On a Saturday in mid-October, the half-mile lane that climbs from downtown Santa Fe toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains fills with easels, pottery wheels, and blocks of stone. More than 100 painters, sculptors, potters, photographers, weavers, jewelers, and carvers set up along Canyon Road for the Historic Canyon Road Paint & Sculpt Out, an event that turns the country's densest concentration of galleries into an open-air studio for a day. The main event happens on a Saturday, with gallery openings and artist receptions the evening before.
The premise is simple and, by the account of the artists who take part, unusually effective: visitors watch the work being made, and the artists talk to them while they make it. Painters work in oil, acrylic, and watercolor; draftsmen in pastel, charcoal, pen and ink, and graphite; sculptors in bronze, copper, metal, and stone. Ceramicists, glass-fusion artists, leather workers, and designer jewelers round out a roster that is deliberately broader than a painting festival. Much of the activity happens inside the sculpture gardens and the thick-walled adobe interiors that line the road, so the event is less a street fair than an invitation to walk into working studios.
"What people really enjoy is that they get to meet the artists and watch them work," Gary Sievert, vice president of the Canyon Road Merchants Association and owner of Sage Creek Gallery, told Southwest Art. "It's a tribute to the artist community that helped put Canyon Road on the map, when artists would sell paintings and sculptures to passers-by on the streets."
That history is the point. Canyon Road was a farming neighborhood long before it was an art district. The oldest surviving houses date to at least the 1750s, built as small adobe dwellings by Spanish settlers, each the center of a family farm worked with water from the Acequia Madre, the irrigation ditch the Spanish dug shortly after founding Santa Fe in 1610 and which still runs parallel to the road. Before that, the route was a footpath between the Santa Fe River valley and Pecos Pueblo. Residents once drove sheep up the road toward mountain pastures and led burros back down loaded with pinon firewood for sale in town.
Artists arrived in the early twentieth century, and often not by choice. The dry, clean air was considered a treatment for respiratory disease. Carlos Vierra, generally credited as the first professional artist to settle in Santa Fe, came in 1904 for treatment at Sunmount Sanitarium, which sat on Monte Sol, the hill above Canyon Road. Gerald Cassidy, who had been given six months to live after contracting pneumonia in 1890, recovered, and in 1915 bought the house at 1000 Canyon Road, where he painted for the rest of his life. Sheldon Parsons, a successful New York portraitist, arrived in 1913 after a relapse of tuberculosis and later built an adobe home and studio at the foot of Upper Canyon Road.
Then came the group that gave the neighborhood its reputation. By 1921, five painters in their twenties, Will Shuster, Fremont Ellis, Walter Mruk, Jozef Bakos, and Willard Nash, had all moved to Santa Fe and formed Los Cinco Pintores, the Five Painters. They were modernists, and they were evangelists: their stated goal was to "take art to the people" by exhibiting in schools, hospitals, factories, and even the New Mexico Penitentiary. The New Mexico Museum of Art gave them their first group show in December 1921. They disbanded in 1926, but the colony they helped establish never really went away. Olive Rush, a prominent early Canyon Road artist, kept a studio at 630 Canyon Road and left the property to the city.
The Paint & Sculpt Out is, in a sense, a reenactment of that era, when painters sold work to passers-by from the roadside. The event has grown into its current shape over time. In 2014, sculptors were added to a roster that had begun with painters, and the doors were opened to glass blowers, fiber artists, jewelry designers, weavers, carvers, and potters. The event notes that the road's preserved adobes and gardens supply subject matter for many of the artists, as do the belly dancers, horseback riders, and passing musicians who turn up on the day.
The exchanges are what participants remember. In a Santa Fe New Mexican account of a recent edition, artist Dick Evans, questioned by a passerby about his work, simply handed over the paintbrush, then watched the stranger repaint the sky of his landscape in a different color. Portraitist McCulloch, participating for the second time, spent an hour or more on portraits of visitors listening to a string quartet, then gave the paintings away to their subjects. Sculptor Marco Antonio Oviedo II helped a six-year-old and his mother make wax flowers. John DePaula, who works at Dominique Boisjoli Fine Art, guided his one-year-old granddaughter through her first artwork.
For collectors, the day is a chance to buy before a piece reaches a gallery wall. Silent auctions and private commissions are part of the program, and the range on offer is wide: contemporary, abstract, modern, expressionistic, figurative, photorealistic, traditional, western, and Native American work. Nancy Ouimet, secretary of the Canyon Road Merchants Association, described the appeal in the event's own listing. "Artists and collectors love the event," she said. "It's a rare opportunity for them to connect. I often hear collectors say, 'I have followed this artist for years and it is so nice to finally meet.'"
The event is also a fundraiser for Santa Fe Public Schools, and students are part of the day rather than a side attraction. A noon parade closes the road to vehicle traffic from 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m., and young musicians from the schools perform at galleries through the early afternoon. The event puts a particular emphasis on artists who live in the Southwest, whether born there or drawn there and unable to leave, a nod to the qualities that have pulled painters up the canyon for a century: the bare landscapes, the shifting skies, the light.
Friday evening opens the weekend, with galleries along the road staying open late for new exhibitions, group shows, and receptions where visitors can meet the artists before watching them work the next day. Designer jewelers, boutiques, shops, and restaurants join in with their own events and offerings.
Canyon Road today holds more than a hundred galleries and studios showing Native American art and antiquities, historical and contemporary Latino art, regional and international folk art, and contemporary work. Santa Fe was named a UNESCO Creative City in 2005, the first in the United States. The Paint & Sculpt Out is the one day a year when the road's galleries and its sidewalks blur into the same exhibition, and the public is invited to stand close enough to see how the work gets made.