On hot and sunny streets surrounded by adobe buildings, the Santa Fe Plaza and downtown teemed with thousands of Indigenous artists. They stood at booths as tourists bought jewelry, food vendors sold frybread, and private galleries drew tourists in.
Melissa Lewis Barnes is a Navajo artist who lives in Durango, Colo. She’s one of 1,000 Indigenous artists selected to appear at this year’s two-day Santa Fe Indian Market. The annual event features more than a thousand Indigenous artisans from across the country and is the largest juried Native American art show in the world.
Barnes explained how to create her handmade beaver fur cowboy hats as tourists walked by her booth.
“I do hand-painted artwork and use the hats as a canvas,” Barnes said. “I punch it up with some cool beaded loom-beaded hat bands, I do braiding around the edges. My goal is to make a hat stand out … it really should be a showstopper. I know I’m sharing my work with the absolute best of the best in the Native world.”
Barnes shared a booth with Linda Baker, a former Southern Ute Tribal Council member. Baker presented her traditional Southern Ute regalia.
“This is a boy’s cradleboard. It’s probably about, I don’t know, two and a half, three feet tall,” Baker said. “It’s fully beaded on the top, it’s got the banner that goes across the front, plus a fully beaded cover where the lacing goes. That’s not only maybe a piece of art to some people, but it’s also utilitarian.”
Baker was one of four Southern Ute tribal members with a booth at the market this year.
Sisters, Karen Box Anderson and Debra Box are Southern Ute, living in Colorado Springs. Their father is from Ignacio. They shared a booth. Karen Box Anderson sold her jewelry, and Debra Box displayed her beadwork and rawhide work. This year was Debra’s 37th appearance at the market.
“This is hand-scraped rawhide,” explained Box. “I use a beef hide, and I paint it with earth pigments and outline it in India ink. I use brain-tanned deer hide. I use the small beads; I like to use size 13, up to as small as grains of salt. You can get a lot more detail in your beadwork design if you use a smaller bead.”
Musical performances, artist presentations, and a fashion show took place over the weekend. At the Native Fashion Show, Indigenous models strutted the runway wearing Indigenous-designed fashion pieces.
This story is part of Voices From the Edge of the Colorado Plateau, a reporting collaboration between KSUT Public Radio and KSJD Community Radio. It seeks to cover underrepresented communities in the Four Corners. The multi-year project covers Native, Indigenous, Latino/Latina, and other communities across southwest Colorado.