Yesterday the Chiricahua Gallery in Rodeo, New Mexico, opened its holiday show. We’ve come to the 25th year––the silver anniversary––of our art guild’s founding. We’ve been around for a quarter of the time that Arizona has been a state!
The gallery is a not-for-profit cooperative of local artists and our supporters within the community.
We interpret “art” broadly, as is fitting. The guild includes painters, sculptors, woodworkers, masters of needlecraft, workers in glass and ceramics, writers, poets, metalcrafters, jelly-makers, crafters of soaps and lotions and candles, photographers, jewelers, weavers, printmakers, a calligrapher…. The gallery nurtures the creative ferment of our Borderlands community, offers workshops, encourages art for kids, gives scholarships to aspiring artists who graduate from our two local (and tiny!) high schools.
Yesterday’s festivities were enhanced by good conversation over cake and punch. We heard a few tales of the early days, when a local lawyer insisted that a bunch of women opening a gallery in Rodeo wouldn’t last the year. (Ah, the value of a challenge!)
The gallery building itself is a registered historic landmark, an old adobe with walls two feet thick and hardwood floors. It has enjoyed a long, colorful life as general store, bar-and-brothel, and church.
I’ve often thought of our local group of painters as the Borderlands School. We are constellated around the Chiricahua Gallery, this small outpost at the edge of the art galaxy, and I like to think that we are doing good work.
Once a very close friend remarked that she wanted to live in the Big City, “where all the important decisions are made.” I disagreed. I believe that the important decisions are made in the quietest of places, in our hearts. Artists probe those quiet places.
It’s an artist’s job to explore the texture of our psyche, to grope for fresh symbols that can revitalize our lives and our culture. Art calls us back to ourselves. It can expose what is rotten and celebrate what is wondrous. Artists who dig deeply, tapping the core of human experience, can produce work that burns with potency, that inspires us all.
Our renewal is at stake.
Next time you are roaming through Cave Creek Canyon to look for Elegant Trogons or Montezuma Quail, stop in at our little art outpost in Rodeo. See what the locals are up to!
Those silvery 25 years have clearly enriched our Borderlands heritage!