Two artists will hang their work side by side this fall at Pie Projects Contemporary Art on Shoofly Street. The exhibition is called Dos Amigos, and the pairing is meant to let viewers see what two very different kinds of New Mexico storytelling have in common.
West and Tapia were "born into different cultural traditions" but "share an instinct for storytelling," each drawing on lived experience and inherited traditions to tell the stories of the New Mexico they both know intimately. The show runs October 20 through November 21, 2026, at 924B Shoofly Street.
Of the two, Tapia is the more widely chronicled. A santero — a maker of santos, the carved and painted saints that have been central to Hispanic Catholic devotional art in New Mexico and southern Colorado for centuries — he began carving santos in 1970, and by his own account he loved drawing as a child.
What made Tapia matter to the wider art world was his refusal to treat the tradition as a museum piece. He reintroduced vivid color to the form and folded contemporary life into it — saints rendered as immigrants crossing a border, a man in jail, a grandmother shielding a grandchild. He has made altarpieces for local churches and, in one of his more celebrated moves, reimagined altars as colorful lowrider dashboards. The NEA, which named him a National Heritage Fellow in 2023, described his work as blending "the sacred with the quotidian, the nostalgic with the contemporary, humor with biting social commentary."
That approach cost him early on. Tapia got his start in Santa Fe's Spanish Market, the storied annual showcase of traditional Hispanic art, but was asked to leave in the 1980s for producing work that fell outside its strictures. "I only lasted four or five years," he told the Albuquerque Journal. "I started experimenting with the colors, making it brighter." He has been unapologetic about the reasoning behind it. "I am the tradition," he has said, arguing that his responsibility is to create new forms rather than copy old ones, so that the tradition "may continue to grow and flourish." His work now sits in the Albuquerque Museum, the Museum of International Folk Art, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, the National Hispanic Cultural Center, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Smithsonian.
West's path ran through the same landscape from a different direction. He was raised on an isolated homestead about twenty miles south of Santa Fe, a childhood he has described as "a magic thing, our life on that little prairie world," with sheepherders and sheep camps nearby, a battery-powered radio for The Lone Ranger, and a two-mile walk to the school bus. He has spent decades painting the region he grew up in — often from above. A 2012 canvas, Flight Over Roswell, shows two men soaring above the town; other works look down on casitas and corrals on the Cerrillos Flats. In a Southwest Contemporary interview conducted by a fellow painter over a wood stove and bowls of red chile stew, West talked about dream imagery, aerial viewpoints and specific local landscapes, and about adobe architecture as a form of sculpture. The interviewer recalled first encountering a West original at the New Mexico Museum of Art — a nocturne with a bird's-eye view of a casita and corral — and later meeting the artist through his son, the musician Joe West.
That is the pairing Pie Projects is offering: a carver who took a centuries-old devotional form and pushed it into the present, and a painter who has spent a long career rendering the high plains and small settlements around Santa Fe from a dreamer's altitude. One tradition is inherited and deliberately remade; the other is absorbed from a childhood on the prairie and returned as image. Both are about the same place, and both are, at bottom, narrative.
The venue fits the premise. Pie Projects is a Santa Fe gallery that spotlights contemporary artists across traditional and new media, and it has made a habit of two-artist shows — recent pairings include Jane Lackey with Ben Dallas, Larry Bell with Susanna Fritscher, and Oli Sihvonen with Signe Stuart. Dos Amigos extends that format into a distinctly local key.
The exhibition is free to visit during gallery hours, with no ticketing or capacity barrier, and it runs a little over a month. For anyone who has followed Tapia's career from Spanish Market to the Smithsonian, or who has looked up at a West painting and tried to place the exact patch of ground beneath it, the show is a chance to see the two conversations in the same room.