All In White
How Santa Fe winters blur the mysterious border between art and life
Courtesy Act One Gallery
The Crooked Cross by Ken Daggett, oil on panel, 20 x 16"
On the final day of 2006, Santa Fe stood still. Residents stayed home or walked through the streets in heavy boots, tramping through feet of unplowed snow to arrive at a café or grocery, occasionally pausing on the way to help a stranded driver push a car free from a snowdrift. Three days before, on December 28, a storm hit Northern New Mexico, whiting out portions of the city for hours and dumping 13 inches of fleecy white magic by midafternoon of the 29th, for a total of 25 inches by noon the following day. The 18 inches dumped in one 24-hour period was, according to the Albuquerque Journal, the largest single-day snowfall on record in Santa Fe.
Meanwhile, we stocked up on food, then waited and watched. The thick snow muffled all sounds, creating an air of secrecy and import, as a hushed crowd feels when a theater goes dark. The piling fluff rounded all sharp corners, and the color of the low clouds blended with the snow beneath, imparting a softness to the scenery that seemed to emphasize the fact that rushing and scurrying were not possible. By the time the storm let up, the town had been transformed into the essence of winter: solitary, quiet, serene, and—when the clouds parted on the 31st to let the clear winter sunlight through—spectacularly, thrillingly white.
“Yes, there really is snow in Santa Fe,” one Boston transplant wrote that month in her Choosing Santa Fe blog, beside a snapshot of her snow-covered yard. It was the sort of scene plein-air painters thrive on: angled light, reflective snow, and dramatic shadows. Plus, for the likes of local artist Bill Gallen, it would have been reasonably comfortable to record. “The thing about New Mexico is that it may warm up to 45 degrees during the day,” he says.
“So there are always opportunities even in supposedly the nastiest weather to get out there and paint.” Yet the preponderance of spring, summer, and autumn scenes in most Santa Fe galleries that display regional landscapes would suggest otherwise. While an occasional winter scene might grace a backroom wall, winter in this region has largely failed to make the jump from the real world to the art world.
“Winter images were more popular in New Mexico before World War II,” says Joe Traugott, curator of 20th-century art at the New Mexico Museum of Art. “After the 1940s, interest in winter scenes decreased as many New Mexico artists moved in abstract and nonobjective directions. Before World War II, the representational artists and their supporters dominated the scene here. That changed as art reflecting the changing seasons of the Southwest lost its appeal, as part of the changing ‘seasons’ of the aesthetic and cultural landscape.” Still, Traugott points out, winter scenes were never as popular as those portraying warmer weather—a trend that had its beginnings with the arrival of the railroad, in the 1880s, when the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe line launched an advertising campaign that used commissioned paintings romanticizing the desert landscape to draw tourists. This positioned regional art as a powerful force in creating and shaping the public image of New Mexico as a place rarely associated with winter.
Even today, many who haven’t lived here are surprised to discover that Santa Fe has substantial winters. Its proximity to the sun-baked deserts of Arizona and Texas partially explains the confusion. “I think people on the East Coast think of us and the entire Southwest as a heatscape,” says Keith Toler, executive director of the Santa Fe Convention & Visitors Bureau. But although the city’s annual snowfall is erratic, with plenty of winters passing with only a few dustings, there is still a span of nearly six months every year that is sure to have snow and subfreezing temperatures at some point. The past two are good examples: In the 2006–2007 season, snow arrived around Thanksgiving and kept coming, while snowfall the following year began around the same time and finished the season with a sizable April storm.
Georgia O'Keeffe's Kokopelli with Snow,
courtesy Burnett Foundation and Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
Historically, Santa Fe leaders may have also had a hand in perpetuating the misconception that it’s a snowless city. Early-20th-century visionaries picked up where the railroad left off in its efforts to bring tourists from the east, by using the AT&SF’s scheme of relying on art to promote a specific perception of the region. In a concerted push to draw tourism away from the main rail line, which bypassed the city 18 miles south in Lamy, organizers of Santa Fe’s new Palace of the Governors museum began publishing, in El Palacio magazine, work by local artists that celebrated the town’s distinction and charm. According to curator of photography Mary Anne Redding, this helped solidify a new public view of the city as a different kind of paradise, complementing the ongoing efforts of local politicians and architects like John Gaw Meem and Carlos Vierra: saving the Palace of the Governors from destruction in 1907, and constructing downtown buildings in their new Pueblo Revival style.
“We don’t have a lot of imagery of Santa Fe in the winter,” says Redding, who co-curated the photography exhibition Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe, which opened at the Palace of the Governors in November. She points to the dearth of winter photographs taken in this region in the past 130 years as evidence that early promotional efforts had a lasting impact on how Santa Fe has been portrayed in art. “Why is that?
I know people photograph Santa Fe in the wintertime now—because it’s not the myth; it’s not the blue sky. But I think there was a decision to market Santa Fe as the Land of Enchantment, and whether consciously or unconsciously, that didn’t include shoveling snow and wearing raincoats.” The show’s organizers actually selected a misty scene of the Plaza in winter, shot around 1912 by Jesse Nussbaum, for the cover of Through the Lens’s companion book (by the same name) because, she says, the photograph is so unusual.
It snowed for three days in early November, and the people of Sagrado put their cars in garages and walked everywhere,” wrote author Richard Bradford of a fictional town based on Santa Fe, in his 1968 coming-of-age classic, Red Sky at Morning. “The Conquistador ran a picture page called ‘Winter Wonderland,’ which showed primarily that one of their photographers didn’t know how to compensate for the glare on snow and had overexposed a lot of film. Amadeo and I stacked three cords of foot-and-a-half split piñon for the fireplaces, and the whole town smelled like a campfire.”
Forty years later, this combination of surprise and preparedness hasn’t considerably changed. And when I ask several Santa Fe gallerists about the winter art they showcase, most have a sense of the subject matter as something people notice almost haphazardly. “I don’t have anyone coming in asking specifically for a winter scene,” says gallerist Brandon Fitzpatrick of Brandon Michael Fine Art, “but when they do see one that’s well painted, they want to round out their collection.” Yet looking through winter paintings in various galleries and the NMMA collection reveals something deeper: Northern New Mexico’s winters, while not necessarily central to its residents’ sense of identity, are more than simply an afterthought. In image after image, from Fremont Ellis’s 1969 Adios Amigo—Hasta La Vista, a dreary rendering of fellow artist Will Shuster’s funeral at Santa Fe’s National Cemetery, to the often heavily allegorical paintings of contemporary Hispanic artist Jim Vogel, the coldest season positions itself instead as one integral piece in a larger exploration of change in both human life and the natural world.
Local contemporary photographer Jennifer Schlesinger sees this kind of artistic awareness as more or less inevitable for local artists whose subject matter takes them outdoors. “I photographed the moon for a year,” she says of her Moon Series, shot between April 2005 and March 2006, “and that took me through the winter. It was my personal track of time for my experience of being pregnant, bringing me through the seasons. You could say it’s sort of accidental, but maybe not so much. To me it was more about a mood of that time of year.” She also points to the photographs of Nancy Sutor, whose series of garden cuttings taken over an entire calendar year parallels Schlesinger’s investigation of human phases that mirror the earth’s, whether biological or emotional.
Both artists’ inquiries recall Georgia O’Keeffe’s use of natural forms to express an inner world. Out of the approximately 2,050 artworks she produced in her lifetime, however, “probably ten have snow in them,” says Barbara Lynes, O’Keeffe Museum curator and director of its research center. The museum owns two paintings that involve snow, and both are part of ongoing series—one, a Katsina; the other, the artist’s now-famous patio door. In these and scenes she painted elsewhere, winter appears as something O’Keeffe, like Sutor and Schlesinger, came across in the course of her daily practice, and which she portrayed in a manner consistent with her style: peaceful, fluid, encompassing.
Just north of here, in Taos and nearby mountain communities, winter’s storms are even more insistent than in Santa Fe and arrive consistently throughout the winter. And unlike Santa Fe, Taos has a reputation as a ski resort that often overshadows its long history as an art center. This sensibility is evident in the town’s art scene, which showcases a higher proportion of winter imagery and remains more focused on representational art than Santa Fe’s—revealing the impact of its residents’ long history of interaction with the elements. “The people who come here are very conscious of the beauty of nature,” says Act One Gallery owner Anita Ellison. “I try to keep pieces in the gallery in rhythm with the seasons.” Taos Modernist Howard Cook’s Winter Mountain Cycle #4, for example—an abstracted 1955 landscape currently hanging in the NMMA—bursts with the drama of constantly shifting seasons. So do a variety of pieces in the impressive collection of work by 20th-century Taos artists in the town’s Harwood Museum.
Among the most potent of winter’s symbolic uses, and perhaps the least specific to any single place, are those that link hibernating landscapes to death and loss—yet also to potential and a sense of possibility, the way the stinging air can make you feel more alive. “Sunlit snow is usually brighter than the sky,” explains local plein-air painter Bill Gallen. “It also creates beautiful shades of green and violet, along with bright yellows. It’s kind of kaleidoscopic.” After growing up in Wisconsin, Gallen isn’t fazed by Santa Fe’s winter cold, and the payoffs can be spectacular. “The sun is also lower on the horizon in winter, so even during the noon hour—which is not very interesting during the summer—you’ll have cast shadows, and the light has a jewel-like quality to it.” This happens when the sun’s low angle allows its light to pass through the atmosphere more obliquely, providing greater opportunity for refraction via contact with particles of moisture and dust. The result: prismatic colors, visible both in the sky and on surfaces.
This region’s artists continue to infuse winter-inspired work with fundamental human explorations that are also common in winter artwork created where cold and snow figure more prominently in the public consciousness. “The first thing that comes to me is stillness,” says local contemporary landscape artist Robert Striffolino of his occasional use of winter imagery. “There’s a quietude I feel when I’m out in a winter landscape, and I try to inject that into the painting.” Striffolino relies on the season’s pared-down color palette, as well as the simple structure of leafless trees, as a way to approach a mood—and as an artistic challenge, given the limitations. “In that stillness and quiet,” he says, “something can come forth that’s much more subtle, that at other times might not be brought to people’s attention.”
At its best, winter-inspired art reveals these dramas—and the paradoxes—found wherever the season creates a presence. “The sun was low and shining already below the branches of the cottonwood trees and turning the mountain into a big, crumpled rose,” noted influential art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan in her 1935 memoir, Winter in Taos. “It is a lovely hour to walk about in the snowy lanes, hastening a little, for the bitterness of the night comes down fast.” Her words could just as easily apply to popular walking paths in Santa Fe: the tree-lined banks of the Santa Fe River along East Alameda Street, or the dog park’s ridgetop trails. “The air grows quiet. If there has been any wind, it ceases; and the snow squeaks under one’s feet and the telegraph wires sing a low song.”
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