Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/112499
Upper Artmosphere by Daniel Wood SANTA FE���S HIGH DESERT IS THE ZENITH OF GALLERY IN early October, the aspens high on New Mexico���s 4,000-metre Sangre de Cristo Mountains blaze with the colour of the insidious metal that first lured Spanish conquistadors northward 500 years ago. The golden leaves fall into the Santa Fe River, but irrigation has robbed the waterway of its vigour by the time it enters a weed-infested ditch lower down along Canyon Road, and nothing gold reaches Santa Fe or the Rio Grande to the west. 32 W E S T W O R L D p32-35_Sante Fe.indd 32 >> However, pushing uphill along the narrow sidewalks of Canyon Road on this cool evening are hundreds of bearers of modern gold: credit-card-carrying art aficionados, collectors and tourists ascending ��� in Santa Fe���s weekly Friday Night Gallery Walk ��� to the 80 art galleries lining the street. Women with chenille scarves and greying ponytails. Men in jeans sporting silver-and-turquoise belt buckles. Gourmet hors d���oeuvres at every turn. Free wine. Classical guitarists. Hip crowds. Quiet money. And in a place founded on the ephemeral promise of fortune, the local wealth these days is real: a contemporary art, crafts and photography scene that���s incredible, its cultural opportunities endless. For millennia, thousands of Apache, Navajo, Zuni and Hopi lived in the mudbrick pueblo settlements of northern New Mexico. Then came the Hispanic invasion of the 16th and 17th centuries as Spanish conquistadors pushed north from Mexico. Still later, in the 1920s, famous artists and writers ��� including modernist painter Georgia O���Keeffe and celebrated British writer D.H. Lawrence ��� found in Santa Fe���s native FA L L 2 0 1 2 12-08-17 1:46 PM G