" Dunton, Oscar Berninghaus and Joseph Henry Sharp (the man who recommended that Phillips and Blumenschein visit New Mexico following his first trip to Santa Fe in 1883).

Other noteworthy individuals who upheld Taos as a place for artistic endeavors were artist Emil Bisttram and socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan. According to art historian David Witt, Bisttram "founded the first contemporary art gallery in Taos, created its first art school, co-founded (with Raymond Jonson) the Transcendental Painting Group in the 1930s, and pushed into existence the Taos Artists Association and its artist cooperative Stables Gallery in the 1950s."

The transformation of Mabel Dodge from New York luminary to Taos guru is legendary. Her bohemian lifestyle and embrace of all that was Indian drew a stream of East Coast visionaries to her Southwest salon beginning in 1918. On 12 acres adjacent to Taos Pueblo, she built a three-story house with 22 rooms, five guest houses and a separate gatehouse to accommodate like-minded aesthetes.

During her lifetime, Dodge Luhan (she married Taos Pueblo member Antonio Luhan) was host to writers, painters, photographers and performing artists. Nearly a decade after Dodge Luhan's death, actor/director/artist Dennis Hopper purchased the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, where a new generation of counterculture types did their thing. Today, members of the arts intelligentsia still seek creative inspiration and renewal in Northern New Mexico.

The Santa Fe Art Colony was less structured, less organized and not chartered like its brethren to the north. "I try not to refer to the early artist community (in Santa Fe) as the Santa Fe Art Colony," local gallerist and arts writer Stacia Lewandowski said. "Even Gustave Baumann said as much in discussing Santa Fe — that what appealed to him about the situation here was precisely that there was not a tightly knit group of artists here — all working in common spirit — as is reflected by other art-colony type places."

For 50 years, painter/printmaker/marionette maker Baumann called Santa Fe home. According to Lewandowski, the art-colony moniker came via newspaper writers and the publication El Palacio, which lumped together artists of differing mind-sets as part of the local "art colony." Traugott puts it succinctly in the How the West Is One catalog: "The artists moving to New Mexico after World War I brought along their artistic biases and aesthetic baggage."

Those who contributed to Santa Fe's artistic milieu during the first decades of the 20th century are a who's who of Southwest American art and modernism.

The most closely knit group of artists associated with Santa Fe at this time was Los Cinco Pintores (The Five Painters). Active from 1921 to 1926, its members were Jozef Bakos, Fremont Ellis, Walter Mruk, Willard Nash and William Schuster. "All five were under the age of thirty, full of high spirits and professing a popular view of art," writes art historian Sharyn Udall in Modernist Painting in New Mexico. "A shortage of funds seldom stood in the way of their optimism; the Cincos soon began to share raucous parties and built neighboring adobes on Camino del Monte Sol, for which they were affectionately labeled 'the five nuts in five huts.' "

In 1923, another coalition of artists — most part of art circles in Taos and Santa Fe — organized themselves as the New Mexico Painters. "The group was a nebulous organization and attracted established painters who were modernists or were incorporating aspects of modernist style into their academic paintings," Traugott writes.

Also during that decade, landscape painter Warren Rollins — the "dean of the Santa Fe Art Colony" — became the first president of the Santa Fe Arts Club. Although never successful financially, it was a clearinghouse for diverse cultural events in Santa Fe and sponsored guest speakers and artists' receptions.

In 1938, the most experimental art group in New Mexico — the Transcendental Group of Painters — came together through the efforts of Bisttram and Jonson. A partial reading of their artistic philosophy — taken from their first group exhibition in Santa Fe — is telling:

"The Transcendental Painting Group is ... concerned with the development and presentation of various types of non-representational painting; painting that finds its source in the creative imagination and does not depend upon the objective approach. The word Transcendental ... best expresses its aim, which is to carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world, through new concepts of space, color, light and design, to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual. The work does not concern itself with political, economic or other social problems."

Passing on cultural treasures

Until the city's galleries took root starting in the 1960s, the Palace of the Governors, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts (built in 1917 as the Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery and now called the New Mexico Museum of Art) were exhibition venues for New Mexico artists. The museum's collection database now contains the names of 2,900 artists who lived in New Mexico at one time or another.

But as art historian Julie Schimmel notes in her introductory essay to Santa Fe Art Colony, as early as 1886, W.P. Blair's pharmacy hosted an exhibit of paintings by art teachers Harold Elderkin and his wife, along with student work from their classes at the Plaza Art Studio. In the late 1890s, the Seligman Brothers general store installed work by landscape painter George Stanley.

The current gallery scene in Santa Fe began modestly in the 1960s. According to Lewandowski, Jean Seth was a key player in promoting its growth. "(Jean) operated the Seth Gallery on Canyon Road in the mid-1960s," she said. "She handled contemporary artists, both Anglo and Native American, along with works by established Santa Fe/New Mexico artists. Willard Clark (with his daughter) also had a gallery on Canyon Road that started in the '60s. It was called DAS Gallery. These were important establishments that helped spur the real growth that followed in the 1970s."

Today, every possible genre, medium and style of art can be seen in Santa Fe, including historic, modernist and contemporary. In three distinct locales — Canyon Road, the Plaza and the Railyard — galleries outnumber grocery stores and car dealerships combined. In fact, for the past few years, Santa Fe has been one of the top three art markets in the country, keeping in lock step with New York and Los Angeles.

Educational institutions in New Mexico have stoked creative fires for decades, boasting some of the nation's most forward-looking art students and faculty. Among them have been painter Richard Diebenkorn, who studied at The University of New Mexico during the 1950s, and Elaine de Kooning, a visiting professor there from 1958 to 1959. Photographer and photo historian Beaumont Newhall, who founded New York's Museum of Modern Art photography department in 1940, was a faculty member at UNM from 1971 to 1984. In 1970, as part of UNM's School of Art and Art History and under the guidance of Clinton Adams and Garo Antreasian, Tamarind Institute moved to Albuquerque from Los Angeles and has since hosted a distinguished roster of the world's top printmakers.

An act of Congress in 1962 established the Institute of American Indian Arts. Overseen by George Boyce and artist Lloyd Kiva New, original faculty members included Allan Houser, Fritz Scholder and Charles Loloma. Recently, Melanie Yazzie, Charlene Teters and Linda Lomahaftewa, among others, have provided formal art instruction to Native students from throughout North America.

But formal art education for Indians predated the founding of IAIA by decades. In 1932, Dorothy Dunn, a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, established the Studio School at the Santa Fe Indian School. Rigid in her teaching methods and demanding a style geared more to illustration than fine art, Dunn nevertheless nurtured a sense of creativity and confidence in her students that allowed some to make a living as artists.

Further opportunities for art education in Santa Fe include the New Mexico School for the Arts, St. John's College, Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe Community College, Santa Fe Photography Workshops and Santa Fe University of Art and Design (formerly the College of Santa Fe).

Those who simply love to admire creativity can travel throughout the state and take part in 43 studio tours that occur annually between April and December. From Farmington to Santa Fe to Silver City, artistic currents in New Mexico flow like the Rio Grande, sometimes fast and furious, sometimes slow and easy, but never-ending.

Douglas A. Fairfield is an art historian, educator, and former curator for the Albuquerque Museum of Art & History.