5 days ago
The New Mexico Town That's Still a Beacon for Artists
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Taos, N.M., is not the type of town where people park themselves at a coffee shop with a laptop. 'It's a place that requires interaction,' says the artist Tony Abeyta. 'We [go to coffee shops] to wake up, to talk about art and where to get our cars fixed. People are working on creative ideas and engaging in high-intellectual conversations and crazy conspiracy theories.'
The culture of connection is partly driven by geography. Located in northern New Mexico, about 50 miles from the Colorado border, the town has a population of under 7,000. The great gash of the Rio Grande Gorge is on one side; the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rise on the other. The largest commercial airport lies a little over two hours south, in Albuquerque. In winter there's enough snow to sustain a ski resort.
'It's not the easiest place to live,' says the designer Raquel Allegra. 'There's a feeling of 'This is hard; we've all got to look out for each other.''
Taos has a rich history and a legacy of artistry that extends back some 1,000 years. Between 1100 and 1450, the Taos Pueblo people used adobe to build the main portions of the multistory Taos Pueblo, which has been occupied ever since. Some pottery shards found at the Pueblo are believed to be 800 years old.
The Spanish arrived in 1540; missions, colonization and independence from Spain followed. In 1898, 50 years after New Mexico was ceded to the United States, two young artists, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, broke a wagon wheel on their way from Denver to Mexico. Entranced, perhaps, by the same qualities that inspire the current influx of creative people — the light, the clouds, the mountains, the sage-blanketed plains, the cottonwood groves and the rift valley with the Rio Grande flowing along its floor — they stayed and eventually established an artist colony.
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