Santa Fe, Forever (Part II)

The Great Indoors

That evening, we had our first and last proper dinner reservation for the trip. We ate at Pasqual’s. On arrival, we had to wait for about 45 minutes for our table to free up. It was clear that there were regulars, that the regulars were quite old, and that the regulars ate here rather often. The food was delicious, but our waiter was weary of us. Although not dressed particularly young or flashy, we certainly had the appearance of fresh graduates. That night I found myself in a predicament: I was not hungry. I toiled over what to order, eyeing the plate sizes of the table nearest us. The plates were large. The air had a feeling that to-go containers were not a common request. I ordered a drink and an appetizer, over-emphasizing that the appetizer would serve as my main. My waiter repeated this to me multiple times, to make sure I fully understood the weight of this decision. I did. We ate. It was dark. It was crowded. Through the window, I saw a mouse run across the street. When we walked back to the Ford Escape—which was nervously parked a mile away—the buildings were all dark, including most of the hotels. There was no one on the streets. For the second time that week we drove through the valleys at night. This time it was gentle and dusty.

Meow Wolf

Frequently described as “going on an acid trip without taking acid”, we waited in line to enter the warehouse which was supposedly filled to the brim with “interactive experience” (and what does that mean to you?). However, to describe this experience as an equivalent of consuming hallucinogenic drugs is like describing going to the movies as “having a beer for the soul”—that is to say, it’s a weird, bad comparison. The most acid-tripping quality about the experience may have been the extremely large, extremely loud concentration of elementary school boys at 10:00am on a Thursday in April. I would have thought it was a field trip but the lack of packed lunches, idling yellow school buses, and neon-colored Hanes t-shirts proved me otherwise. Was elementary school still being held online?

Aside from the presence of said fifth-grade classroom, the rest of the crowd was youngish adults. Some had clearly been here before, and immediately began taking notes once inside, logging every detail through a variety of apps which they opened and closed on their phones. They were here for the plot. Others were like us and were simply there to be there. We were there because we judged a book by its cover—it was pretty and we bought it.

We noticed a series of screens set up throughout the rooms and tried to watch a video that played at one of the stations. The video was animated and not short, and was mysteriously marked “part 2 of 5”. Having caught one playing from the middle, we restarted it and began to watch. A few minutes later, a child ran up behind us, slammed his fist on the only button on the screen, and ran away once the video rewound, yelling to his friends, “There’s literally nothing cool in here.”

As an attraction, everything was well-made and “successful” in a way that went far, far beyond a boba shop having an “instagrammable” wall. It was easy to want to catalogue everything, photograph everything, and touch everything. But all these aspects were also difficult to accept. At some point I began to feel discomfort at knowing I had probably missed a room or a nook or secret passage, and all I could do was to stop looking for it and go home. I was frequently catching myself wondering how often the walls and door knobs and dials and buttons and stools and wheels were being sanitized, and that too signaled to me that it was time to leave.

Two and a half hours later, we were spat back out at the front of the “experience”. We looked at each other and both agreed that we were too hungry to stay for even a minute longer and made our way out. As we sat in the car, I (with horror) remembered that we had timed-entry tickets for the Georgia O’Keefe Museum and so we drove very fast to downtown Santa Fe, where the street parking was beautifully ample.

The Georgia O’Keefe Museum

It was small. Which I was not ready for. I had grown up visiting a pretty sturdy collection of O’Keefe’s at the Art Institute of Chicago, which were forever on-view (do you know Cloud Painting? It hangs above a grand stairwell). Most art museums of major cities have at least one of her pieces in their collection, practically obligatory. But this museum was succinct in a nice way. It focused on her journey as an artist, highlighting her earlier works and drawings, and the plaques were detail-dense. Plagued by hunger, we forewent the guided audio tour, and breezily walked through the galleries. There were no children in the crowds. The paintings were beautiful, but everyone knew this. I was particularly drawn to her paintings of sea shells. Skulls and flowers I had grown up seeing, but the ocean motifs were fresh. The most special of the works may have been three sculptures towards the end: three ram’s horns cast in plaster, wax, and bronze. These castings were for the only three sculptures she had ever made, and they were all eventually cast in aluminum.

MoCNA

At a certain point, we could not linger any longer. Quickly purchasing a box of postcards, we made our escape on the search for something edible, ideally in the form of an empanada. Empanadas were located, food was inhaled. We then made our way towards the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), where I markedly remember their collection of bug pins (many of which were made by graduates of the program). The motif of the insect lent itself so perfectly to abstraction, especially in cold, tempered metal. I feel bad for not having described more art in greater detail, but at some point, there’s only so many ways I can describe beautiful things. If you’re aching for details, consider buying some flights.

Afterwards, we sat in the park adjacent to the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. A mother was throwing a football back and forth with her young son, tourists were milling in and out of shops. A large, RV family walked in-step behind cargo-clad dad, who was walking down Palace Ave. very very quickly.

We headed back towards the Ford Escape and passed Santa Fe City Hall. There was a statue of a robed man facing a large rodent. It was Saint Francis and a prairie dog. It was sculpted by a local artist, Andrea Bacigalupa, who was named a “Santa Fe Living Treasure” in 2008. He died in 2015 at the age of 91. Across the pebble lawn were large heads of fish, breaking the surface of the gravel sea as they cast long, evening shadows. I enjoyed them immensely.

Arriving in Roswell

I don’t think anyone can be prepared to visit Roswell, NM. Nothing about driving three hours through the desert, through abandoned towns, decrepit gas stations, past hundreds of small black cows, could give me the heads up I needed.

Just like everything in Santa Fe is pueblofied, everything in Roswell is alienified. The oval street lamps are donned with slanted black eyes. On the side of every brick building is a large mural of an alien holding up a peace sign. Puns were perilously inserted into every auto-mechanic’s signage, every lawyer’s billboard. A drive-thru Dunkin’ Donuts sign was hoisted by a husky alien statuette. The McDonalds was modelled to look like a giant, geometric unidentified flying object. That is to say, it was a flying saucer. That is to say, it was UFO McDonalds. Most of the shops on main street were occult and/or weed-related. The lone exception was a pawn shop with a sign reading, “Stimulates more than the economy!” sitting in its darkened window, and a 3-ft wide image of a diamond necklace above it.

Many things that could be green were made green. Office buildings just served as backdrops for a continuous sci-fi set. I wondered if this is what it felt like living next to Disneyland but without Mickey Mouse or roller coasters or carnival food. Without anything, really, except for a hypothetical little, green man.

The Anderson Museum

Before reaching the city center (and the highest concentration of UFO-ication), we stopped by an art museum that I had passively added to our itinerary months previous. “There’s no one in the parking lot,” I remarked, “maybe let’s not go.” I was worried that we would be trapped into spending an hour in an unremarkable, incredibly local, one-room gallery and guilted into a $5 donation. “Well. We’re here. So we’re going,” said Hailey, who had just finished driving the three hours to Roswell.

I am swamped in horror now, remembering we almost did not step inside. The wall-to-wall carpeting was an interesting touch, and some pieces were hung a little bit haphazardly, but that all paled in comparison to the enormous quantity of incredible work. It is a contemporary art museum, and free to the public. The Anderson Museum houses the work of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program (RAiR), buying one piece of work from every artist who completes the residency each year. This, in turn, made the collection incredibly diverse in content and form. Another notable strength of the museum was the number of “grand” pieces it had on view. And here I especially mean the fiberglass works of Luis Jiménez.

I did not know that Luis Jiménez was an alumnus of RAiR, but I did know him for his infamous death. Jiménez was the sculptor who created Blue Mustang, the demonic blue stallion poised outside of Denver International Airport. And I know Blue Mustang for its unfortunate consequences—a piece of the statue fell and pinned Jiménez to a steel beam in his studio. He bled to death. The Anderson Museum had many of his works on view. My favorite were his sketches, which featured busty cowgirls on fast horses, fast cars, fast trains, and everything appeared to be on fire, glowing, or just hot. The fiberglass works were titillating (I won’t picture it here, but googling American Dream by Luis Jiménez is free and up to your own discretion).

I was humbled by how few names I recognized on the title cards, and by how many works I was overly infatuated with. I’ll take some time a list a few names: Astrid Furval, Hajime Mizutani, Jerry Bleem, Scott Greene, Joshua Hagler, Bridget Mullen, Alex Boeschenstein, Carlos Quinto Kemm, Rebecca Davis, Linda Mieko Allen, Shona Macdonald, Karen Aqua, Robbie Barber, Julia Couzens, Biff Elrod, Robin Shores, Michael Beitz, Rachel Hayes, Susan Marie Dopp, Maria Rucker. A very short list, but for lack of space I am stopping. I felt so lucky to have walked in that morning. Support the Anderson Museum.

The International U.F.O Museum

Walking into the International U.F.O. Museum, we were immediately hit with a wall of thick, citrusy, stench from an industrial-grade bathroom cleaner. Everyone in line buying tickets was wearing flip flops. The floors were very shiny. I noted that a white-haired man emerged from the “Research Center” to the right of us. He wore a crisp black suit.

Once inside, the smell dissipated. Small streams of people gathered against the walls that walked through an hour-by-hour timeline of the 1947 Roswell Incident. Aside from luxurious amounts of text on the wall, there was little else. Hailey and I suspended our disbelief and coyly followed the timeline. It was here that the man in the suit approached us. “Good afternoon, young ladies. My friends were on ground zero during The Incident. I’m going to be giving a research talk in a few minutes right over there,” he explained as he pointed out an insulated conference room across from us. It was a sweet gesture, if we hadn’t been the only ones he had chosen to talk to. It didn’t help that his eyes did not stray a single time from my chest during his introduction. “Oh okay, sure,” we replied, all smiles. “My pleasure,” he said, his line-of-sight unwavering.

The rest of the museum was mostly Halloween decorations and large props. At a certain point, we burst into laughter at how sh*tty everything was. How it still smelled like toilet cleaner. How interested these people were, poring over every sentence, taking photos of photos of photos that were filtered to oblivion on the exhibition walls. Everything was in Times New Roman. The gift shop took up half of the museum’s real estate, full of Rastafarian aliens and bumper stickers claiming I saw the truth in Roswell, NM! Everything was $10 or $50.

We ended our day at Bitter Lake. It was a bitter lake, indeed. We had to squint to see the water, a small shallow pool of mud that had formed after the wet Spring. But such an uninterrupted body of water was rare in these parts, and so big, white cranes and small, black ducks swarmed the edges, bathing and yelling and standing around on single legs. We began to follow a paved path, which only led us deep into the nothingness. Everything was yellow and harshly flattened by the aggressive blue sky. The wind was whipping around our ears so violently we stopped talking because we could no longer hear each other. We reached the barbed wire fence of some private property and turned around. The wind slammed against our backs, our legs, our heads, our car, following us all the way north out of Roswell.

Light & Weft

The last two days were a blur, as we overcame the shame of being a tourist and began to visit the tiny things that the travel brochure listed. We spent a significant dime on spices and books, ate Frito pie, and wandered past contemporary galleries (rather than into them). We were afraid to go inside, knowing the docent would give us one look and deem us as “stupid, broke tourists” rather than “wise, local buyers” (although it could be argued that coming off as a “stupid, rich tourist” was perhaps the best-case scenario). We ended up inside the New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary, where there was a stunning exhibition of work from the Transcendental Painting Group, which was based in New Mexico in 1938 and disbanded in 1942 upon the beginning of WWII. Despite being short-lived, they had a manifesto—god, no one writes manifestos anymore! One particularly great line reads:

In any genuinely aesthetic work there must be at least a certain amount of abstract elements. We do not disparage any honest effort. The art of the past is a glorious confirmation of the necessity of the present. And it just happens that we feel this sort of painting is a necessity.

“Introducing the Transcendental Painting Group,” University of New Mexico, April 18th, 1939

Along with the work of TPG, other big names were on view—think big chrome pumpkin covered in dots—but all pieces on view shared the throughline of line, light, and abstraction. It was all beautiful.

The next stop was the Form & Concept gallery, where there was a stunning retrospective of Bhakti Ziek. Ziek is a weaver specializing in digital jacquard weaving, but when we wandered over to the far corner of the gallery, we saw that the artist herself was sat at a manual loom, passing the shuttle back and forth. Ziek is 78 years old, yet her hands, then, were quick and precise. We proceeded to chat, talking about weaving (we knew nothing and she knew everything) and collage, and time, layers, and depth. I can only attempt to explain how deeply I felt (feel!) about her pieces: I felt like I could understand them so fully. I felt as though images from my sleeping visions had been plucked and somehow translated into woven existence. It made so much sense to me, visually, that I was enamored instantly. Oh if I had a loom and the time, oh I would try to weave some of my own visions. Ziek showed us a textbook she had written on her digital process, The Woven Pixel: Designing for Jacquard and Dobby Looms Using Photoshop. I have it downloaded on my desktop. One day…

Perhaps the most meaningful afternoon of our week was visiting ‘Aunt Vi’ who is Hailey’s honorary grand-aunt: she was Hailey’s grandmother’s closest friend, and their two families have always been intertwined. I won’t say too much about our time with her and her immediate family (for privacy and brevity) but they made us feel so welcome. They were amazing company, extremely joyous, extremely witty. They were (are!) a very beautiful family.

The Exit

We set off to drop Aunt Vi off at her home. As we drove back she pointed towards the Sandia Mountains. It was the perfect window of time when the sun set and cast an orange wash onto the heights, obliterating any shadows and warming the red earth with a deep, pink glow. It looked like a backdrop: completely unreal, yet too massive to doubt. As though it was a hung curtain and one touch would cause ripples to spread through it. Within a few minutes it was draped in cold shadows, going grey, textured, completely tangible and solid.

Our last day was spent in a quiet limbo. We left Santa Fe early enough to spot frost on the hood of the car. We arrived in Albuquerque late enough to have the sun heat our hair hot. It was the oddest weather for us, summer sun with spring winds. Sunglasses were necessary along with a thick sweater, and yet shorts were more appropriate than pants. We felt tiny little bites against our legs, not from insects, but from particles of sand whipping across our thighs. We wandered via trail into a small valley and approached the side of a black, rocky hill.

The rocks here were not ordinary, however. They were covered in little drawings. Very old drawings. We were in Petroglyph State Park. They were petroglyphs. Some were of people. Or birds. Or weapons. Or rats. We walked past the petroglyphs slowly, making sure we could spot as many as possible.

After that we went to the center of the universe. Not really, but there was a plaque at the University of New Mexico saying so. And then just like that it was time to drop off the car, get on the shuttle, get on the plane, and go home. For the next few months, we would tell people that Yes! We enjoyed our trip. We’re going to move there. No not right now, but at some point. Yes, at some point we’ll drop everything and move. Yes, to New Mexico. We were enchanted.

AS 5/28/24