The Return to Santa Fe

At Bandelier National Monument

“You the spirit who resides everywhere, who remakes the silent stones to speak again, I have come to question you.” - Cherokee Song

When I travel, it is with questions. I go with some ideas about what I would like to learn, and come home with new information that I could not have envisioned when I set out. The last time I was in Santa Fe, in 2017, I was blown away by the magnificence of the Rio Grande Rift, that vast east-west stretch between the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountains. This year, I went deeper, exploring Bandelier National Monument and the culture of the indigenous people who lived there so many centuries ago. I soaked up as much as I could of contemporary pueblo culture, especially as expressed through their pottery.

And after a couple of Covid years of seeing very little in the way of contemporary painting, I went all in at Site Santa Fe, Charlotte Jackson Gallery, and Lew Allen Galleries. Max Cole’s exhibition of paintings, Endless Journey, at Site Santa Fe was a walk into another world where the experience of seeing is as tangible as standing in the rain. When she writes, “Most of reality is not visible. Art makes perceptible the indefinable quality of presence.” she’s acknowleging a basic truth about the real worlds that reveal themselves when we enter into the presence of paintings — and pots.

Conversely, Johnnie Winona Ross, who used to live in Maine but is now in Santa Fe and shows at Charlotte Jackson, has this to say about his Bean Creek paintings: “Their job is not to take you somewhere else, you are not supposed to forget that this is a painting on a wall — their job is to bring you right here.”

I see no conflict in these two points of view. They flip back and forth like the panels in a Jacob’s Ladder,