Enchanted Winter Holidays In Northern New Mexico
Santa Fe
Santa Fe’s handful of world-class art museums have a tendency of being overlooked in favor of its hundreds of world class art galleries. Big mistake. Presently, the International Folk Art Museum presents a suite of special exhibitions unsurpassed anywhere in America.
Apartheid South Africa, America’s criminal punishment system, and Ukraine post-Russian invasion don’t seem to have much in common at first glance. Given more thought, they emerge as kinfolk. The vulnerable being abused by the powerful. Human beings tormented.
Their artists are similarly bonded. Creating from what is available under conditions of extreme trauma. Creating as a life affirming shriek for their degraded dignity.
“iNgqikithi yokuPhica/Weaving Meanings: Telephone Wire Art from South Africa” (through November 17, 2025) shares the histories of wire as an artistic medium in South Africa, the first major presentation of this artform at any North American museum. Picking up in the 1980s as telephone service–and along with it, an abundance of discarded, often colorful, telephone wire–became commonplace in South Africa, the nation’s indigenous Zulu weavers turned to the material. From this detritus, they fashioned spectacularly vivid and intricate geometric, and then increasingly complex figurative designs, into sculptures, vessels, plates, pots, and lids.
“Between the Lines: Prison Art & Advocacy” (through September 2, 2025) exposes visitors to the cruelty of America’s runaway prison system, by far the largest of any democracy on earth, and the artwork produced inside. Artwork produced from toilet paper, chewing gum wrappers, paper scraps, matchbooks, and handkerchiefs, a fascinating subgenre of prison art known as paño arte.
“Amidst Cries from the Rubble: Art of Loss and Resilience from Ukraine” (through April 20, 2025) displays photography and artwork fashioned from shell casings, missile fragments, and ammunition boxes to demonstrate humanity’s uncrushable creative impulse.
Artists making due.
Artists proving no tyranny, no matter how evil or total, can extinguish our desire for self-expression.
Heavy stuff.
Visitors will not be faulted for following up their time at the International Folk Art Museum with a tequila or mezcal flight at the Anasazi Bar & Lounge inside the spectacular Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi hotel in Santa Fe to take the edge off. Participants sit at a dedicated tequila table where one of the bar’s spirits experts guides imbibers through the origins, history, and nuanced flavors of tequila.
No salt or lime here. This is sipping tequila. The best in the world with hundreds of bottles to choose from.
Flights for parties up to six should be scheduled 48 hours in advance and begin at $100 per person. As everyone loosens up, ask to try the Convite Coyote Mezcal Joven which puts the smell and taste of that Taos Pueblo bonfire into the bottle.
This article is from Forbes Magazine.
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