The Art Colonies, Taos, Santa Fe, and the Light

In the summer of eighteen ninety-eight, two painters named Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips were driving a wagon from Denver to Mexico when a wheel broke on a mountain road north of Taos. While Blumenschein rode into town to have the wheel repaired, something stopped him. He later wrote that the view across the Taos Valley, the vast plateau, the sacred mountain above it, the quality of light that seemed to clarify everything, was unlike anything he had seen in a lifetime of looking.

He came back the following year. So did Phillips. They never really left.

The Taos Society of Artists, which they helped found in nineteen fifteen, drew painters from New York, Chicago, and Europe to a community of Pueblo people, Hispano farmers, and high-altitude light unlike anything in the conventional art world. The work they produced, portraits of Pueblo ceremonies, landscapes of the Sangre de Cristo range, studies of adobe and cottonwood and desert sky, introduced New Mexico to the American art-buying public and made Taos one of the most important art centers in the country. Santa Fe developed its own colony on parallel lines.

In nineteen seventeen, artist Carlos Vierra began advocating for a distinctive regional architecture, and the Museum of New Mexico adopted a Pueblo Revival style for its buildings on Museum Hill. Georgia O'Keeffe first came in nineteen twenty-nine, settled in New Mexico for good in nineteen forty-nine, and spent the rest of her long life painting the bones and canyons of the Abiquiú country north of Santa Fe. Her work transformed a stretch of eroded badlands into one of the most recognized landscapes in American art.

She said of New Mexico that the sky up there is something else. She meant the light, the way it strikes the earth from a mile and a half up and makes the colors of rock and adobe glow in a way that seems, to people seeing it for the first time, almost implausible. The art colonies and their legacy are still here.

Taos and Santa Fe together contain some of the highest concentrations of working galleries in the United States. The Pueblo artisans who made pottery, weaving, and silverwork long before the art colonies arrived continue to work and innovate. The light has not changed.