Author: taosnews

Welcome to our latest issue, one that captures the vibrant spirit of Taos — from the quiet grace of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the heartwarming bustle of Mantes Chow Cart. In these pages, you’ll find stories rooted in the land and lifted by art, music and memory.

We walk with llamas through alpine wilderness and learn from the wisdom of foragers searching for mushrooms beneath forest canopies. We visit the newly opened Aldo Leopold House, where conservation history breathes through timber and stone, and we share in the soulful reflections of Eliza Gilkyson as she sings us through today’s storms.

From stolen masterpieces finding their way home to the enduring light of painters Leffel and McGraw, Taos continues to inspire, surprise and stir us. With portraits that honor community and craftsmanship, and a fresh chapter in Taos hospitality at Hotel Willa, this issue is our love letter to the high desert and all of those who shape its story.

Thank you for being part of this adventure.

Ellen Miller-Goins

Magazine Editor

60 lives, 1 town

By Ekin Balcıoğlu

“It took a complete three days to recognize this and make the move which has lasted 35 years to date … Taos hit me like a ton of bricks: I knew I was home,” Paul O’Connor writes in the introduction to “Taos Portraits II: Photos by Paul O’Connor.”

This sense of belonging — immediate yet enduring — provides the foundation for a book that delves into the lives of the people who make up this singular town. Edited by Lynne Robinson and designed by Kelly Pasholk, “Taos Portraits II” presents 60 portraits, each accompanied by essays that illuminate the personal, cultural and artistic forces shaping Taos.

“Then there are the people. First and foremost, the Indigenous Tiwa people of the Taos Pueblo. Their presence, generosity, and history are the underpinnings that hold everything together,” O’Connor continues. These words underscore the centrality of the Tiwa community to the identity of Taos, where their traditions and connection to the land have shaped the town’s rhythm and spirit. O’Connor acknowledges this with a deep respect born of decades of observation and participation.

The town itself has also been shaped by those who came and never left. “Waves of people from various periods of time, coming and going and leaving behind a certain number who never leave,” he writes. It is these individuals — artists, builders, thinkers — who have captured O’Connor’s attention, those who stayed and became part of the fabric of Taos, contributing their creativity and lives to its enduring complexity.

The art of quiet exchange

In her foreword to “Taos Portraits II,” Jina Brenneman reflects on the deeply human challenge of portraiture. “A great portrait is not only a collaboration but also a negotiation between the photographer and the sitter,” she writes. “Perhaps that push and pull is what makes taking a photographic portrait so complicated and also one of the most difficult undertakings in art.”

Brenneman’s words capture the spirit of Paul O’Connor’s black-and-white images, which unfold as intimate exchanges. His photographs have a quiet gravity to them, inviting the viewer to linger, not just on the faces but on the invisible relationships behind each frame.

The book itself mirrors this intimacy. Large in format and weighty in presence, it feels deliberate, designed to demand your attention. The portraits, rendered in black and white, strip away distractions, bringing every detail — the lines of a face, the texture of clothing, the light in a subject’s eyes — into stark relief. It’s not just a book to flip through but one to sit with, to return to, as the stories unfold across its pages. The essays that accompany the images, written by friends, family members or the subjects themselves, deepen the sense of closeness. It is a book that feels both monumental and personal, a rare balance that makes it as much an artifact as an experience.

“Today, portraiture is more important than ever,” Brenneman observes. “It creates a life-affirming, human connection that is essential, in a world becoming less and less sensitive to the human condition.”

This is the quiet power of “Taos Portraits II.” The book isn’t about grand statements but about the small, profound moments of connection between people and the places they call home. Through O’Connor’s lens, we see artists, chefs, builders and weavers not as abstractions but as individuals bound by their creativity, perseverance and deep ties to the community.

O’Connor’s photographs remind us of the richness in every face, every gesture.

“Paul reminds us of the depth of the humanity, culture, care, and love that is the nature of the diverse arts community in Taos,” Brenneman writes.

The portraits are more than static records — they are openings, moments of seeing that reveal not just the subject but the dynamic, interconnected web of life in Taos. The book’s scale, its careful pacing and its refusal to rush or overwhelm embody this ethos. It’s an object that asks to be engaged with deeply — echoing the exchanges it captures.

Stories from the community

The essays in “Taos Portraits II” provide intimate narrativesof the individuals who make up the artistic and cultural heart of Taos. Written by collaborators, friends and family, these reflections highlight the resilience, creativity and deep sense of purpose that define their lives.

Editor Lynne Robinson, who is also editor of Taos News’ Tempo magazine,ensured these pieces retained the authentic voices of their writers, many of whom were not professional authors.

“They were not bound to rote academia in regard to copy edits,” Robinson notes, emphasizing the importance of preserving the individuality and rawness of each perspective. This commitment allows the essays to mirror the diversity and authenticity of the Taos community.

Johnny Ortiz, a chef and forager, lives and works in harmony with the land, blending tradition with innovation. Andrea Rosen describes him as someone whose strength is matched only by his kindness.

“As sweet as Johnny is, he is tough! I could never be strong enough to tie a dead chicken around my dog’s neck for two days,” she writes, illustrating Ortiz’s unflinching respect for the cycles of life. Whether raising Navajo-Churro sheep, foraging wild mushrooms or cooking over open flames, Ortiz’s work is a reflection of his commitment to renewal and connection, where sustenance becomes art.

Artist and artist’s model Lyle Wright approaches his work with a profound connection to his Pueblo heritage and a keen sense of his role within it.

“I ask Lyle what he thinks about when he’s posing,” Kelly Pasholk writes. “He tells me he thinks about the future, about the legacy his generation will leave, about the generations before.” As a silversmith, Wright draws inspiration from ceremonial life and the teachings of elders, creating art that honors the depth of his cultural roots. His work bridges the historical and the contemporary, balancing the preservation of tradition with the reinvention of identity, carving out a space that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

For Patricia Michaels, a fashion designer and artist, creation is an act of cultural preservation and forward thinking, her work rooted in both tradition and innovation.

Her daughter, Margeaux Abeyta, reflects on her mother’s approach: “Fashion is forever forward thinking, and now more than ever the roles are changing.” Michaels’ designs draw inspiration from her Pueblo heritage, translating the textures and patterns of her culture into a contemporary framework. “It is a life of balance, to preserve one’s past while progressing within a larger world of relevance,” Abeyta writes, emphasizing her mother’s ability to weave sustainability and storytelling into her work, ensuring tradition evolves while its origins are never forgotten.

J. Matthew Thomas, as Erin Elder writes, is an artist, architect, curator and the founder of The Paseo Project and the PASEO, a festival that transforms Taos into a hub of interactive art and community engagement. He also co-founded Pecha Kucha in Taos, creating a platform for local artists and thinkers to share ideas and stories. Alongside his community-building work, Thomas’s artistic practice draws from his upbringing and family traditions.

“I’m working with a pile of dress patterns from my mom,” he explains, describing his use of waxed, folded and sewn-over paper. “I think of this as queering the tools of my ancestors.” From quilted 2-D artworks to performances with inflatable cinder blocks, Thomas’ work merges the practical and conceptual, fostering spaces where creativity and community intersect.

A living portrait

“Taos Portraits II” is a celebration of the people who define Taos. Through O’Connor’s lens and the deeply personal essays, the book reveals a community bound by tradition, creativity, and resilience. The Tiwa people, whose connection to the land is woven into the town’s identity, the artists who honor heritage while forging their own paths, and the individuals who choose to stay and contribute — all are part of this living portrait.

The black-and-white images are timeless yet immediate, capturing quiet moments of humanity and connection. The essays enrich these portraits, reminding us that every face carries a story — of perseverance, history and belonging. This is not just a book to look at but one to experience, asking us to pause and truly see the people who shape this extraordinary place. Through these portraits and stories, Taos emerges not just as a place but as a shared, living expression of art and humanity.

In a world often focused on the fleeting, “Taos Portraits II” lingers, offering a powerful reminder of the beauty and strength found in community. It is a reflection of what it means to belong — to a land, to a culture and to each other.

taosportraits.com

By Ekin Balcıoğlu

To encounter a painting by David A. Leffel or Sherrie McGraw is to be drawn into a stillness so precise it feels charged. Light blooms in shadow. Edges soften into air. Figures and objects emerge gradually, as if shaped by the light itself. The longer one looks, the more the structure of the painting comes into focus, not through sharp detail, but through balance, rhythm and intention. There is no decoration, no distraction. Every element serves the whole. The result is an image that holds the viewer fully, quietly and without hesitation.

Leffel has said he seeks to understand the process of painting the way a theoretical physicist seeks to understand the universe. What looks like a figure or a bowl of lemons is, in his terms, “quarks and electrons, waves and particles.” Step too close and the illusion dissolves into gesture. Step back and solidity returns, not as fact but as phenomenon. He’s painting, in his words, not people or fruit, but motion.

Leffel himself calls this process of trying to comprehend nature through painting “intelligence.” It is not a metaphor. It is his philosophy.

Born in Brooklyn in 1931, Leffel spent 11 years of his childhood confined to hospitals with a bone disease. He used that time to draw — not idly, but with intensity. It shaped everything that followed. He later studied at Parsons and Fordham, then at the Art Students League of New York with Frank Mason, where he would return to teach for 25 years. In Studio 7, under the cool north light once used by Edwin Dickinson and Frank Vincent DuMond, Leffel resurrected an endangered lineage of painting.

“David has single-handedly brought the knowledge of the old masters to the forefront of the art world today,” says his partner, painter Sherrie McGraw. “Because he studied Rembrandt, and understood him.” Indeed, Leffel is not only recognized by his peers as a painters’ painter; he is considered by many to be no less than the artistic reincarnation of Rembrandt.

But where Rembrandt’s time teemed with guilds and apprenticeships, Leffel found himself painting in a world increasingly uninterested in technique or tradition. That didn’t deter him.

“The more you invest in anything, the more you get out of it,” he says. “It takes tremendous energy and commitment.” He pursued painting not just as craft, but as a way of perceiving. “Painting is like an interlocking set of relationships: color, edges, values, thick and thin, etc. Life is the same. Everything is interrelated. All of life is like one big, interlocking relationship. Everything you do has a consequence to everything else.”

McGraw met Leffel as a student at the League, after years of searching for something deeper than the high-key Impressionist approach she’d been taught. She had known, even as a child in Oklahoma, she would become a fine artist and had already resolved not to marry or have children, determined instead to follow her own path. Her drawing practice, now recognized as among the finest of her generation, brought new awareness to the medium at a time when few were paying attention to it. Her book, “The Language of Drawing,” is now considered an essential resource for serious draftsmen.

Though McGraw and Leffel made their mark in New York, they moved to Taos in 1992, drawn by the light, the dry air and the mountains. From their studios here, they continue to work and teach, sharing decades of insight through Bright Light Fine Art. Their influence reaches far beyond the canvas: not only in how to paint, but how to see, how to think.

A collector once told Leffel, “I thought your paintings were about quiet.” Leffel replied, “They’re about light and shadow.”

In truth, they’re about both and something more. They are about a way of being in the world, attuned to the deep intelligence of form, and the still, flickering grace of things as they truly are.

Bright Light Fine Art offers online fine art drawing and painting classes for all levels with Leffel, McGraw and landscape painter Jackie Kamin.

brightlightfineart.com

FBI recovers two Taos treasures missing for 40 years

By Geoffrey Plant

Forty years ago, art thieves targeted the Harwood Foundation, an unassuming public library on LeDoux Street with a small exhibition gallery upstairs. A woman distracted the librarian while a mustachioed man removed Victor Higgins’ “Aspens” and Joseph Henry Sharp’s “Indian Boy in Full Dress” and left with them under a long coat.

Thanksgiving that same year, a man and woman used a similar M.O. to lift Willem de Kooning’s “Woman-Ochre” from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in Tucson.

The bizarre 2017 tale surrounding the return of de Kooning’s masterpiece led investigators to the missing works by two members of the Taos Society of Artists.

All three paintings were secreted away for decades in the remote community of Cliff, New Mexico, where they hung inside an innocuous-seeming married couple’s home until 2017. Jerry Alter died in 2012. Rita Alter passed away in 2017. That summer, their nephew cleared out their home.

He engaged a Silver City estate sale company to collect the bulk of the home’s contents, donating other items to a tiny Silver City thrift shop. Removed from the back of the Alter’s bedroom door, the de Kooning went to the estate company’s resale shop, where customers soon identified it as “Woman-Ochre.” News spread like wildfire across the art world that the stolen 1955 work of abstract expressionism, now valued at $160 million, had been found.

After some twists and turns, and a lengthy restoration process, it was returned to the University of Arizona last year.

Initial speculation that the Alters stole from the art museums strictly to keep the works for themselves morphed into theories by amateur investigators that the couple were professional art thieves. They traveled internationally and domestically several times each year, living beyond their means.

A photo shown in the 2022 documentary film “The Thief Collector” shows both Taos Society of Artists paintings on a cozy-looking wall beneath which Jerry Alter is seated playing a clarinet while reading sheet music.

The Higgins and Sharp paintings were among the items donated to the humble Town and Country Garden Club Thrift Store. The nonprofit behind the store ultimately sold the works through the Scottsdale Art Auction in 2018 for $93,600 and $52,650, respectfully. The shop closed in 2021.

In 2024, true crime writer Lou Schachter did some sleuthing to uncover the stolen Taos paintings, writing in a series of articles published by Medium, “In the movie, a garden club volunteer describes the auctioned works and mentions their artists: Joseph Henry Sharp, Victor Higgins, and R.C. Gorman.”

Schachter found a 1985 Taos News story on the Harwood thefts, traced the paintings to the Scottsdale auction and notified the Harwood. In April 2024, the Harwood asked the FBI to track down the paintings, which were found by December.

Juniper Leherissey, executive director at the Harwood Museum of Art, said, “We’re hopeful they will be returned between now and September. We anticipate getting them back.”

Two empty frames representing the stolen works are on display with “Return of Taos Treasures,” an exhibition featuring Joseph Henry Sharp and Victor Higgins’ works from the Harwood’s collection on display until Sept. 7.

The Harwood Museum of Art’s permanent collection includes over 6,500 works of art, including pieces by Sharp, Higgins and the Taos Society of Artists, established July 19, 1915 by Sharp and five other artists and later joined by Higgins, who was also on the founding board of the Harwood Foundation.

This trip, take home more than souvenirs

By Ellen Miller-Goins

If you’ve taken to heart the cliche that “travel is broadening,” if you long to return home with more than tacky postcards and forgettable souvenirs, if you’re looking for opportunities to learn a new skill or improve an existing one, Northern New Mexico offers a bounty of opportunities to give your travel experience real roots.

Taos has long been a magnet for talent, and visitors have so many options for expanding their minds and creative spirits. Taos’ website lists myriad workshops for painting, photography, cooking and baking, papermaking, fiber arts, pottery, stone carving, dance, yoga, meditation, folk and herbal medicine, and more.

taos.org/explore/arts-culture/workshops

Taos Art School is a college-accredited institution that has been offering classes for over 30 years in Northern New Mexico. Participants come from all over the world for a week or more to study pottery, weaving, painting, drawing, photography and equine art. Students also learn about local history and culture in a campus-free setting. Discounts offered to locals.

taosartschool.org | 575-758-0350

Taos Ceramics Center offers a variety of eight-week classes, from hand-building and sculpture to wheel throwing, for adults and children all summer long. For those traveling for a short spell, Taos Ceramics Center can also accommodate pre-arranged private and small group lessons for those who would like to experience a ceramics class and create a keepsake from their visit to Taos.

taosceramics.com | 575-758-2580