The Essence of Santa Fe: From a Way of Life to a Style traces the developments that took a unique and sustainable way of life and turned it into style. Through a rich blend of historic and contemporary photographs, the book unveils the undeniable magic of this charming city that still can be found if one knows where to look.

When New Mexico became an alternative cultural frontier for avant-garde Anglo-American writers and artists in the early twentieth century, the region was still largely populated by Spanish-speaking Hispanos. Anglos who came in search of new personal and aesthetic freedoms found inspiration for their modernist ventures in Hispano art forms. Yet, when these arrivistes elevated a particular model of Spanish colonial art through their preservationist endeavors and the marketplace, practicing Hispano artists found themselves working under a new set of patronage relationships and under new aesthetic expectations that tied their art to a static vision of the Spanish colonial past. In A Contested Art, historian Stephanie Lewthwaite examines the complex Hispano response to these aesthetic dictates and suggests that cultural encounters and appropriation produced not only conflict and loss but also new transformations in Hispano art as the artists experimented with colonial art forms and modernist trends in painting, photography, and sculpture. Drawing on native and non-native sources of inspiration, they generated alternative lines of modernist innovation and mestizo creativity. These lines expressed Hispanos’ cultural and ethnic affiliations with local Native peoples and with Mexico, and presented a vision of New Mexico as a place shaped by the fissures of modernity and the dynamics of cultural conflict and exchange. A richly illustrated work of cultural history, this first book-length treatment explores the important yet neglected role Hispano artists played in shaping the world of modernism in twentieth-century New Mexico. A Contested Art places Hispano artists at the center of narratives about modernism while bringing Hispano art into dialogue with the cultural experiences of Mexicans, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans. In doing so, it rewrites a chapter in the history of both modernism and Hispano art. Published in cooperation with The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

This question-and-answer book contains 400 reminders of what is known and what is sometimes forgotten or misunderstood about a city that was founded more than 400 years ago. Not a traditional history book, this group of questions is presented in an apparently random order, and the answers occasionally meander off topic, as if part of a casual conversation.

Winner of the Southwest Book Award from the Border Regional Library Association As a teenager, Manuel Chávez (1910-1996) left his native New Mexico for over a decade of study at the St. Francis Seraphic Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and other midwestern institutions. Included in his curriculum was an introduction to literature and the arts that piqued an interest that would follow him the remainder of his life. Upon returning to New Mexico, he was ordained Fray Angélico Chávez and would become one of New Mexico's most important twentieth-century writers. In The Life and Writing of Fray Angélico Chávez, Ellen McCracken provides a literary biography that includes a deep look into the intellectual and cultural contributions of this Renaissance man. McCracken moves chronologically through a substantial body of work that includes fiction, poetry, plays, essays, spiritual tracts, sermons, historical writing, translation, painting, church renovation, and journalism. From the prolific creativity of the years of his first assignment in Peña Blanca to the decades he spent researching Hispano genealogy in New Mexico, McCracken traces Chávez's complex and changing identity as an ethnic American and religious subject who was also an historian, artist, creative writer, and preservationist. The year 2010 will mark the centenary of Fray Angélico Chávez's birth, and this volume will serve as a fitting tribute.

Spaulding provides a full biography and a critical analysis of the work of the man who introduced the general public to photography as art.

The oldest capital city in the United States is Santa Fe, which has a rich and varied cultural history as well as the oldest public building still in use. Ancestral Puebloan Indians inhabited the area as early as 500 AD, and Spanish explorers arrived in the early 1540s. When Mexico gained independence from Spain, Santa Fe became the capital of Nuevo Mejico. It was not until 1912 that New Mexico achieved statehood. In the late 19th century, the Southwest became a haven for tuberculosis patients, and a number of sanatoriums were built in Santa Fe. Many creative individuals, including poets, artists and architects, stayed and significantly contributed to the city's cultural and architectural development. In 2005, Santa Fe received the distinction of being the first America community to be designated a "Creative City" by UNESCO.