THE NEW MEXICO MUSEUM of Art’s new Vladem Contemporary “wing” is a recently renovated warehouse turned records center turned exhibition space, located about half a mile from the NMMA’s original 1917 structure. Walk past the admissions desk into the Elliot and William Education Hall and you’ll find a tripartite acrylic-on-canvas painting. The polychrome panels from 2022 are what an extended label calls a “scale reproduction” of Multicultural, a 1980 mural, reworked in 1993, that once spanned the east wall of the building occupying this site. “The essential imagery,” we learn, “remains constant despite differences in style between the 1980, 1993, and 2022 versions.” Do a bit of googling and you’ll find that the shrunken painting is the result of a settlement between New Mexico’s Department of Cultural Affairs, which currently manages the building, and Gilberto Guzmán, the artist who led work on and later modified the mural.1
To create the original mural, Guzmán, a former member of the local Chicano artist collective Los Artes Guadalupanos de Aztlán, collaborated with a team of artists that included Zara Kriegstein, Frederico Vigil, Cassandra Gordon-Harris, Rosemary Stearns, and David Bradley. The diversity of the mural’s subjects intentionally reflected that of the artists involved.2 At the center of both the 1980/1993 version and the diminutive 2022 iteration is an Indigenous woman, whose outstretched arms undergird a scene of one of Santa Fe’s famous September Fiestas. Dancers of varying skin tones sway and swirl across the back of her wingspan in a multiethnic kaleidoscope continued in the Indigenous and European figures who labor or dream to her left and right. Guzmán funded the 1980 rendition of the work himself, then significantly revised it in 1993 with a grant from Absolut Vodka, which had commissioned him to create an ad representing New Mexico for its Absolut Statehood campaign. According to the museum, conserving the mural during the construction of the new Vladem Contemporary wing was deemed impossible, in part due to the multiple stages of its execution. (A conservator who evaluated the piece on behalf of the institution, for her part, disagrees with the conclusion, claiming she highlighted several possibilities for the work’s future in her 2018 report.)3
In a video outside the education center, donor Robert Vladem (who, along with his wife, Ellen Vladem, gave four million dollars for the extension’s naming rights in 2018) tells visitors that the NMMA’s original adobe building did not provide adequate space for the donations of contemporary art that he knew collectors wanted to make. Increasing the museum’s storage and gallery space, he explains, also brings it closer to one of the institution’s original aims, which was to serve as an egalitarian exhibition space for local living artists.4 At the time of the museum’s founding a century ago, director Edgar Lee Hewett went so far as to allow artists to take turns exhibiting their works in the alcoves of the museum’s first floor, without having to appeal to academic juries or curatorial discernment. This “open door” system, the brainchild of Hewett’s anarchist colleague Robert Henri, solved the twin problems of attracting artists to Santa Fe and filling the empty walls of the new museum.5 Northern New Mexico has since grown into an important center for the creation of art; according to an oft-cited, if apocryphal, statistic, Santa Fe is home to the nation’s third-largest art market. Though almost certainly an exaggeration, the claim nonetheless speaks to the outsize role art plays in this city of fewer than ninety thousand. The expanded space allows the NMMA to recommit to its role as a prime venue for contemporary art produced in New Mexico.
Vladem Contemporary’s exhibition, “Off-Center: New Mexico Art, 1970–2000,” which opened in June 2024 and runs through next month, is a multiphase show comprising smaller, rotating presentations of works from the collection under the broad categories of “Place,” “Spectacle,” and “Identity.” When I visited in January 2025, the installation on view, conceived by curators Alexandra Terry, Katherine Ware, and Katie Doyle, was the “Body Electric,” bringing together corporeal works by nearly thirty artists with deep connections to New Mexico. Upon entry, viewers were greeted by a noticeably unimpressed nude woman with a remote control, a ceramic sculpture by Roxanne Swentzell; in a subtly humorous inversion of the usual dynamics of display, the work of art itself looks as if it’s bored by the viewers standing in front of it. On a floating wall behind her hung A Kinder Gentler Nation, 1991, a darkly festive triptych by Kriegstein, echoing the Multicultural mural downstairs that the German artist (based in New Mexico from 1980 until her death in 2009) originally helped produce. Marie Romero Cash’s folkloric Bad Girls of the Bible Wheel, 2001, both exemplifies and subverts New Mexico’s storied santero tradition of brightly colored wooden figures of saints by memorializing sinners instead. The center of the gallery held mostly figural sculptures—along with a museum-designated “reliquary” of the earth by Basia Irland (Río Grande Repository, Source to Sea, 1999)—creating a nearly devotional experience. During my visit to the space, visitors spoke in whispers and hushed tones, even though there were no museum guards to enforce such reverence.
The design of the new building, led by Devendra Contractor, Deirdre Harris, and Graham Hogan of DNCA + StudioGP, also pays tribute to what is singular about its context, with monumental windows framing the New Mexico landscape, as if to present it as a work of art. The windows integrate outdoor vistas of the city and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains into the galleries and connective spaces, a reminder of the terrain that has inspired generations of artists working here. Two large patios on the second floor extend the building farther into its environment; currently, one features a sound installation constructed by Colombian artist Oswaldo Maciá from the natural rhythms and melodies of New Mexican and greater Southwestern deserts. El Cruce (The Cross or The Crossing), 2023, overlays the sounds of insects and bats with clips of a Basque instrument that approximates a horse’s hooves.
The deliberate way that the museum has integrated its site’s history into the new structure makes the treatment of the Multicultural mural appear all the more surprising. To commission a smaller approximation of a work by significant local artists that has stood as a symbol of the community for nearly half a century hardly seems like an adequate solution for an institution that otherwise seems to care a great deal about preserving the history of contemporary art in Santa Fe. Could the mural have been relocated or restored? Or, perhaps more accurately: What would the costs, including opportunity costs, associated with the mural’s conservation have been? It is hard to say for certain.
In any event, the larger issue is that historically meaningful community murals have steadily disappeared from the Santa Fe cityscape. Samuel Leyba, a founding member of the Artes Guadalupanos de Aztlán collective to which Guzmán also belonged, estimates that the group once boasted about twenty murals around town, with an additional ten to twenty in the greater Southwest.6 Founded in the early 1970s, Los Artes was born of local activists’ and artists’ attempts to serve the Santa Fe Chicano community in myriad ways: increasing access to health care, facilitating cultural education, and, of course, painting murals that spoke to Mexican American experiences in the region.6 Among Los Artes’ earliest projects was to recruit addicts recovering at a methadone clinic to collaborate on the execution of murals, an example of “social practice art” avant la lettre. The work of Los Artes elevated figures from the local barrios, giving form to the Chicano community’s yearning for belonging through references to the Mexica (Aztec) homeland—as well as its anguish over the disproportionate number of deaths of Chicanos in the war in Vietnam. Their murals have been contextualized as a part of the community mural movement that spread across the country in the ’60s and ’70s, but they are emblematic also of the broader Chicano movement of that same period, and the art that was integral to it. Of the roughly twenty murals by Los Artes that once decorated Santa Fe, only four survive—in a combination of public and privately owned spaces—and two are visibly in need of conservation.
One of the two Los Artes murals in Santa Fe that appears to receive adequate care—in this case, from Leyba himself, who last restored it in 2018—takes up three sides of a shed on Canyon Road. An allegory of Justice in the guise of the Mexica goddess Tonantzin breaks the chains of bondage, stretching her arms in a manner that rhymes with the figure in Multicultural. Los Artes member Gerónimo Garduño wrote in 1977 that the work had caused an uproar among the arts establishment, sited as it was at the heart of Santa Fe’s commercial art market. “Public art,” he concludes, “is a great threat to those who peddle pictures.”7 Writer Eric Kroll highlighted the controversy in a text for this magazine in 1973, for which he spoke with the members of Los Artes and visited a selection of their murals.8 Over fifty years later, the division seems to persist between purveyors of salable and noncommercial art. It is a false choice. If Santa Fe fails to protect the historical murals generated by its community alongside those by blue-chip artists who come from far and wide, it will lose what made it “off-center” in the first place. That would be a tragic loss indeed.
Davida Fernández-Barkan is an art critic and historian of international and intercultural modernisms. She serves as teaching assistant professor of art at the University of Arkansas.
NOTES
1. Alex de Vore, “Settlement Reached for ‘Multicultural’ Mural,” Santa Fe Reporter, September 28, 2021, sfreporter.com/news/settlement-reached-multicultural-mural.
2. Patricia Montes Burks, Christian Gering, and Simona Rael also worked on the scale reproduction with Guzmán.
3. Alicia Inez Guzmán, “A Historic Chicano Mural Is Being Destroyed for an Art Museum,” Hyperallergic, February 11, 2021, hyperallergic.com/621539/multi-cultural-mural-santa-fe-vladem-contemporary; Leah Cantor, “Vladem Contemporary Back on Track,” Santa Fe Reporter, January 3, 2020, sfreporter.com/archives/vladem-contemporary-back-track.
4. Vladem Contemporary, On the New Museum, videographer Brent Peterson, 3:11, 2023.
5. Kate Nelson, “Finding Their Niche,” El Palacio, Winter 2016, elpalacio.org/2016/12/finding-their-niche.
6. Samuel Leyba, conversation with the author, January 26, 2025.
7. Geronimo Garduño, “Artes Guadalupanos de Aztlán,” in Toward a People’s Art: The Contemporary Mural Movement, by Eva Sperling Cockcroft, John Pitman Weber, and James D. Cockcroft (University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 208.
8. Eric Kroll, “Murals in New Mexico,” Artforum, September 1973, 57.
