The Santa Fe Art Walk has been an important event, interwoven throughout my life as a Colorado Native, which helped begin my relationship with art. The Santa Fe Art Walk has both an ephemeral and morphing quality, while also occupying a constant place in time and space, and while the artwork may change month to month and even the galleries may change year to year the continuous nature of this event make it take on both a quality of novelty and nostalgia.
When I was younger, as early as the age of five, my mom would take me to the Santa Fe Art Walk and my mission would be to find the galleries with the best snacks and collect the postcards and information on the artists and works to collage at home. I loved overlapping the artists and their works with thick layers of Elmer’s glue and posting them to my walls. Sometimes my grandmother, an artist and painter, would come along to the Art Walks and ask me what I thought or felt when I looked at each piece. It began the dialogue that I have with art, from a young age, and it is a dialogue I enjoy continuing through my own works of photography, poetry, and film, as well as the act of looking and taking in another artists’ work.
In more recent years, I’ve begun to see the Santa Fe Art Walk as a delightful and complex experience, that brings the opportunity to explore countless definitions of art, self, society, politics, and people, after all, we are all works of art. As I observe the works displayed in the galleries and streets, I also take moments to watch the people, dressed in their own colors, textures, and making up their own compositions, that crowd in to the galleries, walking up and down the blocks; a vibrant community talking, watching, and reflecting with diverse and like-minded individuals that rise out of Denver during the first Friday of each month.
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