Arroyo Seco, New Mexico

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Canyon Road Arts District

The unique mingling of fine art galleries with gracious adobe homes on winding, shaded streets is the essence of Canyon Road's charm. Although it is just blocks from Santa Fe's busy plaza, Canyon Road's special quality arises from its history as a rural neighborhood of small farms scattered along an old Indian trail.

Within a few short blocks, visitors to Canyon Road can experience more than two centuries of the historic adobe architecture for which Santa Fe is famous around the world.

Professional artists had visited Santa Fe on painting excursions since the 1880s. The region's natural scenic beauty, Native Pueblo cultures, and old Spanish villages provided abundant and exotic subject matter for painting and sculpture.

In a few short years, the presence of nationally known artists such as Henri, Sloan, and Davey had permanently established Santa Fe's reputation as an important art colony. Their presence also made it inevitable that other artists soon would settle in to join them. The 22-year old Fremont Ellis moved to Santa Fe in 1919 "because of the interesting and important artists who were there." The next year, Ellis joined with four other newly arrived artists, Josef Bakos, Walter Mruk, Willard Nash, and Will Shuster, to form the Cinco Pintores or Five Painters. All five artists were under 30 years of age when they arrived, and their work was strongly influenced by the Independent Movement led by Henri and Sloan, which sought to escape the conventions and limitations of academic art.

In the late 1930s, the Canyon Road neighborhood retained much of its rural character. Many descendents of the original Spanish farmers still lived in the gracefully aging adobe homes and some still farmed the small plots by the acequia and river. But now, this centuries old neighborhood and its local culture existed side by side with a new-even avant garde-culture of fine artists, writers and musicians, many of whom were trained in Europe and most of whom were notable figures in the New York art world.

Slowly, but inevitably, the presence of these nationally-known artists would help to transform Canyon Road into one of the most famous art districts in the world. In 1947 as the American economy emerged from World War II, Santa Fe supported only two art galleries. By 1964, three-fourths of the city's twelve galleries were located on Canyon Road. Today, Canyon Road contains more than 70 galleries and specialty shops, still making it the center of Santa Fe's ever-growing art community. Its importance to the arts was recognized as early as 1962, when the city designated Canyon Road a "residential arts and crafts zone." This unusual legal status was created to honor Canyon Road's uniquely beautiful combination of galleries, studios, and residences tucked into the quiet, old neighborhood of historic adobes.

Text courtesy of CanyonRoadArts.com for the complete unabriged text please visit thier website.

Canyon Road Gallery listings