Welcome to the first issue of our Adventures in Art on Substack. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the trips, the artists, and the places that shape each itinerary, the kind of detail that doesn’t always fit into a caption. We’re glad you’re here.
Santa Fe has been a crossroads for four hundred years. Native American, Spanish, and Mexican traditions layered into one high desert city, where adobe architecture sits beside contemporary galleries and centuries of history are still part of daily life rather than something behind glass.
We’re staying at La Fonda on the Plaza, built in 1922 and still the city’s gathering place. The hotel has stood at the same corner of the Plaza since Santa Fe’s earliest days as a trading post, rebuilt several times but always anchoring the same spot. Inside, hand carved beams and a 25-foot cathedral ceiling sit alongside stained glass skylights, the kind of detail
that makes the hotel as much a destination as the galleries we’re visiting each day.
No trip through this region is complete without Georgia O’Keeffe, and the itinerary spends real time with her. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe holds the largest collection of her work anywhere, paintings spanning her decades in New York and New Mexico both, and gives the fullest possible picture of how her style shifted once the desert took hold of her.
In Abiquiu, the small village north of the city, her adobe home and studio still stand largely as she left them. Walking through the rooms where she painted gives a different kind of understanding than the museum alone can offer, the actual light, the actual walls, the view out the same windows she looked through for decades.
And at Ghost Ranch, th
e dramatic stretch of red cliffs and mesas where O’Keeffe first came to paint in the 1930s and kept returning to for the rest of her life, the land itself becomes the subject. The looming form of Cerro Pedernal in the distance appears again and again across her work. Standing in front of it, it’s easy to understand why she once said she’d paint that mountain enough times that God would just have to give it to her.
Painted Deserts runs September 27-30, 2026. Registration closes July 15, and we’re keeping this group small enough that the access stays personal rather than crowded.
If you’ve been waiting for the right invitation to see Santa Fe properly, this is it. Reach out to ryn@adventuresinart.com to reserve your place or ask any questions.
