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Art of enchantment: First SITE Santa Fe International in 7 years explores local lore
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SANTA FE — Take a stroll beneath the vine-covered pergola outside SITE Santa Fe. At the end of the path, on your left, you’ll encounter a pale green obelisk surrounded by a Zuni-inspired “waffle garden” planted with corn, beans and squash — the proverbial “three sisters” of Mesoamerican agriculture. This understated yet powerful work is “Trinities” by Ximena Garrido-Lecca, which serves as the perfect entry point into the 2025 SITE Santa Fe International, “Once Within a Time,” curated by Cecilia Alemani.
This 12th edition of what was once a biennial — returning after a seven-year hiatus — is gloriously expansive, stretching across 15 venues.
Garrido-Lecca’s greenish glass obelisk resembles trinitite, the radioactive glass formed by the 1945 nuclear bomb test near Alamogordo. Chunks of faux-trinitite litter the garden, as well. The obelisk shape is a clear reference to the Soldiers’ Monument that once stood in Santa Fe’s central plaza, and whose original plaque celebrated the conquest and subjugation of so-called “savage Indians.” It was torn down by protesters in 2020.
Garrido-Lecca’s sculptural installation connects the conquest of Indigenous land in New Mexico to the poisoning of the land with nuclear bombs and nuclear waste. But the presence of living plants offers an alternative message of healing and renewal. Disenchantment and reenchantment commingle.
Inside SITE, Diné photographer Will Wilson explores related histories. In a brilliant work of dry, acerbic wit, he pairs overhead photographs of uranium disposal sites across New Mexico with similar-looking photographs of famous earthworks. Is that a Michael Heizer or a nuclear waste pit?
Alemani has a taste for fantastical art, and her 2022 Venice Biennale, “Milk of Dreams,” was inspired by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. Like the original surrealists, though, I don’t think Alemani sees fantasy as a form of politically irrelevant escapism. The liberation of the imagination is a precondition for social change. And many of the works she has chosen, including Garrido-Lecca’s and Wilson’s, mix eerily beautiful imagery with cultural and political critique.
Casting her curatorial eye on the Land of Enchantment, Alemani was inspired by longtime New Mexican filmmaker Godfrey Reggio’s most recent experimental film, “Once Within a Time,” which puts fairytale figures through states of apocalyptic dread. Alemani’s curatorial choices follow a similar dream logic — free-associative, nonlinear and weird, but compelling. Pleasant dreams and nightmares collide in a mélange of history, magic and imagined futures.
Alemani has identified “figures of interest,” both mythological and historical, from New Mexican lore, whose stories she sprinkles across the 15 venues. Some contemporary artists respond directly to these figures, as in the case of Thai multimedia artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, whose awe-inspiring installation at the new, eight-and-a-half-acre art and agriculture venue, Finquita, retells the legend of the Fire Spirit, the mythical archenemy of Zozobra. Arunanondchai’s darkened installation inside an abandoned foundry features a cracked mud floor and flashing sepia lights, recalling the ominous urban wasteland of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film, “Stalker.” In the last room is a video featuring the Goddess Durga, which connects New Mexico’s iconic, gloom-defying Zozobra festival to another nighttime festival, Navratri, popular in Bangkok. I entered with trepidation but left feeling purified and refreshed.
In one room of the SITE building, labeled “In Touch with Light,” Alemani focuses on New Mexico as a mecca for spiritual and physical rejuvenation. The main “figure of interest” here is Francis Schlatter, a mysterious healer whose telescope-like metal “Healing Rod” from 1895 is displayed in front of Agnes Pelton’s transcendental paintings made just four decades later. An intriguing connection.
The spiritual claims of Schlatter’s rod are echoed in the works of John McCracken at the New Mexico Military Museum. A prominent Light and Space artist who made high-gloss pyramid sculptures, McCracken’s fervent belief in time travel and extraterrestrials imbues his relatively characterless objects with an eerie, totemic power.
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One of Alemani’s strengths as a curator is her commitment to public art, and putting art in unexpected places. In addition to the military museum, other surprising venues include the 70-year-old toy store, Doodlets, and a weed shop, Best Daze Cannabis. Those who trek to all venues won’t simply be introduced to great art, but to fascinating people and places we might otherwise overlook.
Alemani brings fine art and folk art into conversation, as well, although not necessarily on equal terms. Helen Cordero (1915-1994) was a Cochiti Pueblo artist known for her storyteller figurines, a motif she invented. Back in the SITE building, Alemani has placed Cordero’s storytellers on tiered steps inside a Plexiglas case in the same room as Simone Leigh’s monumental sculptures. While I appreciate Alemani’s choice to place Cordero and Leigh in conversation — both are figurative ceramic sculptors who tell stories using personal symbols — it’s unfortunate that Cordero’s work is grouped in a display case, since this distinctly ethnographic presentation seems to reinforce, rather than deconstruct, the fine art/folk art distinction. Perhaps the Plexiglas cabinet was deemed necessary to protect Cordero’s work, but Luis Tapia’s similarly-sized figurative sculptures are displayed on unprotected pedestals, Zhang Ruyi’s even smaller sculptures are displayed on a low plinth on the floor and Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s delicate wax cadaver also lies unprotected.
Cordero’s display case is symptomatic of an unresolved tension that runs throughout “Once Within a Time.” Works of art are displayed next to objects associated with so-called “figures of interest,” but it’s not always obvious which is which. We know, of course, that the saloon-owner Doña Tules is a figure of interest, and I love the inclusion of her old, frayed rattan trunk — a trunk that contains a million stories. Writers like Cormac McCarthy and Willa Cather are figures of interest, too. But what about N. Scott Momaday, D.H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov — three people best known as writers who have visual art in the show?
If the intention is to blur the line between “artists” and “figures of interest,” why make that distinction at all? And if the distinction does matter to Alemani, why isn’t the signage more clear? The text panels come in many colors — red, white, brown, blue and so on — the significance of which baffles my ADHD brain. On the exhibition’s webpage, everyone — artist and nonartist, living and dead, fictional and real — is lumped together under “participants.” Does it matter?
The quality of the work is consistently great. Placitas-based artist Maja Ruznic has made the biggest and best paintings of her career for the New Mexico Museum of Art’s St. Francis Auditorium, a former church. Daisy Quezada Ureña’s provocative work of institutional critique at the nearby Palace of the Governors, part of the New Mexico History Museum, includes historic Spanish colonial firearms, her own porcelain art objects and dirt from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s ongoing, controversial excavation of land where Indigenous artifacts were found.
The Navajo code talker Chester Nez is the “figure of interest” who inspires a section of code-themed art at SITE, including optically buzzy works of ASCII computer art that Frederick Hammersley made at the University of New Mexico in 1969, plus three recent weavings by Diné artist Marilou Schultz that look like integrated circuits and semiconductor chips. Diego Marcon’s animated film of mole puppets reciting nonsense is bound to bore some adults and creep out some children, but the general cuteness of Marcon’s moles keeps this section from feeling overly dry. On balance, Alemani’s penchant for storybook whimsy is a good thing, particularly in an exhibition about stories and legends.
Speaking of whimsy, Zhang Xu Zhan’s stop-motion animation of alligators, rabbits, flies and other creatures — all made from paper — is both whimsical and technically astounding. The film is installed in the basement of the Folk Art Museum in an immersive cave of textured newspapers, some of which contain my old art reviews. Glad to see they’ve gone to good use!
SITE Santa Fe International cannot be boiled down to a single overarching statement. It represents a serious deep dive into the cast of characters, fictional and real, who populate New Mexico’s collective unconscious — sometimes reinterpreted by local artists and sometimes reflected through the funhouse visions of outsiders looking in. Stories unfold within stories, and shared references reverberate across works of literature, film and visual art. It’s a lot to take in, and some of the text panels can be quite long. But fortunately, the exhibition runs through Jan. 12, 2026. So, if you’re a local who has the luxury to digest it bit by bit, do that. You’ll discover a wealth of inspired connections, some of which are bound to expand your knowledge and challenge your perceptions of what it means to live in the Land of Enchantment.
Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers music, visual arts, books and more. You can reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com.
