Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/112499
with 12 freaky, hippie disciples. The vehicle���s licence plate reads: ���Jesus Is Coming. LOOK BUSY.��� Elsewhere, a haloed St. Cecilia, patron saint of music festivals, holds a microphone and sings amid an airborne and angelic mariachi band. Says L��pez of his Mexican heritage and the current Santa Fe art scene: ���People are breaking away from tradition more and more ��� blending mythologies and modernism. I���m trying to take Catholic imagery, for instance, and give it modern expression.��� Variations on this theme appear all over Santa Fe. At Niman Fine Art, Hopi native Dan Namingha is inspired by the prehistoric pictographs on cliff-faces across the Southwest, but adds to his acrylic paintings the dots and squiggles typical of Australian aborigine pointillistdreamscapes to illustrate how boundaries are dissolving and a global convergence of cultures is at hand. At the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts are Apache skateboards and Northwest Coast Tlingit transformation masks ��� manufactured in Indonesia and covered, ironically, with 19th-century French Provincial wallpaper. In the huge SITE Biennale exhibition, the interactive 15-screen video installation Douchebag City follows an animated post-modern Everyman on his various, but inescapable, descents to Hell. No matter which way he goes, Everyman���s doomed. Says Charlotte Jackson, respected gallery owner and art authority: ���Santa Fe���s a tricultural city: Hispanic, native, white ��� a melting pot of voices and imagery. People are drawn here by the history, by the light, by the land���s monochromatic starkness; the moon rising over the mountains, the quiet, the sense of possibilities. They say, ���Oh, my God! It���s magic!��� ��� This sense of possibilities extends beyond Santa Fe���s vibrant community of painters and the metaphysics produced by the surrounding desert and the region���s transcendent light. There are a half-dozen galleries displaying international photographic art and a dozen featuring the latest in modern interior design. There are scores more offering embossed boots and cowboy hats, colourful Mexican crafts, Zuni ceramics and traditional Southwest turquoise-and-silver jewellery, alongside spas dedicated to virtually every comfort and New Age protocol known. There���s a 54-year-old summer-long Opera Festival and, in July each year, an International Art Fair and International Folk Art Market. An hour���s drive south of Santa Fe each October, there���s the famous Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, with hundreds of colourful hot-air balloons airborne simultaneously. But towns reveal themselves most vividly in the commonplace: the bells in Santa Fe���s old adobe Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, clangclanging as the early October sun breaks over the Sangre de Cristos to the east; the benches in the city���s central plaza that fill each noon with foot-weary tourists; the sidewalks with busking breakdancers and accordion players. Or the weekend painters, positioned before easels on the cottonwoodlined sidewalks along Canyon Road, striving to emulate those artists exhibited on the interior walls of surrounding galleries. Or the easy-going crowd, children in tow, at the Saturday Farmers��� Market in the newly restored Railyard District, lugging Trader Joe���s cloth shopping bags. The air here is redolent with the outdoor roasting of hot peppers and the stalls piled with heirloom tomatoes, bundles of blue corn, 25-pound bags of New Mexico pinto beans, red chili wreaths, homemade cornbread, laughing Buddhas made of local beeswax, salsas of every degree of combustibility, wormwood smudge sticks (which smell an awful lot like marijuana), even a man selling red worms in Styrofoam cups for $9 a half-pound. Drive out of town a few kilometres, up into the mountains, and Santa Fe abruptly ends in juniper and the wind-blown aroma of desert sage. Thunderheads rise in the distance ��� out toward Los Alamos and Bluewater and Black Rock. Fly fishermen work the pools of Little Tesuque Creek, and the occasional horseback rider provides a hint of the old West, now seen more in sentimental paintings than in reality. Up high, where the air is thin and cold, are the aspen. And in the early evening breeze, the trees��� falling leaves fill the forest air with gold ��� like the dreams of the Spanish conquistadors who sought El Dorado here centuries ago, but instead founded a little town where artists, in the alchemy of the imagination, sublimate their visions into gold. Y Member savings and info on Santa Fe travel: bcaa.com/santafe (Apache Mountain Spirit Dancer/Craig Dan Goseyun) Ron Watts p32-35_Sante Fe.indd 35 Santa Fe-Vourites . OUT-OF-TOWN DAYTRIPS The Rail Runner Express train runs several times daily between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, for tours of northern New Mexico���s high desert and pi��onpine-covered mountains. nmrailrunner.com Two-lane Hwy. 63 heads north from Pecos (a 45-minute drive east of Santa Fe) into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where camping, ���y-���shing, horse packing and hiking/biking treks take advantage of the alpine wilderness. santafe.org . . . . CITY CENTRE MUST-SEES The Andrew Smith Gallery: one of the world���s greatest collections of photographic art. andrewsmithgallery.com The Georgia O���Keeffe Museum honours one of America���s most famous modernist painters. okeeffemuseum.org The Museum of International Folk Art: for astounding crafts, votives, toys, dolls, ceremonial ���gures, traditional tools, dioramas, clothing, puppets, kites and voodoo from around the world. moifa.org . GRUB TO GRAB An initiation into the local culinary scene begins at Maria���s, a labyrinthine Santa Fe institution in pink, with neon-lit wagon wheels and ���orid, multi-hued Christmas lights. Great Southwest food and 170 versions of superb margaritas. marias-santafe.com The Shed: 300-year-old architecture, a cactus���lled patio and authentic Pueblo-Mexican dishes such as corn-based posole. sfshed.com Caf�� Paris, on Burro Alley: an excellent French bistro offering a European alternative to the spicy fare of most Santa Fe restaurants. cafeparisnm.com . . . HOT SPOT SHOPS Art galleries are mostly downtown, off the Plaza, and along a half-km of Canyon Road. A third cluster ��� modernist ��� crowd the Railyard/Farmers��� Market district off Cerrillos Road, 1.5 km SW of downtown. Quirky Todos Santos: for folk art, chocolate and garish Mexican crafts; silver-leaf-wrapped chocolate votives and saints; papier-m��ch��, phallic demons; mini pi��atas; skull masks. 505-982-3855 The Chili Shop specializes in the culinary exclamation point of Santa Fe cuisine, with 15 varieties of Southwest chilies, including haba��eros (among the world���s most ���ery). Also available: ristras the red chili wreaths symbolizing harvest; chili chocolate; chili coffee and, of course, salsa. thechilishop.com . . BEST SLEEP In a town packed with hotels and long-stay home rentals, La Fonda is popular for its exquisite hacienda design, Southwest d��cor and location: adjacent to the central Plaza, downtown gallery district and 19th-century basilica. lafondasantafe.com WESTWORLD >> FA L L 2 0 1 2 35 12-08-17 1:46 PM