Once Within a Time

Returning for the first time sine 2018, the 12th SITE SANTA FE International exhibition is a multifaceted convergence of layered histories, artistic genres, and locations embedded with stories. The exhibition’s title, Once Within a Time, takes its cue from a film of the same name created by Santa Fean experimental filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, which is included in the exhibition. The edition is curated by Cecilia Alemani, who was artistic director of the 59th Venice Biennale and is currently director and curator of public art for the High Line in New York City.

“Conceived as an expansive family album, Once Within a Time is inspired by a group of characters who have inhabited, traversed, or left their mark upon the Sante Fe region across the centuries,” Alemani says. “Rather than adhering to a single narrative, the exhibition embarks on a polyphonic journey, exploring the city’s multifaceted identities and rich cultural history.” Through narratives interwoven through art, architecture, history, and storytelling, the show aims to foster unexpected connections and dialogues.

Works by regional, national, and international artists enter into a dialogue with not only the rich histories and creativity of New Mexico itself, but also with a series of museums, galleries, and unconventional venues—like a local cannabis dispensary, a hallway in a beloved Navajo textiles gallery, and a charming toy and gift store called Doodlet’s. Finquita, formerly the Shidoni Galleries and Sculpture Garden, presents 11 artists in an immersive, atmospheric experience. Among new works made specifically for Once Within a Time, Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai’s otherworldly installations take their queue from Thai horror films and Santa Fe folk traditions alike.

On a floor of cracked mud resembling a parched desert, Arunanondchai has incorporated the ashes of a 50-foot-tall marionette traditionally torched in the streets of Santa Fe every Labor Day. Known as Zozobra, or “Old Man Gloom,” the effigy is the core of a century-old tradition initiated by local artist William Howard Shuster, Jr., who, in 1924, created a 6-foot version inspired by the Indigenous Yaqui tradition of burning an effigy of Judas during Easter. Like the Yaqui tradition symbolizes the eradication of evil, the burning of Zozobra by its mortal enemy the Fire Spirit, represents the extinguishing of gloom or anxiety. In Arunanondchai’s work, the room sinks into a state of blackness and sonic effects portend a spectral figure that appears in orange, smoky light and floats around the room, transforming the space into a cross between artwork, spiritual ceremony, and house of horrors.

The nexus of SITE SANTA FE is its eponymous museum, which presents work by dozens of multidisciplinary artists and cultural practitioners, from N. Scott Momaday and Chester Nez, the last surviving member of the “Original 29” Navajo Code Talkers, to Max Hooper Schneider and Simone Leigh. This year, for the first time, the organization has partnered with around a dozen other institutions and collaborators around the city to present unique satellite experiences.

For example, a chapel-like auditorium at the New Mexico Museum of Art contains a suite of ethereal paintings by Maja Ruznic that complement murals of St. Francis of Assisi. (Ruznic lives in New Mexico with her partner, the painter Josh Hagler, and the pair recently announced a new residency program in a casita called Aletheia House.) And towering ceramic sculptures by Raven Halfmoon stand sentinel outside of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, while inside, works by Halfmoon are joined by pieces by John Chee Arviso, Cristina Flores Pescorán, Sky Hopinka, Nora Naranjo Morse, and Emmi Whitehorse.

One Within a Time’s storytelling focus also encouraged new commissions from writers and poets including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Alicia Inez Guzmán, Tommy Orange, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Estevan Rael-Gálvez, Luci Tapahonso,  and Karen Tei Yamashita, and Lucy R. Lippard. Incidentally an exhibition centering Lippard’s revolutionary influence on the art world, titled Notes from the Radical Whirlwind, opens at the New Mexico Museum of Art on October 25.

Once Within a Time includes more than 350 artworks by 71 international artists “alongside 27 ‘figures of interest’—both real and fictional, historical and contemporary—with strong ties to Santa Fe and the surrounding region,” SITE SANTA FE says. The show continues through January 12, 2026. Learn more on the museum’s website. ✧

Header image: Installation view in the garden at Finquita. Max Hooper Schneider, Written in Sand (Finquita Garden), 2025.

All images courtesy of SITE SANTA FE.